Month: April 2024

Construction has just begun on the Tor Alva, or the White Tower, the world’s largest 3-D printed tower. Designed by architects Michael Hansmeyer and Benjamin Dillenburger and printed with concrete by the technology university ETH Zurich, 8 out of 32 structural columns have been completed. Nestled in the village of Mulegns in the Swiss Alps, the White Tower is designed as a venue for music and theater events. Standing at 30 meters, the design features 32 distinct Y-shaped columns, each boasting a pattern of textured details.

Formally, transparency usually takes the shape of a window, a door, a curtain wall, or a skylight. These are commonly created through rectangular punched openings or in the form of glass curtain wall systems or translucent screens. The following projects play with traditional notions of transparency and window-making in playful and unconventional ways. They create visually striking facades and dynamic relationships between their exterior and interior. They filter light and frame views through their glazing and opening articulation to craft memorable architectural experiences.

CityMakers, The Global Community of Architects Who Learn from Exemplary Cities and Their Makers, is working with Archdaily to publish a series of articles about Barcelona, Medellin, and Rotterdam. The authors are the architects, urban planners, and/or strategists behind the projects that have transformed these three cities and are studied in the “Schools of Cities” and “Documentary Courses” made by CityMakers. On this occasion, Victor Restrepo, Coordinator of CityMakers in Medellin, presents his article “Medellin: A Case Study”.

A family that unites the extremes of the global world: a Russian/American couple, she with a career in Moscow, he in New York, and their – not two or three, but – eight children. In search of neutral terrain, in which they would make a safe nest for venturing out into the world, they arrived in remote and almost forgotten places above the valleys of the Soča, Idrijca, and Čepovans dol. The Banj plateau, a dry karst landscape of pastures on the border between the Mediterranean and the Alpine world, characterized by the typical stone folk architecture of sparse features and slate roofs, convinced them, and they bought an old homestead in Kanalski Lom, hoping to live there and build a new home.

In the rapid development process of urbanization in towns and cities, there is often a lack of proper urban planning. In my childhood memories, the impression of that area was rows of tightly built houses with minimal separation between them and only a mini drainage ditch serving as a fire lane in the rear.