Archinect - News

New approaches to housing offer new career moves for designers

2022-01-31T10:15:00-05:00

Last month, we reported on two stories that demonstrate the range of architectural start-ups emerging to address a lack of housing in the USA and further afield.

One example came from established leaders in the industry, with Bjarke Ingels unveiling details of Nabr, his “people-first housing company” which promises to “put more people on a path to owning a high-quality, environmentally friendly home in the city.” Boasting partnerships with Google, NASA, Apple, Lego, and Tesla, Nabr is an example top-down innovation, with global corporations injecting capital into novel approaches for the future of living; funding which has already allowed Nabr to amass $1 trillion in projects under planning.

December also saw an example of bottom-up support for innovation in housing, with the announcement that UK-based start-up HOKO Design had raised $590,000 in a crowdfunding campaign. Founded in 2...

Automated rebar prefabrication startup raises $8 million in Series A funding

2021-07-01T18:38:00-04:00

A New York-based construction robotics startup that makes prefabricated rebar cages for concrete structures has announced that it has secured $8 million in a Series A funding round.

The round was led by Tribeca Venture Partners and featured Blackhorn Ventures, Point72 Ventures, New York State, and Twenty Seven Ventures. This follows a $3 million seed round raised in late 2019.

The company, Toggle, was founded in 2016 by Daniel Blank and Ian Cohen. Toggle automates the rebar assembly process, combining its software with industrial robots and heavy material handling equipment. This allows the company to produce building materials in a safer, more productive, and more precise manner, thus able to deliver them at a lower cost and faster speed.

"At a time when global construction is accelerating at an unprecedented pace, Toggle offers a way to add capacity while saving time and cost on some of the largest types of projects," said Toggle CEO, Daniel Blank. "We are especially grateful f...

Funding flows to construction technology start-ups

2019-07-24T09:36:00-04:00

Funding in US-based construction tech startups totals just $196.5 million across 44 deals halfway through 2019. Still, $192.6 million across 44 deals is still significantly lower than the $1.274 billion raised by US-based construction startups in the first half of 2018.

The bustling world of construction technology start-ups is off to a slow start in 2019, as mid-year funding statistics point to a marked drop in investment for these insurgent companies over 2018's blockbuster year, Crunchbase reports.

Whether or not 2018's record investment, including Katerra's $865 million haul, was a one-time fluke remains to be seen. Either way, that's not stopping funders from supporting companies like Rhumbix, a San Francisco-based field data-capturing platform that helps builders go paperless on the job site, which recently received a $14.3 million in new investment.

Trevor Zimmerman, managing partner at investment firm Blackthorn Ventures, told Crunchbase, “Today, foreman and laborers have supercomputers in the form of smartphones in their pockets,” adding, “That’s enabling companies like Rhumbix to bring efficiency gains to construction that other sectors, like manufacturing, were able to access over a decade ago with desktop computers.”

New York City-base...

San Jose will be home to the largest co-housing building in the world set to feature "vertical neighborhoods"

2019-06-10T16:24:00-04:00

The co-living startup Starcity plans to build an 800-unit, 18-story “dorm for adults” to help affordably house Silicon Valley’s booming workforce. Dishotsky, the co-founder/CEO of the co-housing start-up Starcity, is now working to fill America’s housing-strapped cities with a scaled-up version of his childhood idyll.

Said to be the an 18-story "dorm for adults" the co-living startup Starcity aims to "redefining the meaning of home." The co-founder and CEO Jon Dishotsky is an advocate for co-living due to his upbringing in suburban Palo Alto. If asked about his upbringing, Dishotsky will share the story of growing up in a co-housing compound thanks to his Stanford professor dad who would often host students during the years. With this upbringing Dishotsky believes this model of creating housing developments with this method of co-living will help "fill America's housing-strapped cities with scaled up versions of his childhood idyll."

A rendering of Starcity's proposed co-living complex, slated to be built in downtown San Jose. Image © Starcity

After launching in 2016, Dishotsky and his team have already broke ground on seven developments in Los Angeles and San Francisco. However, Starcity will be the largest. Aiming to attract renters with "Millennial-friendly amenities" individuals who decided to...

New robotically furnished apartments being tested for space efficiency

2018-09-28T19:25:00-04:00

As Americans cram into ever-tighter urban living arrangements, a question has emerged: Isn’t there some better way to furnish a tiny apartment? Yes. The answer, of course, is robots. Inside a model studio apartment at the Eugene, an 844-unit building on Manhattan’s West Side, sits a blocky, Swiss Army-knife-like unit that looks a little like two-sided armoire with lots of compartments. It’s called Ori. Ori runs on a track and can be activated by voice command...

