Architecture is the art and science of building design.
Category: MENTOR
A CALL FOR A COLLABORATIVE DIALOGUE OF DISCOVERY
THE FORCE OF TRANSFORMATIVE CHANGE CAN HAPPEN OVERNIGHT.IT STARTS WITH IDEA, A CONVERSATION, OR A SIMPLE ACTION.
GROWING NUMBER OF CITIES AND TOWNS STRUGGLING TO REINVENT THEIR PURPOSE BY LOOKING BEYOND THE MISTAKES OF THE PAST,
We are on the brink of concluding the hottest year in the past 125,000 years. Recently, elevated temperatures have adversely impacted the daily routines of a significant portion of the population, particularly those who spend most of their day outdoors without access to air-conditioned environments. Excessive heat stems from various sources, both natural and human-induced. Given the grim outlook on this matter, it becomes imperative to explore structural measures to address and mitigate the potential deterioration of public health caused by escalating temperatures.
In an interview with G1, Denise Duarte, a professor at FAUUSP and a researcher at the Laboratory of Environmental Comfort and Energy Efficiency, emphasizes the potential for municipalities to establish urban oases in various locations across the city. These spaces would serve as strategic hubs to alleviate thermal stress caused by heat, providing relief not only for individuals facing homelessness — already in vulnerable situations — but also for pedestrians who spend extended hours commuting to and from work.
As per the professor’s perspective, in an optimal project, the urban oasis constitutes a shaded area—preferably adorned with trees—equipped with suitable furniture for individuals to rest and access government-provided drinking water. Such a space would enable people to mitigate the effects of high temperatures on their bodies and navigate the city more comfortably.
For the urban oasis to be effective, it is crucial to prioritize accessibility, ensuring the provision of services for individuals of all ages, which extends beyond its primary objective, transforming it into a leisure space amidst urban challenges. To achieve this, seamless integration of the project into urban planning is essential. This integration should enhance the overall quality of public spaces, positively impacting the citizens’ quality of life.
In a world where the impacts of environmental racism are increasingly evident in violent and unequal ways, contemplating spaces that mitigate thermal stress and provide a basic level of dignity for everyone becomes a means to enhance the city’s accessibility and fulfill its democratic role.
Inspiration –Nestled between busy expressways and construction sites and adjacent to the old industrial town of Wan Chai Tsin, “Forest of Blocks” is a quiet, bustling forest of pure white and pink green; the beveled roof, like a building block, cleverly combines the function of advertising exterior wall, so that the traffic flow on the fast road can clearly see the reception center, and also let the years static good atmosphere and advertising benefits not only one choice but through the creative design, to make both.
Unique Properties –It takes more than noisy self-promotion to make a reception center successful. Located in a block with few open spaces, “Forest of Blocks” makes full use of its wide features, retaining nearly 10 meters of green belt outside the 111-meter-long building volume. It also carefully sets up an atrium in the base, and sets up a parent-child play area. Through large floor-to-ceiling windows, residents of the old city who walk here can easily see what is going on. It is not noisy but can naturally attract nearby residents’ eyes and also warmly conveys the home image.
Realization Technology – Starting from the forest image, “Forest of Blocks” is full of warm and childlike architectural personality, which also extends from outside to inside. Walking inside, it can be seen that the designer transforms the concept of a forest tree into an umbrella arch structure and connects it with the ceiling in different directions, creating the interest of multiple viewing angles. In this way, the natural atmosphere is introduced into the interior, blurring the boundary between inside and outside. On the other hand, the light strips on curved walls and soft draped curtains lightly separate the reception tables. Through the soft compartments, they not only maintain privacy and separation function but also allow air and light to flow naturally in the building.
Technical Properties –As the design inspiration that runs through “Forest of Blocks”, the forest concept also embodies the second-floor conversation space of the building. Starting from the concept that the forest has different scenery at each height, the designer creates a deep upper recessed niche and a large side window so that people on the second floor can look at the sky as if they were looking at the gap between trees on the ground, and also turn their heads to see the traffic on the elevated road, through a different perspective, to re-understand the settlement.
Operation / Flow / Interaction –Along with the outside floor-to-ceiling glass that lets neighbors see a variety of scenery, the design is also present in the VIP box on the inside, as well as the floor-to-ceiling windows and doors connecting the outdoor atrium. When people sit in the box, they can also feel the outdoor green and directly push the door to the atrium, as if they were relaxing in the atrium of home and barbecuing as warm and comfortable.
Research Abstract –Located in Wan Chai Tsin, an industrial district near the fast road, the designer makes “Forest of Blocks” a soft medium in the hard urban image, making the reception center a pleasant green space and a playground for children. It is also the place where Wan Chai Tsin can be seen again from multiple perspectives, which makes this street with few open fields have more possibilities for neighborhood interaction because of the “Forest of Blocks.”
Challenge –Since the “Forest of Blocks” is located in the base with a significant height difference and is adjacent to the site under construction, the designer skillfully uses waste materials from the site to fill the atrium, which alleviates the height difference and indirectly reduces the frequency of trucks going in and out to clean and transport waste. Through the strategy of killing two birds with one stone, the problem is solved cleverly.
In addition to the use of construction site waste to fill the gap, soft furnishings in “Forest of Blocks” are mostly recycled objects, so that the temporary architectural design of reception center will not cause too much waste after demolition, and the concept of sustainability is implemented in “Forest of Blocks”.
The Sharjah Architecture Triennial 2023 opened on November 11, 2023, with a wide program focused on the overarching theme of The Beauty of Impermanence: An Architecture of Adaptability. While on-site in Sharjah, the ArchDaily team had the chance to sit down with curator Tosin Oshinowo and discuss her curatorial view, the development of the main themes of the program, and the larger principles and intentions behind the event. Informed by her experience growing up in Lagos, Oshinowo has focused the Triennale on the celebration of places that thrive under conditions of scarcity and the alternative models that the Global South can provide in working towards a more equitable and livable future.
In the interview, she discusses the values and principles that have given shape to the program of this year’s Triennale. Tosin Oshinowo talks about the need to recognize the value in all regions and all forms of practice. She also highlights the dual responsibility, on the one side to ensure that the Global South understands the value that is holds, and to let the Global North know that there is an alternative and that there are lessons to be learned from these regions.
All I’ve done here is highlight some of the existing conditions and celebrate the sophistication that exists within them, those conditions that don’t seem to be acknowledged by what we consider to be progress.
This vision led to the choice of the theme for the Triennale, “The Beauty of Impermanence: An Architecture of Adaptability,” as well as the choice of practices to be highlighted. The invited architects and designers share a common interest in working within the idea of context and tradition, while also integrating and being aware of the conditions of modernity. The starting point for the exhibition was the idea of “Renewed Contextual,” but this idea gained more nuances informed by the responses received from the invited architects, leading to the crystallization of new sections, the “Intangible Bodies” looking at the ephemeral ad emotional character of architecture, and “Extraction politics,” highlighting the tensions that exist between economics and the environment.
Platforms like Sharjah Architecture Triennial give a voice, accessibility, and an enabling environment to make sure that we have these discussions around areas that don’t normally get this audience. There is no center, there is diversity and strength in all sectors of the world. Ensuring that we fully understand the values that are here, that we are able to celebrate them and be able to learn from them, that is truly important.
One of the key criteria of the event was immersion within the context of Sharjah, resisting the tendency of globalization in favor of looking carefully at the immediate context, its unique identity, and the value it brings. Oshinowo describes how her curatorial view was informed by the previous edition of the Sharjah Triennale, which focused on the theme of “Rights of Future Generations” curated by Adrian Lahoud. During the interview, the curator also underlined the strive for the Triennale to offer a wider interface than a traditional architecture event in the variety of approaches presented and the search for understanding alternative ways of doing things. Through this interface, the event contributes to the critical discourse, the exploration of materials and principles, and the international cross-pollination of ideas to leave this as a better planet than what we have now.
Harold Cohen was a pioneer in computer art, in algorithmic art, and in generative art; but as he told me one afternoon in 2010, he was first and foremost a painter. He was also an engineer whose work defined the first generation of computer-generated art. His system, AARON, is one of the longest-running, continually maintained AI systems in history. Harold Cohen was an exceptional artist, an impressive engineer, and an important bridge between those two worlds.
Harold Cohen coloring the forms produced by the AARON drawing “Turtle” at the Computer Museum, Boston, MA, ca. 1982. Collection of the Computer History Museum, 102627459.
