October 05, 2012Metropolis Magazine Announces Annual Next Generation® Design Competition Call for Entries
Winning Design to be Awarded $10,000. Entry Deadline is February 18, 2013
July 25, 2012
Opening Games: Next Generation winner designs for London’s East End
London Mayor’s office has commissioned an urban installation called BLOOM Games, by Bartlett architecture professor and Next Generation winner Alisa Andrasek, for Victoria Park in the East End.
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The Architect's Newspaper
Accordion Architecture
July 01, 2004
A Canadian firm’s material experiments produce flexible living spaces.
By Martin C. Pedersen
Like many innovative ideas, Stephanie Forsythe and Todd MacAllen’s Soft House began with one intention and arrived at another place altogether. While experimenting with crenellated paper—with the idea of creating stereo speakers—the architect-designers stumbled onto a great space-making concept. “Even before we knew for sure what we were doing with it,” Forsythe says, “we were playing around with it as a material—looking at different shapes and things it could make.”
At the same time their firm—Forsythe + MacAllen Design, in Vancouver—was developing a 200-unit housing scheme in Japan. “We were exploring ways to make living space flexible,” Forsythe says, “particularly in how bedrooms could be closed up and literally put away when not in use.”
Thus their free-form material experimentation led to Soft House, an accordion-like structure the designers believe possesses a multitude of functions, including emergency shelter, room divider, and temporary wall. In developing the structures and looking for a material more durable than paper, Forsythe + MacAllen are receiving research assistance from Solutia, a fiber manufacturer, and Freudenberg, a German textile maker. “After working with them,” Forysthe says, “we realized that we could actually engineer our material from the fiber on up.”
Soft House was a semifinalist in Metropolis magazine’s Next Generation® prize and one of five winners of the 2003 First Step competition, sponsored by Common Ground, a New York City organization seeking innovative solutions to homelessness. The designers hope to complete a single-room occupancy prototype for Common Ground using the Soft House concept next year.
January 21, 2009
The Freer Masons
Michael Silver’s new audio software liberates bricklayers from their paper plans.
January 12, 2009
A CASE in Point
2004 Next Generation Runner-up launches an original academic program
June 04, 2008
Growing Full Steam Ahead
November 01, 2007
Shelter from Taliesin to Manila
June 06, 2007
More on Molo
See what’s unfolding for a past runner-up
February 16, 2005
Updates: Forsythe + MacAllen, Lira Luis, Jeanine Centuori
Updates on 2004 Metropolis Next Generation® Design Competition runners-up Forsythe + MacAllen, Lira Luis, and UrbanRock Design/Jeanine Centuori.
December 22, 2004
Seattle Waterfront Plan Dealt Setback
Next Generation Design Competition runner-up Cary Moon and her People’s Waterfront Coalition were dealt a blow this week when Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels announced the city’s plan to replace the Alaska Way Viaduct with a six-lane tunnel.
December 01, 2004
A Place to Dock
Architect Lira Luis’s temporary shelter would give Manila seafarers someplace to come home to.
December 01, 2004
Building Blocks
A young designer finds a way to recycle plastics into reusable building components.
December 01, 2004
Flower Power
Landscape-architecture studio StoSS proposes a plan that uses phytoremediation to make brownfields into public gardens.
December 01, 2004
Reclaiming the River
Pete Seeger and friends promote a permeable swimming structure for the newly cleaned-up Hudson River.
November 22, 2004
A Backup Plan
When his study of leading task chairs revealed that most of them force the sitter into unhealthy postures, industrial designer Jeff Jenkins decided to start with healthy postures and work backward.
November 22, 2004
Improv Theater
Architects often espouse the idea of adaptability, but they rarely give it center stage.
November 10, 2004
Software Aims to Revamp Masonry Practice
Michael Silver, a 2004 Next Generation® Design Prize runner-up, and the International Masonry Institute are developing Automason, a software program that delivers precise instructions to on-site masons.
October 01, 2004
Do the Strand
Seattle activists suggest that the best plan for a troubled waterfront freeway may be to eliminate it.
August 01, 2004
Radiant Living
Emergent turns infrastructure into ornamentation with a concept house based on systems of circulation.
July 01, 2004
Mapping the Competition ‘04
Where did all these ideas for the Metropolis Next Generation Design competition come from?
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