What you see in the video above is San Francisco-based Obscura Digital’s six solid weeks of content development, countless hours of production, and invaluable cultural awakening coming to life on the exterior surface of Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque in Abu Dhabi.

This 17-minute long show of architectural projection animations replayed every 30 minutes for 5 days starting on November 29, 2011 to mark the 40th Anniversary of the United Arab Emirates National Day. The experience brought together over 1,000 people from all over the world and from the most modest to the most extravagant backgrounds—a very appropriate tribute to the values that Sheikh Zayed built the Mosque and the UAE on.

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Christopher Janney’s installation in a walkway at Miami Airport.

As Miami prepares to throw a big party for art lovers and design fans to the creative extravaganza that’s Art Basel Miami Beach and DesignMiami, visitors can expect to have memorable aesthetic experiences just by paying close attention to the city’s very public buildings. These projects, as Mies famously advocated, integrate art into architecture.

The show starts at Miami International Airport (known for its top quality art program). Michelle Oka Doner’s amazing terrazzo floor, inlaid with bronze fossil like ocean flora, makes the long walk to ground transportation enticing. The water theme continues at the next terminal, where your eyes dive into “Waterspace” , a photo mural and oversized photos installation by artist Petra Liebl-Osborne that turns the usually sedate airport walls into an under-water world. ” Initiatives like this one are very important and needed - they give people that normally might not venture into a museum or gallery a chance to connect with  art”  says Petra.

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Mayor Bloomberg at the NYC Big Apps 2.0 awards ceremony, photo: Kristin Artz/Office of the Mayor, via the New York Times.

How do you take the enormous amount of critical information gathered every day by city agencies and make it actually useful to citizens? On the City of New York’s DataMine web site, just looking through the list of datasets generated by the Department of Transportation alone is enough to give you a headache. Enter the annual NYC Big Apps competition – a call to software developers who can mine this data and find ingenious ways to put it at the fingertips, or keyboard clicks, of the average New Yorker. This April, winners received a total of $20,000 in cash, the wide exposure their work deserves, investment meetings with BMW, and a chance to talk to Mayor Bloomberg about their ideas.

Here’s a round-up of this year’s Big Apps:

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Beth Terry shared these nurdles and plastic fragments found on Marin, Calif.’s Kehoe Beach in March 2010. Photo: Becca Harsch.

Manuel Maqueda says we’re stuck midway. We understand plastic pollution issues, but we don’t have the solutions. The voice of the Earth is not being heard, Maqueda, co-founder of Plastic Pollution Coalition, says. He was driven to seek plastic pollution justice after a conversation with oceanographer Captain Charles Moore, who is also the founder of the Algita Marine Research Foundation. Moore shared with him what appeared to be a bag of sand which, Maqueda realized, was a bag of minute pieces of plastic. Moore told Maqueda, “that’s the beaches of the future…. It’s the global warming 30 years ago coming to us now.”

Maqueda wanted to take action, to solve environmental issues that were being ignored. After research and collaboration with Google Earth, he gathered a group of individuals with a shared interest and passion for plastic pollution justice to meet at the Google Headquarters. Together they addressed “what this problem is, what the solutions are, and what the solutions are not.” (See the infographic below to see where the problems are.) From this meeting, the Plastic Pollution Coalition emerged. Maqueda and Plastic Pollution Coalition quickly became the voices of the Earth that had been relatively silent in the fight for plastic pollution justice. Read more…

Last month, attendees at the annual Interior Design Educators Council (IDEC) conference, were shown the best films chosen from this year’s Interior Design Education Video Competition. Aiming to change the public perception of the profession, the competition asked students to demonstrate the quality of interior design education and industry standards. This year’s theme:  “How is the public’s health, safety and welfare protection enhanced by the skills of fully prepared health care interior design practitioners.”