Graduating from University of London’s Slade School of Fine Art in 1950, he was a member of the generation of British painters that included David Hockney, Bridget Riley, and Richard Smith. By the early 1960s, he had gained fame with several exhibitions across England, and by the mid-’60s, had begun to show his work internationally, with gallery shows in London, New York, and Toronto. His work focused on abstract, biomorphic forms, with a color palette that seemed to come out of the same pool as the Pop Art practitioners insurgent at the time. His art represented Great Britain in major events such as the Venice Biennale and the Biennale de Paris, two of Europe’s most prestigious art festivals. By the late 1960s, Cohen had grown tired of the London art scene and started to shift his thinking to the topics that would inform the rest of his artistic career—How do artists process their information in the creation of artworks? What are the minimum conditions under which a set of marks functions as an image? What makes an image evocative? To answer these questions, he began investigating children’s drawings and ancient petroglyphs, looking for their “artness.”
In the late 1960s, Cohen became interested in computer technology. He left his home in London for an appointment at the art department at the University of California, San Diego. There, he met Jef Raskin, a graduate student, who introduced Cohen to the college’s CDC 3200 mainframe. Cohen was taken by the possibilities of the computer in determining how artists process their information, since computers are excellent at processing and do so purely based on defined input. Raskin introduced Cohen to programming, starting with FORTRAN. The CDC 3200 at UC San Diego was a batch process machine. A programmer would create a program on punched cards, then submit the cards to be fed into the machine by an operator, who would then return the results, either as a printout or as a series of newly punched cards. Cohen felt stifled by this process and eventually gained access to computers that he could program and run himself. His first computer was a Data General Nova. Later, Cohen acquired Digital Equipment Corp. PDP-11s and VAXs. He started out programming in FORTRAN, before transitioning to the C programming language.
Cohen became a permanent professor at UC San Diego and began delving further into computers. By 1971, he had developed a painting system and presented a paper on it at the Fall Joint Computer Conference. Shortly thereafter, he was invited to display the system and some of its works at the Los Angeles County Museum.
Detail from an untitled AARON drawing, ca. 1980.
These early presentations and papers attracted attention in both art and technology circles, and Cohen was invited as a Visiting Scholar to Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence Lab (SAIL), where he spent two years working on a paint system surrounded by AI luminaries such as John McCarthy and Ed Feigenbaum.
AARON image created at the Computer Museum, Boston, MA, 1995.
Cohen’s initial program was rather simple. He defined a small set of rules and forms that the computer composed into drawings, which were then put to paper using a drawing “turtle”—a small robot equipped with a marker.
The 1979 exhibition, Drawings, at SFMOMA, featured this “turtle” robot creating drawings in the gallery. Collection of the Computer History Museum, 102627449.
Of the early versions of AARON, Cohen wrote, “In all its versions prior to 1980, AARON dealt exclusively with internal aspects of human cognition. It was intended to identify the functional primitives and differentiations used in the building of mental images and, consequently, in the making of drawings and paintings. The program was able to differentiate, for example, between figure and ground and inside and outside, and to function in terms of similarity, division and repetition. Without any object-specific knowledge of the external world, AARON constituted a severely limited model of human cognition, yet the few primitives it embodied proved to be remarkably powerful in generating highly evocative images: images, that is, that suggested, without describing, an external world.”1
AARON, as Cohen worked with it from 1973 onward, could be seen as an art creation expert system, though Cohen somewhat rejected that moniker.
“… perhaps AARON would be better described as an expert’s system than as an expert system: not simply because I have served as both knowledge engineer and as resident expert, but because the program serves as a research tool for the expansion of my own expert knowledge rather than to encapsulate that knowledge for the use of others,”2 Cohen wrote in 1988.
Video: Harold Cohen’s lecture on Computer Generated Art, September 23, 1980
The initial output of the paint system was primitive; the drawings were black and white, though over time Cohen would color many by hand. Using this technique, AARON produced thousands of drawings at many different scales, from letter-sized paper to massive murals like “Primavera in the Spring,” created for the Computer Museum in 1980.
Cohen dedicated most of his time to creating AARON and less to painting in the 1970s. In 1979, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) held an exhibition called Drawings that featured Cohen’s work. The exhibition featured a hundred-foot long mural of forms drawn by AARON and hand-colored by Cohen, as well as a drawing “turtle” creating images on the museum floor. The SFMOMA exhibit was the first in a string of exhibitions at major museums around the world, including Britain’s venerable Tate Gallery in 1983. AARON created many works that Cohen would color. Cohen’s work with AARON represented a unique man-machine collaboration, which became popular with science centers as an area of exploration. Many commissioned artworks, including what some consider AARON’s masterpiece—”Socrates’ Garden,” created for the Buhl Science Center.
Measuring 18 by 23 feet, “Socrates’ Garden” is a series of the biomorphic forms that the early AARON system specialized in creating. Cohen then took the images, enlarged them, colored them with acrylic paint, and mounted the individual forms on plywood, arranging them to form a “tree” that loomed over visitors, immersing them in the piece.
As with any artist, the AARON system went through phases. Those early forms, often resembling children’s drawings, progressed into more biomorphic figures, not dissimilar from those that Cohen himself had specialized in early on in his career. Further innovations during the 1980s saw Cohen increase AARON’s knowledge base, adding more rules and forms, including everyday objects, plants, and even people. At times, Cohen would add forms, such as animals, only to remove those forms when they proved to be inconsistent with Cohen’s own research goals.
It’s taken me 20 years to teach AARON to draw. How can I possibly teach it to color before I die?
— Harold Cohen, 1989
The first color image created by AARON at the Computer Museum, Boston, MA, in 1995. Collection of the Computer History Museum. Collection of the Computer History Museum, 102741168.
Harold experimented with several techniques for putting AARON’s drawings to paper. The turtles gave way to sturdier pens on robotic arms. In 1995 Cohen debuted a version of AARON that not only drew the forms, but could color them as well. The system, measuring almost 8 feet long and nearly 6 feet wide, used a vacuum table to hold the paper in place while an arm drew and then colored the forms. This required more complex software, which was only possible with Cohen’s evolution out of the C language into the lingua franca of artificial intelligence—LISP. The Computer Museum in Boston was home to the exhibit, The Robotic Artist: AARON In Living Color. The process was slightly altered for the exhibit. A Silicon Graphics workstation ran AARON’s software overnight, creating many images. Cohen then reviewed the images, selecting one to become the day’s work. Next, the file was loaded onto the PC-compatible, which controlled the robot arm. The robot then mixed paints on a palette to create custom colors, which it applied using a variety of brushes. The images featured fewer of the biomorphic forms that had been the hallmark of the early versions of AARON and, instead, showcased images of people, plants, and tables. The coloring of the drawings was also nearly indistinguishable from that Cohen had done by hand for AARON’s drawings a decade before. Cohen had trained AARON to create convincing “Harold Cohen” paintings.
The exhibit was featured on ABC’s Good Morning America and PBS. The first image created with the new system was sold at an auction held at the Computer Museum in Boston. In 2015, this untitled painting of two figures was donated to the Computer History Museum and is now a part of its Permanent Collection.
Cohen wrote extensively about AARON, looking at the questions a computer-based artistic system raised both within the computing and art worlds. Was AARON creative? Cohen certainly thought that it was not as creative as he had been in creating the program. Who was the artist—Cohen or AARON? Cohen compared it to the relationship between Renaissance painters and their studio assistants. Was the fact that AARON created art works evidence of computer intelligence? On that, Cohen seemed non-committal, saying that AARON never worked to improve itself, a sure sign of intelligence, but at the same time defending the fact that AARON did just what human artists did, taking knowledge of forms and applying them to the creation process.
AARON Paint System on display at the Computer History Museum in Revolution: The First 2000 Years of Computing.
Harold came to visit the Computer History Museum in the summer of 2010 to help us re-assemble the 1995 version of AARON for our exhibition, Revolution: The First 2000 Years of Computing. I was lucky enough to spend the afternoon assisting him, amicably chatting about art, film, and his work. I asked him why he had not created a process by which AARON would sign its paintings. “Well,” he said, “I guess if it ever signed a painting on its own, that would signal the end of all debate on the matter of its intelligence.”
I later discovered a painting in our collection that had been signed “AARON 19-7-85″ in the familiar style of the system. Apparently, this had been a short-lived experiment.
The 1995 version of AARON could color its own images using a variety of brushes and a robotic arm.
Cohen continued to create works and write well into his 80s. On February 8, 2016, Cohen published Fingerpainting for the 21st Century. In it, he describes the latest iteration of AARON. Much like the system displayed at the Computer Museum in 1995, a Linux-based workstation generates line drawings akin to those AARON created in its earliest form. Cohen would then select images to send to a Windows machine attached to two monitors: one displaying a paint system control screen, and the other a 7-foot-tall display showing the artwork. Selecting a brush type and color from the palette on the control screen, Cohen could then color the work using his fingers on the large screen. Cohen described how his relationship with AARON had changed with this version.
