Archinect - News

Stanley Tigerman Rides Again: Architect's final sketches go on display in Chicago

2019-09-16T20:09:00-04:00

A collection of engrossing sketches created by the late architect Stanley Tigerman are currently on view at Chicago's Volume Gallery. The exhibition, titled Tigerman Rides Again, presents some of the final creative works produced by the iconoclastic architect who passed away in June of 2019.

According to exhibition text, "After a hiatus from his daily drawing practice, Stanley Tigerman picked up his pen and his moleskin notebook in January 2019. He began creating images that harkened back to his early paintings and moved away from the drawings he made to express, explore, and develop ideas on architecture throughout his over five decade-long practice. While he is known for his lively and often colorful collages of buildings and cartoons, these black and white drawings revert to another time. The works produce optical illusions and align with his paintings from the 60’s that reveal influences of his former Yale professor, Josef Albers."

Tigerman Rides Again. Images courtesy of Volum...

KAAN Architecten completes a new base for the Institut des Sciences Moléculaires d’Orsay in France

2018-09-12T15:16:00-04:00

The new Institut des Sciences Moléculaires d’Orsay (ISMO) was recently completed by Dutch firm KAAN Architecten. The institute moved into their new building as part of the Université Paris-Saclay's future campus in Orsay, France.

Institut des Sciences Moléculaires d’Orsay (ISMO) by KAAN Architecten, located in Orsay, FR. © Fernando-Guerra

Located about 12 miles outside of Paris in Plateau de Saclay, the science institute is a grouping of physics laboratories, an educational building, housing, offices, and a reception center for international researchers.

Institut des Sciences Moléculaires d’Orsay (ISMO) by KAAN Architecten, located in Orsay, FR. © Fernando-Guerra

Institut des Sciences Moléculaires d’Orsay (ISMO) by KAAN Architecten, located in Orsay, FR. © Sebastian-van-Damme

The firm's design is centered around an urban-meets-rural idea with a concrete rectangle amidst the for...

New social housing project in Paris features a balcony network design

2018-09-11T15:19:00-04:00

A new social housing project by Hardel Le Bihan Architectes was recently completed this year in Paris near the Clignancourt University campus. The 63 housing unit structure is part of a larger development comprised of two apartment buildings and a university cafeteria.

Croisset Social Housing by Hardel Le Bihan Architectes, located in Paris. © Schnepp Renou

In line with the growing greenbelt, the firm created a large, south-facing open area at the middle of the development and a meadow on the roof of the restaurant.

Croisset Social Housing by Hardel Le Bihan Architectes, located in Paris. © Schnepp Renou

The project aims to give new language to the architecture of social housing. With a compact design, the structure is elongated by a second, lightweight skin highlighting its verticality.

Croisset Social Housing by Hardel Le Bihan Architectes, located in Paris. © Schnepp Renou

The network of balconies orchestrates a facade pattern of single and double heights following the floor plan g...

Perkins Eastman reimagines NYC grid for increased pedestrian and shared space

2018-08-31T13:29:00-04:00

The city grid, which once served to organize the development of private real estate by providing access to land parcels, now has a more pressing role to play in making cities livable. Our reimagining of the grid starts from the premise that how we use public rights of way no longer meets the city’s needs, so we should transform the streets radically, dedicating them to pedestrians.

Jonathan Cohn and Yunyue Chen propose a new pedestrian plan for Manhattan's grid grouping blocks into larger neighborhoods and organizing streets into either thoroughfares or local streets. Cohn leads the transportation and public infrastructure studio of Perkins Eastman, while Chen received the 2017 Perkins Eastman’s Architectural Fellowship for the Public Realm.

Manhattan grid divided into thoroughfare and local streets. Image: Perkins Eastman.

Their plan is a combination of the Dutch shared street idea of woonerf and the Barcelona “superblocks”. Shared, local streets would include continuous, curbless, and textured surfaces with cues that conform drivers to speeds of about 6 miles per hour.

Example of a shared street with less vehicle access and more pedestrian space. Image: Perkins Eastman.

"Superblocks" are limited to local traffic inside and would be sectioned off by thoroughfare streets with local streets in between. Local streets would always be within a 5 minute walk of any...

Photographer documents where human-imposed grid must bend to Earth

2018-01-04T13:28:00-05:00

Photographer Gerco de Ruijter is widely known for his work focusing on grids and other signs of human-imposed geometry on the landscape. His latest work explores instances in the North American landscape where the Jeffersonian road grid is forced to go awry due to the curvature of the Earth. His film Grid Corrections was made digging through Google Earth imagery of the Thomas Jefferson Grid, a grid built of exact square mile increments that must bend every 24 miles.

Photo: still from “Grid Corrections” by Gerco de Ruijter, courtesy of the Ulrich Museum of Art.

