DesignIntelligence proves every year that they are the architectural community’s greatest oxymoron with the publication of their highly suspect and highly controversial ranking of accredited undergraduate and graduate architectural programs in the country. If you have had any doubts about the credibility of DesignIntelligence’s yearly ranking of architectural programs, you are really going to love this. I received an email from a friend a couple of days ago regarding the announcement of the new 2009 Design Futures Council Fellows. I did not care at first, because I did not even know what the Design Futures Council was.
August, 2009 Monthly archive
Images of contemporary architecture do not necessarily come to mind when thinking about the architecture of Orlando. While Orlando is not the architectural capital of the United States, there are actually a great number of buildings in the Orlando area that have been designed by architects of varying styles, different eras, and degrees of fame. Although great examples of contemporary architecture do exist in Orlando, I did not think that I would find a high design contemporary structure at the mall, but that is exactly what I found shortly after moving to this city.
Glass block is a great building material; I believe that if Louis Kahn would have had the opportunity he would have made his arches out of glass block and not bricks. Don’t believe me check out his unbuilt design for the Memorial to Six Million Jewish Martyrs. When is the last time that you asked glass block, what do you want? Has anyone ever? Glass block is one of those materials that have only had part of its potential exploited. Before I die, I’ll have to build a glass archway as a tribute to the deceased master architect, but until then let’s look at some glass block details.
It’s not just important to be a talented renderer, developing a great set of resources is essential, and allows you to spend your time on design rather than modeling a lamp. Time spent searching the internet for the perfect sky could be better spent developing a stronger proposal in order to win a new commission or simply meet a deadline. This posting contains many high resolution (3,000 pixels wide) images of skies that are open source and free to use. Over the years I have developed a plethora of graphic resources that I keep in my satchel (LaCie Little Disk 500 GB Portable Hard Drive, designed by Sam Hecht
If you live in the U.S. and have not heard of the company Soprema, don’t worry because you probably are not alone. Soprema is a European based company that was founded in 1908 and they have recently entered the U.S. market. Soprema is responsible for the production and manufacture of many great roofing products which offer great performance benefits available at competitive rates, compared to traditional roofing products used in the U.S. The most innovative product that Soprema has developed is Soprasolar. Soprasolar offers an alternative ‘green’ roofing option for designers and architects seeking to integrate sustainable building strategies into the design of buildings with flat roofs.