“It never occurred to me until recently that I had changed the terms of my relationship with my program, my collaborator, in a very fundamental way. Before this new phase, it had always been necessary to bring AARON’s contribution out of the program’s space so that I could make my own physical contribution—that is, printing its drawings on canvas before I could start the coloring. Now I am working almost entirely in the program’s space. Issues of physicality don’t arise until the physical limitations of the hardware make that final stage of adjusting color relationships necessary.”
Harold Cohen passed away on April 27, 2016. He was 87. Over a career that spanned more than 60 years, he exhibited work around the world in dozens of exhibitions. His works are held in major museums like the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, and the Tate Gallery. Commenting on Cohen’s passing, legendary early computer artist Frieder Nake said, “Harold was the lonesome rock of rule-based algorithmic art. Nobody in the world did anything in fine art as courageous, as daring, and as successful as he. His approach was unique in all its facets. His rich work stands out unparalleled.”
5 Iconic Designers and Their Furniture Milestones: Aalto, Gray, Le Corbusier, Van der Rohe & Panton
Big meeting: Le Corbusier’s LC4 Chaise Longue meets Eileen Gray’s Adjustable table, Alvar Aalto’s Stool 60, Verner Panton’s Flowerpot pendant and Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona chair
The 20th century is almost certainly the most important period when it comes to interior design icons. The list of protagonists who have contributed to making this era of design such a great one is certainly too long to truly do justice to all of them and their classic furniture designs. For this reason, here we present just a small selection of architects and designers such as Eileen Gray, Le Corbusier and Verner Panton, who have written design history over the past century, and which still continue to make an impression to this day – all of whom can be found on the Architonic Platform. Our journey includes extraordinary talents from all corners of the world: A look back at the furniture world of yesterday, which was then of tomorrow, and today still shines as brightly and timelessly as ever.
Alvar Aalto
Our story begins with furniture design from the last century and an icon of Scandinavian minimalism, Finnish architect and designer Alvar Aalto (1898-1976). His designs not only influenced his country of origin, Finland, but are also synonymous with Scandinavian modernism, Nordic aesthetics and architectural purism. For his Paimio Chair, developed in 1931 and one of Aalto’s greatest furniture classics, he was inspired by Marcel Breuer‘s Wassily Chair. The chair, with a seat-back shell made from a single curved piece of wood, was part of the design for the Paimio Tuberculosis Sanatorium (1929-33).
In 1933, the design of the world-famous Stool 60 followed, which is produced by Artek today, just like the Paimio Chair. Despite – or thanks to – its purism and simplicity, it is an undoubted classic and available in countless versions today. And this is also where one of Aalto’s great inventions came into being, the L-leg: a birch wood strut bent into an L-shape which is screwed directly, making complicated wooden connections superfluous. With this new bending technique, which he used for the Stool 60, Aalto achieved a masterpiece that changed the design of wooden furniture. His entire oeuvre ranges from room plans to designs for individual buildings and furnishings.
He also worked with his wife Aino Marsio-Aalto on interior design and furniture. With his innovative use of natural materials, organic forms, curved lines and human-centered design, he has helped to shape the basic features of modern Nordic design. However, Aalto did not only make his mark with his Finnish birch wood furniture or public buildings. Probably his most famous object is the wave-shaped Savoy vase which was designed for Iittala and presented for the first time at the World’s Fair in Paris in 1937 – and the Finnish brand still today continues to launch new colour variations.
Eileen Gray
Eileen Gray (1878-1976), born into an Irish-Scottish aristocratic family, is undoubtedly one of the most important designers of the last century. After her studies – she was one of the first women to study at the London Slade Academy in 1898 because of her good background – she went to Paris, where she ran the Jean Désert Gallery and sold her furniture, as well as designing interiors.
After her acquaintance with the Romanian architect and architecture critic Jean Badovici, with whom she had a romantic as well as professional relationship until 1931, Gray focused on architecture: in 1924, she built the House E 1027 with him and for him in the French Rocquebrune on the Côte d’Azur. The design also included the furniture of the modern cliff house – and it was here that she created her most famous designs, such as the Adjustable Table and the Bibendum Chair. She was inspired by Breuer’s tubular steel experiments at the Bauhaus in Dessau, but made the material look more elegant. The side table, which she supposedly designed with her breakfast-in-bed-loving sister in mind, is one of the most copied designs ever and is now marketed under licence by ClassiCon.
It is also remarkable that Gray significantly changed course during her career. After making a name for herself in Paris in the 1920s as the best address for lacquer furniture, she made the transition from recognised and respected furniture designer to architect at the age of 40, encouraged by Badovici. And with the House E 1027, she achieved a truly pioneering achievement in modernist architecture.
Le Corbusier
Even as a child I admired the LC1 Chair – I thought it was really great! Not because I knew a lot about design and Le Corbusier back then, but rather because it was such a treat for me and my brother to crank the backrest – non-stop. And I have to say – not without a little pride, – that the chair is not only a masterpiece in terms of aesthetics and comfort, it has survived to this day, and still looks great almost thirty years after the abuse it suffered at our childhood hands – and the backrest still swivels, too.
But Charles-Édouard Le Corbusier (1887-1965) is not only known for his visionary furniture designs. He also devoted his early professional years to architecture, where his groundbreaking ideas sometimes met with criticism, but also revealed designs that would ultimately shape architecture from then on. His reinforced concrete skeleton system ‘Dom-Ino’, developed in 1914, made fine floor plans that dispensed with load-bearing walls on individual storeys possible. The Weisenhaussiedling in Stuttgart, Germany, which he co-developed in the 1920s, is probably the best-known architectural housing estate that took serial living to the next level. Towards the end of the decade in 1928, he presented the LC4 recliner, which is produced today by Cassina, as are most of his seating designs. Incidentally, the first pieces in the LC series were created together with his cousin Pierre Jeanneret and with Charlotte Perriand.
Other of his very cubic furniture designs, mainly club chairs and sofas, are all coordinated and compatible with each other, and they show once more the serial thought that lay behind so many of Le Corbusier’s designs. In 1931, he produced his very own colour keyboard, the Polychromie architecturale, with 43 shades. 28 years later, in 1959, he added 20 more colours. To this day, it is frequently used by a wide variety of brands for their products and design concepts. And with the Modulor he developed – a proportion system based on the golden section – he laid a foundation for proportion and design theory, which still today makes up a part of the fundamental studies of every architecture student.
Mies van der Rohe
The outstanding German avant-garde architect and designer of modernism Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969) was not only the third but also the last director at the Bauhaus from 1930. Of all the great architects of modernism, he is perhaps not the best known, but most people are familiar with the Villa Tugendhaft and the Barcelona Pavilion – his most famous architectural works. Nietzsche was also known to have been a regular reader of his works.
What many are not aware of is that after his first years of professional experience in the field of architecture and acquaintance with Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier, as well as his involvement in the construction management of the German Embassy in St. Petersburg, he was called up for service after the outbreak of the Firt World War. Following the war, he added his mother’s surname, van der Rohe, to his surname Mies. In the years that followed, he became involved in avant-garde architecture, co-edited the magazine ‘G’ and co-founded the Ring, a collective of avant-garde architects.
In 1925 he was appointed artistic director of the Deutscher Werkbund, and two years later he was responsible for the artistic planning and execution of the Weissenhofsiedlung in Stuttgart on the occasion of the Werkbund exhibition ‘The Dwelling’, with which the architects propagated the ‘New Building’. With the Barcelona Chair, designed for the German pavilion at the World Exhibition in Barcelona in 1929, Mies van der Rohe created a modernist furniture icon that is at least as popular today as it was then for enhancing lounge, waiting and other interior areas. It was created in collaboration with his partner of many years, the architect and designer Lilly Reich – whose contribution, however, was only acknowledged much later. In the design, they were inspired by ancient stools and neoclassical seating furniture and reinterpreted the curves and shapes with leather and chrome. In 1938, before the outbreak of the Second World War, he moved to the USA where he lived from then on. He was appointed head of the architecture department at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago a year later and found success as an architect from the end of the 1940s. His last building was the German National Gallery in Berlin.
Verner Panton
Panton is considered one of the most influential Danish furniture designers and interior architects of the last century and has left a lasting mark on the world of furniture design. His eponymous Panton Chair from 1959 is an icon that almost transcends the furniture sector and certainly one of the most famous of all chairs. His two most important teachers were Arne Jacobsen and Poul Henningsen. In the course of his career, Verner Panton (1926-1998) created innovative designs and futuristic designs from a variety of materials – in particular, products were realised in plastic and in bright, exotic colours.