The winning video, “Interior Design and Health Care,” was submitted by Louisiana State University students Colette DeJean, Leigh Hardy, Ryan Weilenman, Sarah Tull, and Alyse Lambert, with the guidance of faculty advisor, Danielle Johnson. It builds a strong business case for the process of design and its impact on health care. The description of the seven-stage design process is a logical progression, which would make sense to health care practitioners and administrators, as well as practicing designers. It is an excellent promotion for the value of design, and its impact on the customer, including patients and staff. As I watched the film, I kept wishing that design firms would make similar presentations to their potential clientele across all market segments. As the students have discovered, it’s a great, shorthand tool, to communicate visual messages. Read more…

The US-Mexico border wall, photo courtesy thecurvature.com

Robert Frost’s maxim about good fences and good neighbors probably works very well if you’re a small landowner in rural New England. It gets a little more complicated when applied to international boundaries. But Ronald Rael, assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley, is suggesting that there might be some truth in the idea even for the border between the United States and Mexico – and that design might hold the key.

It is hard to think of a more contentious public building project in than the US-Mexico border wall. Authorized in 2006 by the Secure Fence Act, the barrier – which will eventually cover about 700 miles along the 2,000 mile border – is roiled in immigration laws, human rights concerns, drugs and smuggling, the deaths of illegal immigrants, and even environmental concerns about animals that get caught in the fence while traversing what was once their undivided natural habitat. Read more…

Fantastically futuristic, there’s something eerie about this geodesic sky-dome. Like a 1950s vision of the future coming to life, it’s otherworldly — something out of a science fiction movie. In late 2011, this dome, aptly named The Home for the Future, however, will become a reality.

Providing a year-round microclimate that showcases cooperation between man, technology, and nature, The Home for the Future was designed by Laboratory for Visionary Architecture Asia Pacific (LAVA), with the goal to create a space where technologies are seamlessly integrated to satisfy human needs. Read more…

Last Spring I enrolled in a sustainable construction development class thinking it would be nice to know a thing or two about healthy building material alternatives. Despite the section of my bookcase now dedicated to green manuals and alternative materials catalogs, I have learned an important lesson that most building professionals, concerned with health and sustainability, have learned before me: there is no such thing as “a thing or two.” It’s more like a few thousand things, most of them with crazy scientific names ending with “-ene” or “-ide.” You can spend hours just figuring out what type of paint to invest in (or, should that be wallpaper instead?) to minimize the VOCs used, and that’s even before the dreaded “egg shell white, or linen white?” debate.

Even for design professionals with some experience in building healthy, the challenge can seem like a time consuming labyrinth of dictionary definitions and a frustrating exercise in weighing lesser evils.

For most of us, including those just beginning our professional lives, lessons on sustainability thinking can culminate in a confusing upward climb towards a healthy environment. But, thanks to Perkins + Will’s “Precautionary List”, understanding chemical compositions in the design world has become easier. The list was created by the architecture firm, with the understanding that it is up to every individual to apply the precautionary principle when it comes to the health of humans, other living beings, and the environment. Even if there’s only a chance of a material containing something harmful, why use it? Read more…

Why the funny title?  Well, I went to a conference a few weeks ago in Burlington, Vermont and came away wondering if the Passiv Haus movement is really accessible to the mainstream. The phrase is a play on words from the presentation, “From Bauhaus to Passivhaus”, given by Ken Levenson during the Better Building by Design Conference, hosted by Efficiency Vermont.

A handful of presentations showcased Passivhaus projects and their innovative design process, as well as other super-low energy, net-zero projects. They brought together a variety of professionals and their case studies, working on opposite ends of the spectrum— houses for the wealthy ‘spare no expense group’ and those working with Habitat for Humanity, ‘let’s figure out how to do this for everyone group’.  Somewhere in the middle we will meet. Read more…

This year’s Maison et Objet show in Paris held a pleasant surprise for architecture geeks everwhere. The Spanish ceramics producer Lladró released a new collection of vases, boxes, and mirrors called Metropolis. Not only is that a name I’m partial to, but the collection is inspired by my latest love – urban design.

The young designers working in the newly formed Lladró Atelier wanted to evoke the modern city, its surfaces and forms, but in an abstract way. Read more…