Advanced circularity: Transformative thinking toward design conception

Circularity is a concept related to circular economy, as a model of production and consumption of extended life cycles, this involves sharing, leasing, reusing, repairing, refurbishing and recycling existing materials and products implying waste reduction. The circular model uses materials in a cyclical chain of valuing natural resources at all production stages, it aims to … Read more

SOUND ENERGY THEORY

As the world continues to look for alternatives of sources to feed its insatiable appetite for energy while reducing reliance on fossil fuels, a new source may lie in an unexpected place: the Sounds around us. Investigations into Sound Energy have been ongoing for many years, but the use of sound as a Source of … Read more

Heat & Light

particle trace visualization of wind patterns around a building

Wind Effects on Buildings With this blog post we would like to hit on a sample from the multitudes of complex factors affecting the built environment in an urban context. These factors will aid or inhibit a designer’s ability to utilize wind to provide a better internal climate for the users of our buildings. One … Read more

Occupant Behavior Simulation in Building Energy Conservation: Methodological Summary and Workflow Review.

Actually, there is often a significant discrepancy between the designed and the real total energy use in buildings. The reasons of this gap are generally poorly understood and largely have more to do with the role of human behavior than the building design. Human always interact with architecture in their daily life: opening/closing windows, turning … Read more

SCALE MATTER

Structural Materials Is the scale of the projects in the experimentation on computational design fabrication an obstacle or an opportunity?  Since architects started to shed their skin on the conventional way in practice and caught the digital era, the abundance of application of digital design on the realization became joyful for the audience. Mario Carpo … Read more

IS COMPUTATIONAL DESIGN THE RENAISSANCE OF THE STRUCTURAL SYSTEMS ?

The last 10-15 years of development in computers and software have given most engineers and architects the capacity to self-resolve every kind of problem with complex structural forming in a short amount of time.                                                                         This has allowed them to break the calculability paradigm. Where what was not able to be calculated, or even … Read more

Flight SA-3.470

How can we design for a world of increasing uncertainty despite ever growing predictive power? ACT -1 Plane taking off. Pilot: Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking, welcome aboard this Saudi Arabian Airlines flight from Berlin to Jeddah. Currently entering Polish airspace, our route will take us across eastern Europe, where you will … Read more

Who am I? AI?

Is AI reformulating Walter Benjamin’s notion of Aura? In the Expansive Theory course, our group is challenged to create a plot regarding the above question, with ideas and citations from bibliographies given by the faculty. Our plot happens in a metaverse gallery. Act 1 introduces opposite opinions regarding the aura of aesthetics through history. Act … Read more

Guests of Nile

When does the landscape become a machine? Abstract The fictional short narrative that follows develops in a construction site of Nile’s dam. It aims to analyze the relationship between host and guests, in an assumption where the Nile is the changing landscape that welcomes each species. The plot consists of three acts, the first act … Read more

Adaptive Support System: Retraction Control in Arched Vaults

Nader Akoum Architecture 3d Printing Earth

Support & scaffolding during consolidation of clay printing are quintessential to push the boundaries and capabilities of earthen architecture because, with said added support, opportunities for large spans, high arches, aggregated arches, and other structural phenomena arise. The options invented over time are diverse and, regardless of the used material, they can be very insightful … Read more

Benidorm 360

A new ecosystem for a global tourism destination Benidorm, Alicante The city of Benidorm is the most renowned mass tourism destination on the Spanish Mediterranean coast. It has been recently acknowledged as a sustainable urban development to support the mass-tourism industry; however, Benidorm had received strong criticism during many years, mainly because of its striking … Read more

3 CITIES

Cities face complex challenges, amplified by the unparalleled urban growth testing traditional municipal and regional boundaries. Cities have evolved into metropolitan regions, complicating the optimization of city services, e.g. transportation, infrastructure, and public service. The evolution of cities and their urban forms are ever-evolving in a direction that induces higher car dependency and longer commuting … Read more

(is)landicity

Athens, Greece “Archipelago is a group of islands set in a sea that simultaneously divides and unites them” The case of the Aegean Archipelago in Greece, which consists of 1.145 islands and islets, for reasons associated with historical and geographical circumstances, represents the promise of a different urbanism.  Even in the absolute separation of the … Read more