Even today, there is always a ‘new supply’. In recent years, for example, numerous new and old designs have been launched by &tradition, which integrate seamlessly into the diverse modern mix and match style – perhaps precisely because they are style icons, but at the same time can be produced using the most modern manufacturing methods. His Flowerpot series from 1968, now produced by &tradition, lends a young, fresh, nostalgic flair to the space it inhibits, thanks to strong intense colours and its simple yet iconic shape – two facing semicircular spheres in different sizes.
His iconic colourful designs and patterns, which are sold as rugs under the Verpan brand, among others, were used by Dries van Noten in his Spring/Summer 2019 collection and adapted for numerous designs. The Danish designer immortalised his special feeling for colour, function and form in the book ‘Verner Panton: Notes on Colour’, published in 1991, from which the following quote is taken: The choice of colour should not be left to chance. You should consciously choose a colour. Colours have a meaning and a function.’
Check more details of these and other furniture pieces in the Architonic catalog.
Amidst the current wave of architectural globalization, the art of crafting designs attuned to specific contexts is fading. This concern is especially significant in countries in crisis, such as Ukraine, where the built environment’s history is being eroded by war. In these conditions, the contribution of local architects with an innate grasp of the country’s cultural nuances becomes imperative. Leading the charge in the rebuilding of Ukraine is prototype, a pioneering practice that challenges architectural conventions to push the country towards a promising future.
Recognizing their forward-looking vision, ArchDaily has featured prototype as part of the 2023 New Practices, a global annual survey. prototype’s outlook on the future of architecture aligns with responsible design that addresses the environmental impact of construction and marries contextual and specific considerations for each project. Their recent accomplishments include the bookstore Readellion, and Ukrainian-Danish Youth House, epitomizing prototype’s recurring design principles of mobility, adaptability, dynamic levels, and change of scenarios.
Established in 2020, the Kyvian Architecture Bureau prototype has garnered attention for its visionary design processes and philosophies. Their conceptual approach is rooted in experimentation and thrives on the discovery of productive counterpoints through meticulous consideration of the site context. From residences to industrial infrastructure, their diverse portfolio showcases a commitment to detail, fabrication, and customization.
A notable testament to the bureau’s context-driven approach is the Mobile Pavilion, a project designed for the House of Europe initiative in Ukraine. Microrationality, prototype’s driving concept, manifests as the humanization of public spaces and its ability to adapt to Ukraine’s diverse landscapes. The House of Europe’s design competition aimed to foster cultural integration between the European Union and Ukraine, prompting the creation of a portable pavilion that travels across the country for cultural events. The winning design by architects Ivan Protasov of prototype, Yana Buchatska, Dmytro Mikheyev, Taras Baran, and Olha Kuchmagra successfully redefines public spaces across Ukraine. Challenging conventional architecture in Ukraine, the modular blue pavilion becomes a vibrant cultural hub, drawing citizens to participate in festivals, lectures, and workshops.
Ukraine’s architectural landscape presents a duality of compact European neighborhoods and Soviet-influenced widely spaced layouts. The Mobile Pavilion’s adaptability is a response to these contrasting contexts, designed to operate as a system that adapts to the scale of various public spaces. Research on design limitations, such as the average area of public squares and bridge heights in the country, was conducted to arrive at the final design. “We first approached the competition brief by thinking about creating an artificial landscape that works with its surrounding context”, Protasov reveals. The Mobile Pavilion now resembles a playground that can configure itself to changing contexts, taking on a new form in every city to offer users a fresh experience.
Essential to the design was modularity, allowing for effortless disassembly and transportation across different cities. The system is a combination of four structural elements – two containers for gatherings and an information hub, crowned with twin open-air auditoriums that seamlessly flow into the site. As the pavilion ventures through different urban landscapes, it adapts into six diverse configurations while offering distinctive workshops, film screenings, and concerts tailored to each city. With a footprint of 180 square meters, the architectural system not only crafts a one-of-a-kind public space but also evokes a sense of connectivity through its form, multilevel layout, and comprehensive 360-degree orientation.
The project’s design philosophy also finds expression in its materials. A bright blue industrial FRP grating, encased in glass for soundproofing and thermal insulation, creates a visually permeable boundary between the interior and exterior. Symbolic of EU-Ukraine relations, this transparency mirrors the vulnerability and connectivity prototype seeks to foster in Ukraine’s public squares. The design not only visualizes openness but also transforms public spaces into inviting meeting points. Additionally, blue metal tubes form custom furniture, further bridging the gap between design and function.
Embodying prototype’s ethos of user-driven experiences, the pavilion serves as an “unconditional space” that invites active participation, enabling users to define the spatial configuration. The modularity allows users to exercise the freedom of defining the spatial configuration of the pavilion, thus appearing as an unfinished project. The pavilion’s unconventionality captured the attention of both young and old generations who began to have their dialogue with the system. “Architects are always striving to make things better, however, when you put that responsibility in the hands of the users, it results in democratic and adaptable spaces”, shares Mikheyev.
Operating on dual scales, the Mobile Pavilion promotes cultural integration with the EU while decentralizing culture within Ukrainian cities. In the country, there has been a tendency to concentrate efforts on cultural developments within the capital city and large metropolises. The Mobile Pavilion brings a paradigm shift where funds and programs are allowed to penetrate smaller towns of Ukraine. The design aims to be an interactive public space, letting users engage with the system irrespective of the House of Europe’s programs. This flexibility transforms the Pavilion into a dynamic platform for community interaction.
prototype envisions a new era for Ukraine, one defined by responsible contextual design and infrastructural growth. “After the victory, Ukraine would become a great construction site in the world, gathering interest from international and local architects”, Buchatska believes, “It is important that architects deeply understand and respect the historical layers that define the landscape of Ukraine”.This new era empowers local architects to take ownership of their spaces, catalyzing recovery through activism and innovative design. The trajectory of Ukrainian architecture is set to flourish, with local architects driving progress and transformation.
prototype’s impact transcends architectural innovation; it extends to the transformation of public spaces, cultural integration, and Ukraine’s resurgence on the global stage. Through their Mobile Pavilion and other groundbreaking projects, prototype shapes not only buildings but also experiences, fostering connections between people, contexts, and ideas.
This feature is part of an ArchDaily series titled AD Narratives where we share the story behind a selected project, diving into its particularities. Every month, we explore new constructions from around the world, highlighting their story and how they came to be. We also talk to the architect, builders, and community seeking to underline their personal experience. As always, at ArchDaily, we highly appreciate the input of our readers. If you think we should feature a certain project, please submit your suggestions.
25 practices, sole practitioners, and startups from 5 continents and 18 countries have been chosen as part of the 2023 New Practices, the latest edition of the global annual survey by ArchDaily. Ongoing since 2020, the review detects and showcases those who are taking architecture in its new direction under unstable times and demanding challenges.
ArchDaily’s New Practices has invited not only designers to apply but those practicing within the broadest definition of architecture and its exercise to share their innovative, fresh, and forward-thinking mission with us. As a result, the 2023 edition features designers, landscape architects, researchers, curators, activists, writers, and three ground-breaking startups—the modular construction U-Build, Urban Beta with their Beta Port building system, and the “Google Doc of Space Design” Rayon—thus joining previously highlighted firms: AEC-industry-oriented management software Monograph, energy transition startup Baupal, online design platform and marketplace CANOA, and 3D-printed housing company ICON.
David Basulto, ArchDaily Founder & Editor-in-Chief, has stated regarding the 2023 New Practices:
As the growing complexity of our world presents us with ever-growing challenges at an unprecedented speed, our built environment has become one of our society’s most critical questions. From energy scarcity to inequality, density, diversity, waste, food production, circular economy, and identity—it all converges into the built environment. To face this, architecture needs to evolve and scale.
The practices we choose for this year’s edition embody the spirit of innovation, and from their diverse windows they bring something new to the table: from participatory processes to climate awareness, from the local approach to scaling architecture, to make it more accessible and democratic.
Meanwhile, Clara Ott, ArchDaily Projects Manager, has this to say:
From early in their careers, they challenge the known architectural scene fueled by a desire to get involved in architecture from a fresh perspective; by bringing new ideas ranging from developing construction systems and materials, inclusive participatory processes, care for the environment and innovation through technology. Their work becomes a significant contribution and true inspiration for the development of the built environment.
Throughout 2023, ArchDaily, across seven sites and four languages, will showcase the chosen practices’ work, explaining their approach through a series of in-depth articles as happened with the previous edition’s selected firms.
