Archinect talks climate emergency activism with built environment groups taking a stand — The first ‘climate emergency’ declaration by a constituency of suburban Melbourne in 2016 was an early signal that public opinion on global heating and biodiversity loss had shifted from a feeling of concern to that of crisis. Architects and built environment professionals around the world have since joined forces with…

A Look at the Rise of Chinese-Built Projects Across the African Continent — A boom in Sino-African trade relations since 2000 has catapulted China from being a relatively small investor in Africa into becoming the continent’s largest economic partner. This shift, in combination with a decreasing profit margin for construction projects in mainland China, has encouraged both Chinese state-owned construction firms (SOC’s) and…

East Africa is currently in the middle of a construction boom which is transforming the region’s built environment. According to Deloitte’s 2018 African Construction Report, the total number of building projects in East Africa rocketed by 96 percent between 2017 and 2018, with a substantial increase of 167 percent in…

Book Review — The past two decades have seen a marked increase in city ranking indexes and urban metrics, yet across the board American cities continue to score poorly — last year no US cities made the top 25 in lifestyle magazine Monocle’s Quality of Life Survey. On the opposite end of the…

Conversations on the Future of Architecture Publishing — The ease of online publishing has influenced a surge in the production of architecture content — more text, images and video are now created and distributed than ever before. In this sink or swim environment of the global ‘mediasphere’, print-based architecture publishers face challenging questions when it comes to their…

I reflect on the architecture publishing industry with critic, writer and curator Ethel Baraona Pohl from dpr-barcelona. — How did you first become interested in architecture publishing? Architecture publishing was a mix between my personal and professional interests. Literature and poetry were, and are, my great passions, even though I studied architecture. There was an organic development from my PHD into research then into publishing—there appeared to be…

How to Design for Disassembly — Architecture firms and their clients are becoming increasingly conscious of the environmental impact of their buildings, from life-cycle performance to the economic and environmental costs of dumping quality used components. According to the CDRA, over 500 million tons of recoverable construction and demolition materials are produced in the US each…

Entertainment Architecture for the Experience Economy — While Las Vegas is as popular as ever, visitors are spending less time on the casino floor. According to a recent report, gambling time now totals 1.9 hours during an entire stay in Vegas, an hour less than in 2015 and over two hours less than twenty years ago. This…

New Capabilities for the Construction Sector, How to Get Started and How to Navigate the Law — According to a 2016 Goldman Sachs report, the largest commercial buyer of Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS’s, more commonly known as drones) in the next five years will be the construction sector, valued at $11.2bn worldwide. What new roles will drones adopt both in the architectural design process and outcomes? If…