Building Materials: The Latest Architecture and News

Framlab, an innovation studio based in Bergen and New York City has created Glasir, a community-based system for urban farming. The proposed modular structure relies on aeroponic growth systems to provide local products.

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Dedicated to love and diversity, the public art installation Heart Squared has just opened to the public. In its 12^th edition, the Times Square Valentine Heart Design Competition curated by Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum had selected the winning proposal of MODU, an architecture and design firm based in Brooklyn, and Eric Forman Studio.

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It is an inevitable truth that the world population is growing exponentially. Higher numbers can only lead to a higher demand for resources, food, and housing. By the year 2100, the 7.6 billion people currently living on earth will reach, according to the UN, a whopping 11.2 billion.

This increase can only mean that the need to accommodate these people will become an urgent priority, innovating and shifting from the household system that is present nowadays. Soon enough this will be a global pressing issue.

Created by Studio Studio Studio, the new interdisciplinary lab founded by Edoardo Tresoldi, Gharfa is a pavilion located in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The experimental installation is part of the temporary creative project Diriyah Oasis, designed and curated by Dubai-based studio Designlab Experience.

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Commissioned by the Nobel Peace Center in Oslo, Norway, and designed by Snøhetta, the installation entitled The Best Weapon, was first unveiled to the public at the United Nations Headquarters’ Plaza in New York City. This urban peace bench aims to honor “the past Nobel Peace Prize laureates and their efforts to bring people together to find effective solutions for peace”.

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As a firm which has already won major awards, worked on culturally significant projects on a large scale, and generally achieved substantial success and recognition in just over 10 years, SO-IL seem to straddle a line between being an “emerging” and an “established” practice. Florian Idenburg and Jing Liu founded SO-IL (Solid Objectives-Idenburg Liu) in 2008 and have since gained a reputation for modern, clean-lined designs, but often with a unique material twist.

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Constructed as part of Agrikultura—a triennial of public artworks and urban interventions in Malmö, Sweden—this installation, described by the designers a "maquette of a monument to the honeybee", is in fact home to an entire colony. It references—by design—the mysterious elements of 'bee orientation': verticality (gravity), geometry (the cell structure of the beehive), and the position of the sun relative to the hive. The project is, on the one hand, "a potential memorial for the bees" while, on the other, "a celebration of the sun on which all life depends."

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