Team members: Ahmadreza Schricker, Mehdi Holakoui, Mona Janghorban, Patrick Hobgood, Behrang Bani-Adam, Roxana Afkhami, Amin Mahdavi
Embracing the potential of modernization, architects traditionally practice in cities with rising GDP growth to play a catalytic role in urbanization. Founded in New York by Ahmadreza Schricker in 2015, the intimate experience of realizing traditional architecture in a time of constant economic volatility has reconfigured ASA’s practice to pursue design in all directions: ASA North is dedicated to the physical realm, while ASA South has taken on projects in the virtual, including the first ground-up Virtual Museum for the Afkhami Collection. ASA East explores the past, preservation of the environment & adaptive reuse and is currently in formation; ASA West seeks to invent architecture for the future in lesser-explored frontiers, from earth’s geographic poles to other planets.
Being born in the middle of the pandemic, the practice led by Alejandro Saldarriaga Rubio focuses on investigating low-cost/low-tech design solutions for the persistent problems in the Global South through innovative construction methods, sustainable practices, and community prioritization. Recently the studio has started to engage with informal settlements in Bogotá, Colombia, and currently, they are speculating on new typologies, emergent from the Coronavirus pandemic, that can be reapplied to more chronic problematics of the public realm of the informal landscapes of the world.
Team members: Emiliano García, Helene Carlo, Paula Amín, José María Castro, Daniela Alarcón, Iván Cruz, Alberto García, Diana Medina, Michelle Vences, Alejandro Sosa, Brenda Delgado, Karen Rivera, Isabel Ramírez, Daniela Ruiz de Chávez, Andrés Corona
ASPJ is convinced that Landscape—with capital L—is a necessary tool to design the horizons of today and tomorrow, and that design from the deep logic of Landscape allows the creation of coherent and abundant environments. Helene Carlo and Emiliano Garcia have developed territorial studies, stormwater management projects, renaturalization of rivers and regeneration of degraded environments, and design of environments and natural atmospheres. The Landscape is the final integrator, with a hydrological basin approach, where water is the guiding thread for the establishment of regenerative living systems, proposing diverse and productive landscapes linked to human establishments.
Team members: Chen Xi, Zhu Zhu, Weng Cekai, Huang Zhenfeng, Lin Ziya, He Xiansen, Ye Fangnan
Founded in 2017 by Chen Xi, their work focuses on public and cultural projects at various scales, attentive to the needs of diverse groups and scales. The studio aspires to create spaces that bring unique poetry and profoundness to contemporary urban and rural environments: “We see architecture as an art of mediation between social, economic, and political interests. We try to create meaningful places with minimum resources. We want to narrate emotions and memories with spatial poetry. We believe that each space, grand or tiny, is a clue to the vastness of our world, and a testimony to the glory of everyday life. By planting these quiet and resilient spaces one at a time, we envision architecture to branch out and blossom with life and narratives.”
Team members: Diogo Aguiar, Daniel Mudrák, Adalgisa Castro Lopes, João Teixeira, Claudia Ricciuti, Liam Romo, Marta Bednarczyk, Matyáš Řehák
Diogo Aguiar Studio operates between the fields of architecture and art, simultaneously conceiving small-scale buildings and spatial installations for public space, temporary or otherwise, believing that the ambivalent practice informs and drives the work being developed, as speculative and spatial research. Among other relevant themes that are transversal and inevitable to contemporary reality, the studio is interested in the material and sensorial exploration of immersive architectural or artistic spaces, be they archetypal or ready-made, through the study of geometric, abstract, and elementary compositions. These are materialized as formal systems, that work the limits of the filled and the empty space, seeking to claim the relevance of the process of designing the architectural space, as a powerful research instrument.
Team members: Alkistis Thomidou, Berta Gutiérrez, Giulia Domeniconi, Lea Hobson
As an international collaborative practice of architects and researchers, forty five degrees is committed to the critical revisioning of space-making, exploring new methods, resources, and means. Their work investigates the built environment through research, design, and artistic experimentation, across multiple scales and in its social, economical, and structural implications. They are interested in collecting protocols and collective approaches, exploring alternative living and city-making models and new paradigms of spatial development to engage with communities and the networks they are part of. The collective strives to create inclusive and accessible spaces through careful use of scale, material, and design language and is committed to rethinking education through academia and practice, placing design at the intersection of arts and sciences. At the studio, their projects address the social and cultural spheres, developing non-profit activities and engaging with a broader spectrum of actors creating a bigger impact.
Team members: Caio Calafate, Pedro Varella, André Cavendish, Ingrid Colares, Barbara Amorim and Igor Machado.
Based in Rio de Janeiro, gru.a has been developing projects and works of different scales and natures, with a special interest in the intersection between the fields of architecture and the arts. Over the last few years, the office has carried out projects for cultural centers, exhibition spaces, artistic installations, theaters, residences, and interventions in modern heritage, among others. The firm has participated in exhibitions and festivals such as the Venice Architecture Biennale (Brazil Pavilion, 2018) and the Ibero-American Architecture Biennale (2019). Also in 2019, gru.a was selected among the 10 finalists for the DEBUT award, granted by the Lisbon Architecture Triennale (2019) for international practices.
Team members: Fernando Martirena, Anadis González, Dat Nguyen, Daniela Iglesias, Mauricio Chávez y Manuela Silva.
Infra is a prefix indicating “below” or “before”. As a prefix in itself, it conditions everything that precedes it. Infraestudio is less than an architectural studio: it is a fiction created to operate discreetly in a city frozen in time. Infraestudio practices narrative architecture as a design exercise without the mediation of images: they start from the same discourse to experiment with different resources such as buildings, research, exhibitions, editorial practices, writing, art, and activism. Some of their obsessions are making architecture that hides in the landscape, showing emptiness as a representation of an idea, not thinking about forms but strategies, and building the minimum necessary.
Team members: Jae K. Kim, Ji Seon Yoon, Gyu Tae Kim, Tae Wook Kang, Seung Hoon Lee
Defined as an agenda-based design practice, JK-AR is a platform for design experiments, creating space and form to yield new experiences. They think of visions for human life through architecture, rethinking traditional tectonics with digital technology for producing structural forms which challenge conventional practice in design and construction. Recently, the office focuses on recreating East Asian timber structures through interdisciplinary studies of design computation and historical analysis. In this context, the projects of JK-AR intend to constitute a novel step in reinventing and evolving the historical monumental structure.
Team members: Blanca Garcia Gardelegui, Eva Theresa Haendler, Leonid Slonimskiy, Artem Kitaev, Dmitriy Prikhodko, Marina Skorikova, Vsevolod Babichuk, Daniil Ulakhovich, Rodion Kitaev
Virtually bringing together partners from different parts of Europe, KOSMOS works on projects of diverse scales and typologies: from furniture to art installations to masterplans, including big urban parks and territorial development projects. They believe that architecture is a collaborative, inclusive, and multidisciplinary profession, and often collaborate with other architects, artists, political activists, sociologists, photographers, and poets. KOSMOS believes that architecture is not just a well-designed volume of a building, facade, and internal layout, but rather a spatial frame for spaces of public interaction, for being together. Architecture should activate the space around it and become a frame for people to spend their free time or work; play or study; relax or be active; meet each other or be with themselves.
Romanian architect, designer, writer, and educator, Stanescu’s projects span seamlessly across disciplines and scales, from private residences to public infrastructure, from product design to teaching. She has worked with the New Museum in New York, MoMA, Virgil Abloh, Coachella, the Storefront for Art and Architecture, and Kanye West. The studio is run from Berlin & New York.
Through architecture and design, Office Kim Lenschow seeks to reveal and challenge ingrained values, beliefs, and material narratives in established building practices and ways of life. The firm believes in architecture embedded in our time, seeing the built environment both as a resource of materials and of cultural meaning. Office Kim Lenschow is currently searching for a more fragile and open architecture, where the materials used, and the buildings’ patterns of use are better calibrated and synchronized with each other. This includes experimenting with different ways of applying bio-degradable materials to architecture to create an architecture better suited for our planet. Their aim is to cultivate a more aware and authentic engagement with the world and the structures that surround us.
Founded by Sebastián Bravo, Oficina Bravo develops projects of intervention of buildings with heritage value, commercial spaces, gastronomic, housing, and public facilities. They are interested in making simple projects with efficient use of resources (architectural, economic, constructive, and material) looking for buildings that—through a clear strategy—are a contribution to the city and have the ability to interact with the immediate context. Oficina Bravo cares about having a conversation with the clients, understanding and involving them in the process, and making them understand its work. That is the only thing that ensures that the ideas behind the project survive with dignity once the work is inhabited.