Companies like Ori and Bumblebee Spaces are testing out robotic furniture in major cities where living space is limited. The Ori system, currently testing robotically-furnished apartments in Manhattan, operates through voice command or your smartphone app moving the modular unit along a floor track. Bumblebee Spaces, testing spaces in Seattle and San Francisco, takes interior robotics to the ceiling by moving furniture vertically from the floor to being stored above your head.

Cheezburger founder/CEO joins YCombinator's 'New Cities' project

2016-10-28T13:44:00-04:00

YCombinator, the Silicon Vallley start-up accelerator and investment firm behind Airbnb and Dropbox, announced its entrepreneurial reach into city-building this past summer, with the goal to develop "a city for humans" with reduced housing expenses and a simplified planning code.

Some SV investor-speak aside, YC's so-called "New Cities Project" doesn't sound particularly controversial to anyone who likes cities and wants them to support better lives. But there is a bit of learned defensiveness in YC's blog post announcing the venture: "We’re not interested in building 'crazy libertarian utopias for techies.'"

Now, they might have a bit more explaining to do. Ben Huh—founder and CEO of I Can Has Cheezburger?, the meme-generating website that birthed lolcats—has joined the urban utopian pursuit as an "Explorer", as Huh announced on Medium earlier this week:

For the next 6-months, I am joining YCombinator Research’s New Cities project as an Explorer. My goal? Create an open, repeatable sy...

What's the newest project for Silicon Valley investors? Building cities

2016-06-28T17:39:00-04:00

Y Combinator, the startup accelerator and investment firm that helped produce Airbnb, Dropbox, and Instacart, is embarking on a creation project arguably more ambitious than any company. "We want to build cities," wrote Y Combinator partner Adora Cheung and President Sam Altman...the project aims to develop ways to reduce housing expenses by 90 percent and to develop a city code of laws simple enough to fit on 100 pages of text. Eventually the plan is to actually produce a prototype city.

"We’re not trying to build a utopia for techies," says Cheung, the project’s director and the former CEO of failed housecleaning startup Homejoy. "This is a city for humans."

For more news from Silicon Valley, check out these links:

This "Decade of Perks" is ruining our creativity

2016-01-20T13:10:00-05:00

Give employees all the tools they need to innovate, make space for a little fun, then watch the sparks fly. The truth about creativity, however, is considerably less convenient. Discomfort, and even a degree of hardship, are what drive creativity, not bean bag chairs and ping pong tables. [...] if companies want to nurture creative employees, not only content ones, they must include challenges and even a dash of hardship in their bag of perks.

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Could Google's Sidewalk Labs help alleviate urban city problems?

2015-07-03T12:33:00-04:00

It’s this inevitable dichotomy between data and real life that will likely define [Google's] Sidewalk Labs...There’s a naivety to their worldview that might help to get things done inside a company but could prove a hurdle to progress in the public realm. Yes, the region does need more housing, but the politics of how, where, and when that housing is built are far more nuanced than Google can apparently handle.

The cloud of speculation surrounding Google as of late only grows bigger with the tech giant's recent launch of its independent start-up, Sidewalk Labs. Charging further into Google's real-world endeavors, the "urban innovation company" vies "to improve city life for everyone through the application of technology to solve urban problems" like curbing energy use, creating more affordable housing, cutting pollution, and streamlining transportation. Could Sidewalk Labs potentially ease the growing pains of real-life urban cities, or is Google just spewing more technocratic rhetoric?

Will Zappos turn downtown Las Vegas into the next Silicon Valley?

2014-01-21T13:28:00-05:00

Late in 2011, [Zappos CEO] Hsieh became even more legendary by announcing almost larkishly that he’d be leading a $350 million effort to rejuvenate a blighted stretch of Las Vegas’ downtown […] His plan was to spend much of his own personal fortune to transform this lifeless area about a mile north of the neon blitz of the Strip into an entrepreneurial tech nirvana. [...] Doubters have no place in the ecosystem. Pragmatists stand little chance. A love of hyperbole prevails.

Solving Problems for Real World, Using Design

2013-12-30T13:57:00-05:00

While the projects had wildly different end products, they both had a similar starting point: focusing on how to ease people’s lives. And that is a central lesson at the school, which is pushing students to rethink the boundaries for many industries. At the heart of the school’s courses is developing what David Kelley, one of the school’s founders, calls an empathy muscle.