NBWW BLOG…

These knobs and levers employ the formal and material signatures of their creators’ work. By Ali Morris Architects considering product design have long looked to hardware as a starting point. Such was the case for Edwin Heathcote, an architect-turned-critic for The Financial Times and founder, in 2001, of London-based Izé, which partners with design firms to produce knobs, pulls, tabs, and levers. “Architects tend to start from appearance rather than function, whereas product designers tend to work from function back to appearance,” he says. “The architects seem to have more of an idea of what they want to do, and then they try to adapt that into something that will work.” The tactic has proven successful in recent years, adding a new vertical to the market for architectural hardware....

Ethical discourse within architecture is tepid at best. What have architects lost, and what do they still have to gain, in asking the hard questions? By Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson for AIArchitect Last February, The Guardian’s Owen Gibson reported on hundreds of migrant worker deaths in Qatar owing to preparations for the FIFA World Cup 2022. Al Wakrah’s Saoud bin Abdulrahman Stadium in southern Qatar, designed by Zaha Hadid, Hon. FAIA, which had not yet started construction at the time, is among the World Cup’s most prominent projects. When asked at a London event about conditions for construction workers there, The Guardian’s James Riach reported in a follow-up story Hadid’s now-famous reply: “I have nothing to do with the workers. I think that’s an issue the government—if there’s a...

Green building isn’t as difficult as you might think. By Lance Hosey A couple of weeks ago, the Seattle Daily Journal of Commerce published an opinion piece titled, “Why green building has hit the wall, and what to do about it.” The author, long-time green building advocate Jerry Yudelson, laments the relatively low rate of green building certification and asks, “Why hasn’t the current system had more marketplace success?” The answer, he claims, is that the most popular rating system, the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) program, is too complicated and costs too much. He points to his own organization’s competitor system as “simpler, cheaper and more useful.” As I wrote last...

“I cannot, in whole conscience, recommend architecture as a profession for girls. I know some women who have done well at it, but the obstacles are so great that it takes an exceptional girl to make a go of it. If she insisted on becoming an architect, I would try to dissuade her. If then, she was still determined, I would give her my blessing–she could be that exceptional one.” – Pietro Belluschi, FAIA from the 1955 New York Life Insurance Company brochure, “Should You Be an Architect?” With great fanfare, in mid-October 2014 on the opening night of the 6th annual Architecture and Design Film Festival in Manhattan, Festival Director Kyle Bergman announced that the festival’s special focus this year was on women in architecture. “We’ve been wanting to feature women in architecture for...

As one of the first organizations to implement a regular award for young architects, The Architectural Review has had its eye on youth for over a decade and a half. But with awards, exhibitions and media coverage of those conspicuously labeled as “Young Architects” proliferating in the years since, has the concept now been co-opted by those who merely seek to monetize and exploit architecture’s most precarious practitioners? In this polemical article, originally published by The Architectural Review as “The problem with ‘Young Architecture’,” AR Assistant Editor Phineas Harper and Phil Pawlett Jackson unpick how the cult of “Young Architecture” has been absorbed into the profession, with potentially harmful ramifications. Read Full Story HERE >>>>> via Why “Young...

by Mark Mortimer Have you ever had one of those days when you just couldn’t complete another Fourier Transform no matter how many chocolate covered cacao nibs you consumed? You need to perk yourself up, maybe imagine something a little more exotic than a Volkswagen diesel scooting down a gravel road. Well then, pull up a chair and grab a copy of the last Architectural Design issue of 2014 entitled “Space Architecture – The New Frontier for Design Research”. Sure it’s got some pretty involved speculative prose, but the graphics are stupendous and will knock you right back into a can-do mindset. Read the Full Review HERE >>>> via Book Review: Space Architecture.

Thanks to the increasing popularity of massive open online courses — or MOOCs as they’re commonly referred to — learning has never been easier (or more convenient). Sites like Coursera and edX offer free classes online from accredited and well-known universities across the globe, including Harvard, MIT and the University of Hong Kong. While some classes are more structured and include a set lesson plan, homework assignments, quizzes and the option to receive a certificate at the end, others can be set at your own pace and approached more independently. Following our wildly popular article on Four Ways to Learn About Architecture for Free, we’ve compiled a list of upcoming online classes related to architecture, engineering, urbanism and design. So whether you’re looking to embark on a...

Owen Hatherley on the Aylesbury estate, protest and Modernism Opinion: the fight for London’s Aylesbury estate – a negative symbol of the Modernist-inspired drive to standardise housing design – is about saving the ideas not the architecture, explains Owen Hatherley. At the Commonwealth Games last year in Glasgow, a spectacle was promised of the celebratory demolition of the city’s Red Road flats. This would symbolise a ‘new Glasgow’ (one of several there’s been over the last few decades) emerging out of the apparently dogged public perception of the former Second City of the British Empire as a place of gigantic tower blocks and razor gangs. Aside from the fact this stereotype is now so hoary and silly that it can’t be held by anyone outside of a...

Forty Ways to Think About Architecture: Architectural history and theory today edited by Iaian Borden, Murray Fraser, Barbara Penner Paperback, 280 pages What at first glance appears to be a collection of forty essays on architectural history and theory is actually more focused, since the “Forty” in the title also refers to Adrian Forty, Emeritus Professor of the History of Architecture at The Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London (UCL). Called “the UK’s leading academic in the discipline,” I’m ashamed to admit I have not read one of Forty’s books. Of course, this may be excusable given that he’s only written three books since 1986, when Objects of Desire: Design and Society 1750-1980 was released: Words and...

Christopher Hawthorne Los Angeles Times As an architect, what do you give the company that has everything? More to the point, what do you design for the company that is everywhere, that has become digitally ubiquitous? If you’re Thomas Heatherwick and Bjarke Ingels, the rising-star architects tapped to design the new Google headquarters in Mountain View, you begin by covering all of your bases, philosophical, practical and technological. The remarkably ambitious plans that Google released at the end of last week, for a hefty 3.4 million square feet of new office space distributed across four pieces of land between the 101 Freeway and the edge of San Francisco Bay, are communitarian, flexible, robotic and dipped in nostalgia all at the same time. But plenty of architects might...

The proposed “Strawscraper” would create energy from the gyration of thousands of follicles. by John Metcalfe Wind turbines are a fine source of green energy, but some would argue they’re also eyesores. People have tried to lessen their horizon-dominating nature by toying with design. Paris, for instance, will soon be getting one shaped like a tree, and in Stockholm, if visionary architects ever get their way, there could be a vertical wind farm reminiscent of a humongous loofah sponge. Whether or not that’s an improvement over the standard turbine depends on your feelings toward immense bathroom accessories gyrating in the breeze. Sweden’s Belatchew Arkitekter certainly believes in its strange creation, the “Strawscraper,” calling it the...

LAKE MARY, Fla., March 3, 2015 /PRNewswire/ — FARO Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ: FARO), the world’s most trusted source for 3D measurement, imaging, and realization technology, announces the acquisition of kubit GmbH, a global leader in the development of software for surveying and as-built documentation. The acquisition also includes substantially all of the assets of its U.S. distributor kubit USA, Inc. Located in Dresden, Germany, kubit has been developing field-proven software products to enable and simplify the use of real world objects in CAD applications since 1999. Initially launched to link total stations directly to AutoCAD, today kubit is the industry leader in providing tools to integrate 3D laser scan data with CAD environments such as Autodesk Revit and...