Paulo Tavares’s practice explores the frontiers of architecture across design, advocacy, writing, and curating. Operating through multiple media and across fields, his work opens a collaborative arena aimed at environmental justice and counter-hegemony narrative
Team members: Ivan Protasov, Pylyp Chaikovsky-Vamush, Uliana Dzhurliak, Serhiy Revenko
A one-word description of prototype’s approach would be microrationality. They want to inspire others with flexibility concerning the variety of the challenges the firm takes on, from cultural to industrial to residential projects and beyond, and eco-friendly technical macro- and micro solutions, whether it be upcycling, minimum/zero waste, or circular production. prototype sees the future of architecture as becoming more responsible in terms of inventively reducing the current negative impact of the construction industry on the environment and more attentive to each project in terms of both its broad context and narrow specifics: prototype might utilize scaffolding as part of a temporary building, construct half of a waste sorting station from the waste it is supposed to sort or incorporate the materials left from on-site pre-construction dismantling into the project we execute on that site.
Team members: Bastien Dolla, Stanislas Chaillou, Shira Nathan, Arthur Brongniart, Quentin Tardivon, Jan Pochyla, Xavier Haniquaut
In Rayon’s vision, architectural drawings are today at the core of our entire industry’s daily work. Yet, the class of legacy software people are currently left with was built during the pre-internet era. Therefore, Rayon brings to the table a 2D, browser-based and multiplayer experience allowing people to draw, share and work together on their drawings. At a time when people are increasingly moving their work, teams, and workflows online, Rayon aspires to spearhead this revolution in our industry, and democratize space design as widely as possible. In a nutshell, Rayon is essentially the “Google Doc of Space Design”.
Team members: Robben Bai, Helen Yu, Leqian Xue, Mengxuan Sheng, Yejing Wu, Xiaoyi Liang, Enze Wu
Roarc Renew will always express a clear constructing idea in its practices. Building logic reflects the principal logic of how things work in this world, which is substances and joints: joints can reflect the substances in the physical world and connect them all. In its practices, Roarc Renew has created a JointsPavilion (JP) series for the construction system and a SoftJoints (SJ) series for the home furniture system to leverage its know-how to make it easy and simple by connecting substances beautifully.
Team members: Malene Hvidt, Nikoline Dyrup Carlsen, Svend Jacob Pedersen, Sofie Staal, Aleksander Aarstad, Otto Engelhardt, Johan Neborg, Linn Olsson, Karoline Bach, Victor Lomholt, Victor Munch, Anastasija Vlasova, Vera Johanne Aagaard Hertz, Mette Estrup, August Wille, Mads Riishede Knudsen, Morten Nielsen, Valentin Bauberger
Spacon & X strives to disrupt and challenge architectural norms and conventional design boundaries in a diplomatic manner, something they call disruplomacy. This approach has been guiding the firm since its inception, where it worked to address the urgent issue of spatial scarcity within urban contexts by reconsidering how we consume space. Spacon & X designs surfaces, volumes, and spaces that are multifaceted; able to serve a variety of purposes and functions; where multiple activities and experiences can occur over time, on the same square meters. To create spatially optimized and characterful spaces, Spacon & X believes that the most aspiring work comes from an untraditional fusion of skills across disciplines; bringing together various ideas from different practices to generate alternative, innovative and enduring solutions.
Taller General is a space of confluence, where they find themselves day by day doing what they like, mainly through architectural work. However, the space aims to mix all the flavors that make up our lives, whether it is called activism, reading, teaching, construction, drawing, planning, or management. Taller General is comprised of Martín Real and Florencia Sobrero. However, the group mutates depending on the development of each project. Collaborative work brings together worlds, opinions, and practices, enriching the space and facilitating results that they would be unable to imagine by themselves.
Team members: Jonas Swienty Andresen, Simon Strøyer
Tideland Studio applies architectural tools in field research to capture and unfold phenomena relevant to our time. They work in the intersection between science, art, and architecture pushing the boundaries of disciplines to create experiences that inspire and educate. One of Tideland Studio’s goals is to mobilize change by bringing attention to climate change. Therefore they embrace architectural technologies that enable to register, simulate and communicate changes to natural and manmade landscapes.
Team members: Nick Newman, Oli Berry, Hannah Burrough, Esra Alma, Ben Baker
U-Build is a not-for-profit startup, developed by Studio Bark in collaboration with Structure Workshop. They empower people to make their own spaces with U-Build’s modular flat-pack kits. The startup uses precision-cut CNC plywood assembled into blocks that can be bolted together into any configuration. Using parametric design they can turn simple sketches into fully costed technical drawings, and cutting files that can be sent all around the world. The system has been designed for the circular economy so that all of the parts can be disassembled. In fact, U-Build commits to taking back any unwanted U-Build boxes and reusing them in other projects, and several of our projects have already had many lives. Worth mentioning it that U-Build provides its services and systems at reduced rates or pro-bono to charities and movements working for a better future.
Team members: Anke Parson, Paul Clemens Bart, Florian Michaelis, Marvin Bratke, Isabella Luger, Verena Katzmarzyk
Urban Beta is a spatial innovation studio creating inclusive, innovative, and transformative spaces. The studio develops spatial systems with a participatory approach, dealing with social justice, predictive planning, co-creation, and the democratization of design. Urban Beta creates transformative spaces that grow with us and can react to the changing streams of the information society. Their planning acts at the intersection of multiple disciplines and transforms dreams, visions, and values into tangible spatial concepts with future-proof narratives. Urban Beta’s core principles are based on social inclusion and predictive planning: they see themselves as an interface for spatial innovation, developing predictive planning tools and creating platforms for participatory co-creation processes and seamless transitions between physical and digital.
Team members: Anna Juni, Enk te Winkel, Gustavo Delonero, Gabriela Rochitte, Luiza Souza
vão is a transdisciplinary office whose work meanders through the fields of architecture, urbanism, and fine arts in the most diverse scales, demands, and contexts. vão is interested in the so-called transdisciplinary, basing all their works on theoretical, technical, and experimental grounds when investigating peculiar characteristics of the territory of action that can be incorporated into the project’s reasoning.
Mae-ling Lokko’s Willow Technologies aims to explore and activate new positions for architects and designers within a global generative justice framework. Through the identification and transformation of different forms of “alienated value” within the architectural, agricultural, and food material life cycles, its work explores how design can play an active role in broadening and deepening ‘who’ and ‘what’ to participate in our material economies. Centered around projects that leverage agricultural, forestry, and food by-products, the practice aims to develop knowledge exchange and research platforms between largely disconnected intersectoral stakeholders.
The jury also wants to acknowledge the shortlisted practices of this edition: Domain Architects, SpActrum, Cinema Urbana, Coletivo LEVANTE, 3me arquitectura, Fabrizio Pugliese, Estudio RARE, HANGHAR, Proyector, Bona fide taller, Ivan Bravo Arquitectos, AMDL CIRCLE, CatalyticAction, DROO – Da Costa Mahindroo Architects, EVA Studio, Grand Huit coop, IVAAIU City, Kun Studio, Peter Pichler Architecture, RAD+ar, RnD_Earth (Research and Design), SAGA Space Architects, SO?, ZMX, and Fria Folket.
The ArchDaily’s 2023 New Practices jury was comprised of:
Hana Abdel, Senior Projects Curator
Romullo Baratto, ArchDaily Brasil Managing Editor
David Basulto, ArchDaily Founder & Editor in Chief (Final Stage)
Agustina Coulleri, Projects Curator
Fabián Dejtiar,ArchDaily en Español Managing Editor
Victor Delaqua, Content and Community and Social Media Editor
Nicolás Valencia, ArchDaily Network Editorial & Data Manager (Final Stage)
This article is part of the ArchDaily Topics: New Practices. Every month we explore a topic in-depth through articles, interviews, news, and projects. Learn more about our ArchDaily topics. As always, at ArchDaily we welcome the contributions of our readers; if you want to submit an article or project, contact us.
Text description provided by the architects. The AB House is a double-height unit located on the fifth floor of an apartment in Pingtung City, our first house as architectural designers, the two of us and a baby. The unit was bought when the apartment was still under construction. We had the opportunity to alter the original 4-bedroom layout to better appreciate the natural light and ventilation the unit is gifted with.
Most of the initial partitions were removed to create a sense of openness to complement the double-height space. As one enters, the sky can be seen through the double-height outer wall; the view straight to the greens at the balcony, through the kitchen and dining space, welcomes him. Ample openings on the outer wall brighten the volume of the space, as the air gently flows. The open kitchen expands toward the balcony. An L-shaped kitchen counter divides the kitchen from the entryway; the hard-to-use corner kitchen counter is open toward the entryway to accommodate a shoe rack for everyday shoes. The initially shared bathroom adjacent to the kitchen was transformed into a storeroom, with its wall pushed inward to make space for a wider kitchen.
