Articles by Daniela Porto

The A’ Design Awards – the world’s leading annual international juried design competition – were established to promote and recognize the best design work in all countries and in all creative disciplines. The Award has 100 main categories, including Architecture, Building and Structure Design, Interior Space and Exhibition Design, and Furniture Design, in addition to others related to the world of Lighting, Landscape, Building Materials, and many others. This year’s edition is now open for entries; designers can register their submissions here.

Why this competition? Why Now?

When it comes to the shaping of public spaces, an airport lounge provides glorious scope for the flexing of design muscles. When a space serves a broad spectrum of tastes and types, what guides the aesthetic? When hundreds of people tread its floors daily, what materials will withstand the wear and tear? And what furnishing and effects does the space require in the first place? Are people using it to fuel up on food before a flight, or as a temporary office? Are they making a library of the space or a crêche; are they catching 40 winks or drinking towards an airborne stupor?

Real-time visualization is used to generate renderings with excellent visual quality from a BIM or CAD model. When integrated into your design workflow, it can also facilitate collaboration and allows all parties within an architectural project to engage throughout the design process.

Offsite construction is a fast-growing sector within the global building construction industry. With that growth, many challenges lie ahead for all parties involved, especially architects, who have traditionally remained at arm’s length to the means and methods of construction. Cost challenges have led many firms to want to learn more about optimizing for offsite delivery methods. To help speed up industry transformation, a cooperative and open-source initiative led by the Quebec Wood Export Bureau has been developing a suite of nonprofit and collaborative tools for architects. At www.offsitewood.org, they offer a free Revit plugin, detailed content packs, and a BIM-integrated early-phase embodied carbon estimator called Carbon Fixers.

Affordable housing has become an increasingly dire global issue. Be it rent or homeownership, the unaffordability of homes has been on the rise. A look at U.S. Census data illustrates a sharp decline in homeownership in recent decades. Although Millennials were the most populous generation by 2019, they only contributed to homeownership at a rate of 47.9%. Contrastingly, Gen-X’s homeownership rate stood at 69%, following the silent generation at 77.8%. Trends of generational decline in homeownership are mirrored in other parts of the world, such as in the U.K. where rates have steadily dropped from 71% in 2003 to 64% by 2018. Many experts point to affordability as a large reason for this decline.

Daylight and Architecture, a global knowledge-sharing initiative focusing on exploring the limitless potential of daylight in architecture, has announced the new series of ‘Daylight Talks’.

It has been said that we are living through a trans-apocalyptic era. Not pre-or post-apocalyptic, but something in between: a series of interconnected crises that demand action, at a time when it’s too late to prevent the world from changing, but not late enough that all hope has been lost for a (changed, yet positive) world. Architecture is deeply involved in this process, as the transformation of the built environment and the construction industry are key to the way we live.

The next “Beyond Scale” lecture at IE School of Architecture and Design is coming soon!

With the increase of extreme weather events due to climate change, sustainable architecture is only becoming more important. After all, to mitigate the impact of climate change, the International Energy Agency has recommended that industries aim for a net-zero energy system. For the construction sector, that means working to mitigate 11.4 Gt of CO2 emissions.