Check out a one minute clip of his film documenting these strange instances of T-intersections and zigzagging turns, where the human grid is forced to account for its natural environment. Read more about the project on Geoff Manaugh's BLDGBLOG.

How solar battery storage will affect microgrids and off-grid living

2017-08-14T17:32:00-04:00

In March, Tesla cut the ribbon on this groundbreaking grid-scale battery installation, a key test of the viability of energy storage in making renewable energy a more reliable part of the grid. With 50,000 solar panels and 272 batteries, the combined solar-and-storage plant provides enough energy to power 4,500 homes for four hours. If Tesla can help keep Kauai solar-powered around the clock with its batteries, then it can apply what it has learned elsewhere in the country, and around the world

In her Longreads/Grist piece, author Amelia Urry explains the changing nature of solar power challenges that off-grid dwellers as well as smaller, geographically isolated microgrids face now that battery storage on an industrial scale is becoming more lucrative.

The article tells the story of a young couple struggling to live off the grid on the Hawaiian island of Kauai, when at the same time, the local utility cooperative switches on its brand-new bank of Tesla batteries to store the abundant solar power it generates during daytime but couldn't offer during peak times in the early morning and late evening hours: "It’s not about getting off the grid. It’s about building a better one."

Win the Grids & Guides Visual Thinkers notebook + pencil set!

2016-09-02T17:40:00-04:00

For many architecture and design students, a new school year calls for fresh supplies. But regardless of your student status, a timeless essential for designers is the trusty notebook and sharpened pencils. If you're looking to add to your sketchbook collection, Archinect is giving away the Princeton Architectural Press' latest version of the Grids & Guides Notebook for Visual Thinkers along with the Grids & Guides 12 Pencils set to five of our readers!

Read on for more and how to enter the giveaway.

This sleek hardcover notebook offers 160 pages of varied graphing paper for all your sketching needs. The graph paper is also interspersed with colorfully illustrated infographs and charts, from geometry to the geologic time scale. The lucky Archinectors to win will be one of the first to own the new gray version of the notebook, which won't be on sale until September 20. You can pre-order it here.

In addition to the notebook, we're giving away the Grids & Guides 12 Pencils for Visual Thin...

Beyond the Grid's vision to make a Lower Manhattan neighborhood more resilient

2014-12-18T13:58:00-05:00

While independent communications infrastructure, renewable energy, and resilient heating and power systems may all be major priorities in contemporary urban development, the three aren’t typically incorporated into the same project. Beyond The Grid — an ambitious plan underway in the Two Bridges neighborhood of Lower Manhattan — does just that. And the fact that the proposal has been created in this neighborhood is no accident.

10x10 London auction renders 100 drawn perspectives around The Shard

2014-10-30T18:14:00-04:00

10x10 Drawing the City London is an annual fundraising event established by British architect Tim Makower and organized by charity group Article 25 that gets its name from the 100-square grid that captures one particular area in the city of London.

Each square of the grid is assigned to 100 participants, who are typically some of the U.K.'s most well-known and emerging architects, designers, and artists. Participants will then create and donate an original work of art inspired by the buildings and public spaces within their assigned square. For 2014, The Renzo Piano-designed Shard will be the center of the grid.

This year's set of participants include notable names and 10x10 favorites like Norman Foster, Ivan Harbour, Sheila O'Donnell, C.J. Lim, Piers Gough, Chris Wilkinson, textile designer Celia Birtwell, artists Norman Ackroyd and Roger FitzGerald, and 10x10 founder Tim Makower himself.

Online bidding for the art begins November 4 through November 25, followed by an exclusive evenin...

Tomorrow's cities: Do you want to live in a smart city?

2013-08-19T15:02:00-04:00

How do you fancy living in a city with which you can interact? A city that acts more like a living organism, a city that can respond to your needs. [...] But how do we get to this smarter future. Who will be monitoring and controlling the sensors that will increasingly be on every building, lamp-post and pipe in the city? And is it a future we even want?

Could Electric Cars Threaten the Grid?

2013-08-16T15:20:00-04:00

Plugging in an electric vehicle is, in some cases, the equivalent of adding three houses to the grid. That has utilities in California—where the largest number of electric vehicles are sold—scrambling to upgrade the grid to avoid power outages.

4,114 Stoplights in Los Angeles and the Intricate Network that Keeps Traffic Moving

2012-01-30T20:00:00-05:00

Yu is a soft-spoken engineer with great power: He sets the timing for all of L.A.’s stoplights. His department has to take it all in: bikes, trains, big events and, of course, lots and lots of cars. Los Angeles has one of the nation’s worst reputations for automobile congestion, but that’s a simplistic way of looking at things. Its freeways are still the most congested in the nation, but L.A. has 36 times as many miles of surface streets as it does freeways.