The dining area is the hearth of the house. The living space on the initial plan was removed for a bigger dining area, as we observed that we tend to spend time with family and friends at the dining table. The area acts as a dining space, a workspace, and a gathering space at the same time. A table height wall cabinet next to the dining table is to carry objects when swapping functions at the dining table. While the balcony can’t be extended outward, we greedily extended it inward instead. The materiality of the balcony floor flows into the dining area, using its tactility to bring one into the balcony starting from the inside. Folding doors at the balcony maximize opening for ventilation. On a breezy summer afternoon, we sit close to the folding doors and feel like we are on the balcony.
A metal platform on the mezzanine can easily be discerned in the open space. The platform leads to the back laundry area and serves as a personal working space overlooking the open space. Curved edges of the platform, perforated flooring, and thin railings minimize the platform’s weight in the double-height space. The partitions on the mezzanine are also mostly removed to enhance interactions between the first floor and the mezzanine. A soft curtain partition divides the master bedroom from the small living space next to the mezzanine balcony. When the curtain opens, the small living space becomes an extension to the master bedroom, while both spaces enjoy cross ventilation. A projector projects from the small living space to the opposite wall to indulge the double-height void.
We hope that this house of openness, with its harmony between different spaces, enriches our everyday lives as we slowly grow as a family.
Project location
Address:Pingtung, Pingtung County, Taiwan
Location to be used only as a reference. It could indicate city/country but not exact address.
After high school, college. After college, a “good” job.
For me, it started with an internship that morphed into the full-time job I needed to pay off the student loans casting a shadow over my entire existence.
A decade or so after I graduated, if you took on student loans, the shadow became a tattoo.
After binge listening to “You can do it!” self-help tapes, I surprised myself and almost everyone who knew me by parlaying my first “real” job into a prestigious corporate gig followed by a series of wildest dream-fulfilling stints in Amsterdam, Paris, Sydney, Melbourne, and Tokyo.
Yes, it was amazing as it sounds. When I wasn’t traveling the world for work, I was taking friends on high-end vacations and paying for most of it with all the travel points I’d banked.
After about 15 years, I caught the plastic rabbit and asked, “Is this all there is?”
Little did I know that existential question was about to be T-boned by a global economic meltdown.
I pivoted before pivoting became trendy.
The economic implosion hastened my employer’s bankruptcy, and since my career was already in re-runs, I made the leap.
At 40, I proclaimed the second half of my career wouldn’t be characterized by waiting for someone else to deem me worthy of promotions and pay increases. I was going to be my own boss.
Cheery first-wave entrepreneurs — “influencers” hadn’t been invented yet — were just beginning to tout how easy it was to be your own boss and make millions. All while smiling over a MacBook and sipping coffee at an outdoor cafe. Conveniently, they sold the course that would show you the system and step-by-step plan that would make your new life “just add water” easy and chaos-free.
Sign me up! And I’ll have an espresso, please.
I took some courses, learned the systems, and felt prepared. And a few years later — yes, that’s right, years— I resigned from my high-paying, middle-prestige job on a sunny June day.
If corporate gave me a parting gift, it was the knowledge I could outwork almost anyone. I was confident that would be enough.
That was over ten years ago. Entrepreneurship and influencer life have caught fire since. Drop shipping, affiliate marketing, course creation, Etsy shops, and the whole internet proclaiming how easy it is to work a little and make a lot. Wealth porn settled in for a long winter’s nap.
Full disclosure: as of this writing, I’ve not hit millionaire status.
Selfies and influencers emerged in the early years of my entrepreneurship, and I saw a lot of fake private jet pictures and read endless memes reminding me, “She thought she could, and so she did!” It was a few years before the darker underside was exposed.
Now there are UN-fluencers making fun of wealth porn and calling out a new thing: perseverance porn. The “You can do it” and “Just don’t quit !” memes that sustained me in the early years are now the asbestos of entrepreneurship and labeled “toxic” positivity.
I have no regrets about leaving employment to be my own boss, yet there are a few things I wish I’d known ten years ago.
One of the most insidious illusions is equating spending money with progress.
Buying new equipment, setting up your social media, and paying for a new website is exciting and intoxicating, yet also misleading.
You feel like you’re on your way, investing in things you “have to have,” but you’re usually only depleting your accounts and replacing playing house with playing business but with real money. You’re convinced you “need” these bare necessities to be “legitimate.”
Often, this initial spending spree is a way to hide your fear.
There’s a lot you don’t know, and you imagine that will come with time, and in the meantime, you’ll get ready for that by spending. It’s seductive because it makes you feel in control. And in the early days, you usually have plenty of money.
Before you turn in your resignation or divest your 401k, see if your idea generates a profit in a small, sustainable way.
Does anyone other than your family and friends want your custom pickleball paddles, gourmet cupcakes, or vegan ice cream? If you make a profit, (and that’s a big “if”) take the next step.
No profits? Tune your offer before quitting your job, buying a ranch, and 100 emus.
You’ll still learn loads, and your mistakes won’t bankrupt you.
Running your own shop can be lonely.
You’re rarely alone as an employee, yet entrepreneurship can be isolating and lonely. Do anything you can to establish and maintain a peer group to get honest feedback and test ideas with others in the same boat.
The host at one conference ensured everyone was in a Mastermind group before leaving.
I walked away with a clique of other newbie entrepreneurs who offered invaluable been-there-done-that business insight and support. Find others who have walked the same path.
Ask yourself, “Am I just paying to be a part of something?”
The information in that $2000 course you “just have to have” is free at the local Small Business Development Center. But SBDCs aren’t Girl Boss sexy, so they’re easily overlooked. While that course creator your friend told you about is living your dream (allegedly). Just look at her sitting at that cafe table, crafting some brilliant email on her brilliant computer. Beware of that sizzle marketing and seductive spending. Don’t take the bait.
When I started, there was an SBDC within view of my apartment. Did I go and avail myself of all the offerings? Nope.
Check it out and save yourself lots of time and money. Mostly money.
Your business is not your baby.
A friend and his partner were investing their retirement money into a new business. One day, he confided,
“Since we don’t have children, this business is going to be our child.”
“Just make a big donation to charity and save yourself the heartache,” I quipped.
You’ve heard the old saying — loan money to a friend, lose your money, lose your friend.
Treat your business like your baby. Lose your retirement money and your partner.
If you make your business your child, you will hang on long after you should close it up. You’re more likely to make bad choices — ones you’d never make if you were running a business. When you make it your “baby,” you make it personal.
Don’t do it.
Plan for the end.
Judy Blume’s book “Forever” is a story of first love and first sex. I read it when I was a teenager.
What I remember most about the book is a question posed to one of the characters.
“Have you thought about how this relationship will end?”
Your first love and your first business have more in common than you think.
Plan for the end. Your energy will decline, your desires will change, and quitting is different when you’re the founder.
You can’t just walk away — and you might want to.
A friend of mine threw in the towel on her business. And a few years later, she paid thousands in tax penalties because she didn’t go through the steps to shut down her tax entity. In her mind, she quit. In the “mind” of the IRS, not so much.
Toxic positivity is real.
Anyone who tells you running your own business is a money tree surrounded by flowers of freedom and joy is likely trying to sell you something. Once you’ve bought their miracle framework, they’re in the wind, and you have to make it work. Read that again. If it were that easy to trade $2000 for $1 million, a lot more people would have done it.
Is life as an entrepreneur better than working for someone else? For me, that’s a “Hell Yes!” Yet, it’s not an easy money utopia. Starting a business is not for everyone, and when people don’t succeed, the successful, independent entrepreneur porn or perseverance porn shames them into silence, which means the very lessons learned that can help you make more informed choices never see the light of day.
There’s a secret, too.
Almost all the successful entrepreneurs I “looked up to” and, in part, modeled my new life after, I learned, shared one attribute: They were already rich.
And this fact was very carefully concealed behind thoughtfully crafted origin stories. Everyone loves the underdog who pulls themselves up by the bootstraps story, so that’s what they offered. They’d let out enough rope to tempt your aspirational appetite and not much more, but yeah, already rich.
And “rich” is a relative term, so it’s not hard to do “ethically.”
The thing about money is you always compare up. Someone who “only” owns a small house in the Hamptons might say, “We don’t own our own plane! We’re not rich.” But they have a lot more disposable income to hire coaches, designers, and help of all kinds. Most importantly, they have the space to make mistakes. And that makes a huge difference you may not factor into the equation.
In the last few years, fake bootstrapping is getting called out.
People who post online about buying their first house at 21, are getting called out for misleading people when the reality is their daddy bought them the house. People humble bragging about making $100k on their “First launch” usually omit they had plenty of money before they launched. Perhaps they don’t even think it matters, but $1k vs. $20k buy on Facebook advertising matters.
