As anyone in NYC can attest, new construction in the city has tended toward the unimaginative, with boxy glass and steel condos popping up where elegant, conscious architecture once existed. Danish architect Bjarke Ingels of the eponymous Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) attributes this trend to the lack of consideration of environmental factors and how they can be used to develop a building; depending instead on …
Expanding on their expansive installation visualizing the magnitude of the Netherlands’ 10,000 empty government buildings at the 2010 Venice biennale, Ronald and Erik Reitveld of RAAAF partnered with a multidisciplinary team at the Sandberg Institute to explore the concept of design potential within unused spaces in a new book. “Vacancy Studies: Experiments and Strategic Interventions in Architecture” spans possibility and optimism in the practical and …
Urbanization has gone from global phenomenon to the source of increasingly vital environmental, social, political and economic issues. In Africa, movement to urban centers has skyrocketed in the past decades with central planners unable and sometimes unwilling to plan for the future. Based in the coastal capital of Abidjan in the Ivory Coast, where palm trees and beaches abut a growing West African business center, …
