Articles by Diego Hernández

Renowned photographer Laurian Ghinitoiu has shared with ArchDaily a series of photos of one of the most influential projects of recent Pritzker Laureates, Anne Lacaton, and Jean-Philippe Vassal. The Transformation of the 530 dwellings in Bordeaux, 3 modernist residential buildings, reflect Lacaton & Vassal’s sensitivity towards understanding existing structures. It also highlights how with minimal interventions, radical changes can be made to the habitability and usability of a modernist building -knowing that in Europe, the majority of these structures have ended up being demolished-. This approach was enough to select this transformation as the winner of the EU Mies 2019 Award, for the best contemporary architecture in Europe.

EPISODE 9 will focus on Future Cities. Our guest will be Jonathan Ward, a Design Partner at NBBJ, who is developing Chinese technology company TenCent’s Net City, in Shenzen China. At roughly the size and shape of Midtown Manhattan, Net City features a new Tencent office, a residential neighborhood, schools, retail and other amenities. The project focuses on sustainability, including photovoltaic panels on rooftops, sensors that track environmental performance and flooding, and a comprehensive transportation network that prioritizes public transit, bicycles and pedestrian access. Ward’s other notable projects for NBBJ include headquarters for Samsung in San Jose and South Korea, Ant Financial in Hangzhou, the Wellcome Trust in Cambridge, Telenor in Oslo and Reebok in Massachusetts.

In this video, Architecture with Stewart breaks down the floor plan strategies of Louis Kahn (1901-1974) for how they treat and arrange rooms in servant/served configurations. After World War II showed us the dark underbelly of technology, the architecture that gave us “machines for living in” seemed misguided and dehumanizing. In contrast to pre-war open and free plans, Louis Kahn considered new possibilities for rooms; believing their privacy and enclosures could work together in a ‘society of rooms.’ Beginning with a close look at the Trenton Bath House, the video includes computer animations, sketches, photographs, and historical narratives to trace the evolution of the room through buildings like the Adler House, Esherick House, and the Exeter library ⁠— a monumental room of cultural memory.

Liminal spaces are everywhere, both literally, and as a popular topic of intrigue on Reddit and other image-sharing platforms. Posting photographs of empty dilapidated spaces followed by collective reminiscing of childhood experiences is proving to be a popular activity these days. At one time or another, the spaces depicted in these eerie photos seemed like a good idea, a useful solution to a problem of providing shelter for crowds in the act of movement or commerce. Architecture had specific terms for these spaces too and defined them through theories that explained their role in our culture. In this video, architectural professor Stewart Hicks presents how architects think about liminal spaces, what goes into them, why they exist, and why some architects and artists still work to produce their effect.

Architectural plans require training in order to read, understand, and produce. Mastering their codes can unlock the most powerful tool that architects have to imagine and construct new buildings. It is not only important to learn the intricate formal and geometric operations to produce these types of drawings, but also to interrogate the traces they leave on the buildings we design. In this video, architecture professor and designer, Stewart Hicks talks about the basics of architectural plans: where they came from, how they are made and used, and what they are good at representing. Using a three-dimensional model of a basic house, he goes through the steps of transforming it into a plan projection while discussing the implications of each step and offering precedents to reveal their nuanced implications.

What is the danger of making something pretty? Well, when it comes to homes it can be complicated. Curb appeal seems like an innocent concept, but architects have been quoted calling it “empty signifiers of good design” or even eerie or creepy. Curb appeal privileges superficial visual composition over deeper, more spatial considerations. Further, the overregulation of visual propriety easily strays into practices that are exclusionary and oppressive. This video takes a close look at the history, evolution, and consequences of curb appeal from an architect’s perspective using examples from popular culture, art, film, and architecture. Unexpected origins and peculiar turns through picturesque gardens, mirrors for viewing the landscape, and exhibitions like Venturi Scott Brown’s ‘Signs of Life’ serve as waypoints in our journey for understanding people’s views of what houses should look like.

With nearly 200,000 votes cast during the last 21 days, we are happy to present the winners of the 2021 ArchDaily Building of the Year Awards. This peer-based, crowdsourced architecture award showcases projects chosen by ArchDaily readers who filtered thousands of projects down to the 15 best works featured on ArchDaily in 2020.

Geometry is a language and a portal that allows objects to pass between the physical world and the world of drawing, abstraction, and language. How does stepping through this portal leave an imprint on the buildings we design and build? Architects and theorists like Vitruvius, Alberti, and Le Corbusier all believed that geometry was an important key to architecture’s understanding and design. Is that as true today as it was then? The tools of the architect have changed, has their relationship to geometry changed as well? In this video, we explore why and how geometry is so important to architecture as well as some different approaches to the use and expression of its most indelible principles.

After 2 weeks of voting in our 12th edition of the Building of the Year Awards, our readers, with over 150,000 votes, have narrowed down over 4,500 projects to just 75 finalists, representing the best architecture published on ArchDaily. With finalists from six continents, this award developed in partnership with Dornbracht demonstrates that the trust placed in us by our readers to reflect architectural trends from regions around the whole world creates challenges that we are eager to rise to.

After 2 weeks of voting in our 12th edition of the Building of the Year Awards, our readers, with over 150,000 votes, have narrowed down over 4,500 projects to just 75 finalists, representing the best architecture published on ArchDaily. With finalists from six continents, this award developed in partnership with Dornbracht demonstrates that the trust placed in us by our readers to reflect architectural trends from regions around the whole world creates challenges that we are eager to rise to.