There’s nothing wrong with being rich. There’s nothing wrong with generational wealth, but wealth means you can afford to make mistakes.
Owning your own business can be a rewarding ride, but a business has a lot of dark corners people don’t talk about because any mistake or failure reflects back on you.
I hope you avoid these common gotchas, and please, if you have them, add your lessons learned in the comments.
Career Strategist Courtney Kirschbaum helps Fortune 500 professionals get better jobs and careers. Learn three ways she can help you by visiting https://www.courtneykirschbaum.com.
Design storytelling is one of those crucial skills people want, but it’s hard to know exactly how to learn it. Talking about it conjures images of the late Steve Jobs on stage, engaging and persuading the audience with the power of design.
We often create design artifacts centered on storytelling, such as storyboarding and journey maps, yet it’s not always obvious how to improve at telling stories.
However, it may be easier than you realize. To learn how to tell stories with design, keep one question in mind: what tension is the audience hoping to resolve?
Storytelling in design is about keeping your users in mind
Cole Nussbaumer Knalfic, in her book Storytelling with You, highlights an example of why many presentations fail to engage people and why Designers have an advantage with storytelling.
Imagine how people typically approach creating a presentation. It might typically follow a linear template, such as:
Now think of how many boring presentations you’ve listened to following that format. When you do, one thing should become clear: these presentations are not designed with the audience in mind. Instead, it’s designed to be easy for the presenter to read off their slides in an acceptable manner.
It’s also why we, as Designers, can probably do better: our careers are spent understanding user needs, wants, and frustrations. So designing a presentation with your ‘user’ (i.e., audience) in mind can easily result in more engaging and persuasive presentations that get your audience to take action.
However, storytelling isn’t just useful for presentations.
Design often uses storytelling as part of their process
I won’t touch on them in this article, but here are some other opportunities you might have to leverage storytelling within your design process:
This is the high-level overview of the user’s path, touching on some of the main driving factors, motivations, and emotions behind how a user interacts with your site.
Storytelling can help you engage your team with one person’s journey and where they struggle, or our site doesn’t match what they need. In particular, storytelling can help distinguish between what the business wants customers to do and what they actually do.
In addition, customer journey maps are often polished deliverables you can provide to visualize your user’s path through many different products and departments.
How do you create a basic story with steps around how users address and complete specific tasks? I’ve lumped these artifacts together because Storyboarding requires both Personas and Use cases to be fully fleshed out.
While these storyboards may be meant for internal use, engaging your team with the Persona, and the specific context they face, will be the driving factor here.
For example, why does Mary seem to time out a lot while Dave doesn’t? When you establish the context, your team might see that Dave is an expert user who uses our systems constantly, while Mary is a novice senior citizen who spends all her time reading the massive amount of text on the site.
User stories are one of the smallest tasks that leverage storytelling and sometimes one of the most important. These small stories fit into Agile backlogs and tracking software, which are features people can accomplish within sprints.
Regardless, all of these processes have storytelling elements within them, and even though we’re focusing on presentations, they should all follow a basic 3-step process. That process starts with a question: Who is your audience, and who are you prioritizing?
Who is your audience, and who are you prioritizing?
You’re unlikely to get your entire team to agree on one action. As a result, you have to consider two things when you think about your audience: who is your audience, and who do you want to prioritize?
The first question will focus mainly on your audience’s composition to help you figure out what you need to address. For example, if your audience is all close team members who’ve been with you every step of the way, you could cut summarizing every action you’ve taken until now.
On the other hand, if you’re talking with people who have never heard of your project, you may need to stay high-level and provide much context.
Most of the time, however, audiences tend to be a mix of people, especially if this is a large issue you’re addressing. This is where the following question matters: who will you prioritize?
People that provide access: Managers, VPs, or C-level executives can often provide access to specific audiences, tools, and more
People that provide resources: Project Managers can work in your requests (like additional user testing) into the budget and timeline
People that provide knowledge: Lead Engineers (or other Subject Matter Experts) can provide technical guidance into whether a design is feasible
People that provide approval: Product Managers, Product Owners, and a mix of Administrators can approve you for new tools, analytics accounts, and more.
Understanding who you prioritize helps you focus on the points you must provide. For example, suppose you’re trying to get another round of user testing approved.
In that case, you will want to focus on why that’s the case: perhaps users brought up a serious issue (like a law around data privacy you were unaware of) unexpectedly that would require us to change our design radically.
To assist us with this process, you must address the following question: what conflict/tension does your audience have?
Your audience has tension around something you need to resolve
Tension is at the heart of every good story; your presentation should be no different.
The core of storytelling in design revolves around one simple question: what conflict/tension exists for your audience?
This seems simple, but failing to address the audience’s tension often causes presentations to flop. To explain this, let’s take a poor example of this.
Imagine you were presenting your user research, describing the ‘tension’ with the following problem statement: “Our problem is that users don’t know how to figure out how to complete task X.”
Is that really what your target audience member cares about? No. What they care about will likely be the ‘effect’ of that problem.
Whether it’s metrics being affected (like low Weekly Active Users) or our lack of knowledge around why this is occurring, that’s the tension your audience is facing. They’re looking to UX to guide them on why users aren’t engaging with the current design or what actions we need to take.
In our example, Product Managers have tension around whether we have everything we need to complete our product according to our timeline. If not, what do we need to do?
In that case, when they hear you define the problem that way, some will likely tune out and say, “This presentation is not targeted for me.” That doesn’t mean that they won’t always take appropriate action: it’s just that they’re not engaged (and persuaded) by what you’re presenting.
As a result, you sometimes find out that you didn’t engage your audience when you finish speaking, and there’s an awkward long pause in the meeting before someone speaks up and tries to summarize what you presented.
To truly get them involved, we need to take a step back and consider what tension exists for our audience. Once you’ve done that, you can finally start with the storytelling process for your presentation.
To do that, let’s take a look at the Narrative arc.
Create a narrative arc with your findings to address tensions
Once you understand what tensions your audience is facing, it’s time to draft an outline of your points that will form your story’s basis.
This should be done as low-tech as possible, as the main goal is to have a rough draft where you can trash talking points, move them around, or consolidate them with little issue. For that reason, using Post-It notes, whiteboards, index cards, or sheets of paper allows you to draft without becoming too attached to certain ideas (like if you were to design them as Powerpoint slides).
Once you’ve drafted your talking points, it’s time to apply a basic story framework called the Narrative Arc:
What common ground and frame of mind must you establish with your team? This often consists of thinking about the knowledge you know tacitly and whether it would be helpful to communicate that directly.
For example, you may know the job titles and responsibilities of the users you tested with, but would it be helpful to elaborate on that with your audience?
Rising action: What tension exists for your audience? How can you directly address this and build it to an appropriate level based on your work?
For example, if Product Managers are concerned with whether we have everything we need for a good Product, this would be where you raise the idea that our users are skeptical that our design will address everything they need due to a legal constraint we may not be aware of.
Climax:
What is the maximum point of tension for your audience? This is often about conveying what’s at stake if we fail to take action. What’s at risk, and what does your audience care about?
In our example, this could be as simple as conveying that our current design won’t pass internal review because some serious legal concerns (around data privacy) aren’t being addressed.
Falling action:
While this sounds a little fuzzy, the main purpose is to ensure we transition from the climax to the ending. In this case, it might include additional details of user concerns, potential options we can take, questions to address, or solutions to employ.
In our example, this might be where we raise the idea of doing a quick re-design and another round of user testing. We might also bring in additional arguments, such as that the design must change so much that we can’t be sure that previous user feedback will apply to this design.
Ending:
This is the resolution and call to action. It’s rarely as simple as “We found X, so we should do Y.” Instead, this ending should be the following action we need our target to take, from setting up another meeting with people, deciding to choose an option, or checking whether we can approve such recommendations.
In this case, we need to ensure that the action we want our audience to take is clear and compelling.
By doing this, we’ve successfully laid out the basics for telling a story with our presentation. After doing that comes the following step: feedback.
Refine your story and ask for feedback
No story is perfect on the first draft, and your design stories are no exception. What you need to do once you come up with a basic story is to review the elements that you’ve written down.
For example, ask your team members (or other designers) if your story focuses on addressing your audience’s attention or whether your key insights back up your argument.
Refining your slides and iterating on your stories can help you learn to tell stories about design much better. That, in turn, can turn your processes into things that engage your audience to a larger degree.
While storytelling is still a skill you’ll have to learn and practice, the basic framework I’ve laid out here is a great way to practice, learn, and master the art of storytelling with design.
ARCHIABYSSNIYA 