Newswise — Looking to build with an environmentally smart and friendly approach? A University of Oregon professor has pooled virtually all available resources, including color images and diagrams, to help a designer pursue both passive and energy-efficient strategies.
The book – The Green Studio Handbook: Environmental Strategies for Schematic Design (Architectural Press) – is not intended to serve as a green building checklist nor as a textbook for environmental technology, says Alison G. Kwok, a UO professor of architecture. “Instead it provides the necessary information to make judgments about the appropriate use of green strategies and to validate design decisions regarding these strategies,” wrote Kwok and co-author Walter T. Grondzik of Florida A&M University, a former visiting professor at the UO, in the preface. (more…)
Enhanced Applications and New Functionality Redefine Traditional Design Process
At its World Press Day event today, Autodesk, Inc. (Nasdaq: ADSK – News) announced comprehensive updates to its Revit platform for building information modeling (BIM) software applications, and an expanded portfolio of solutions that address the building industry’s evolving requirements for productivity and efficiency. The latest updates to the Revit platform help provide immediate competitive advantage, better coordination and quality, and increased support for sustainable design, all of which can lead to better performing buildings and higher profitability for architects, engineers and the extended building team. (more…)
At a recent gathering of CIOs, I was introduced, not as an information architect, interaction designer, or librarian, but as a futurist. I figure this affords me the latitude to make a prediction.
Next year, after the bubble bursts, we will enter the era of Information Architecture 3.0. This won’t surprise Tim O’Reilly who slyly positioned the “Polar Bear” atop the #1 Google hit for Web 2.0 and commissioned the third edition just in time to clean up the mess.
In fact, this future is self-evident in the undisciplined, unbalanced quest for sexy Ajaxian interaction at the expense of usability, findability, accessibility, and other qualities of the user experience. (more…)
A team of faculty members in the School of Architecture and Planning have been awarded a $553,045 research grant from the U.S. Department of Education Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE) to develop educational materials that use advanced media to teach important building principles to architecture students.
The funded project, “Building Literacy: The Integration of Building Technology and Design in Architectural Education,” will focus in particular on the development of a new interactive, multidimensional software program to help students develop a better understanding of building systems integration. (more…)
The floor of the main space is a field of undulating white dunes. It has been almost a decade since Toyo Ito began to publicly express concern about his influence on the younger generation of Japanese architects. Ito is deservedly celebrated for his embrace of the effects of electronic and information technology on the contemporary city, his theorization of the concomitant effects on human life as a ‘virtual body,’ and of course his poetic built expressions of transparency and weightlessness. Yet in 1998, he published an essay critical of the anemic minimalism of new Japanese architecture that included this admission:
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