While we wait for the completion of the 1.3 million square foot Transbay Transit Center, in 2017, we have time to think about what this collaboration between Atelier Ten, Pelli Clark Pelli Architects, and Adamson Associates will bring to San Francisco.

To reach the goal of a LEED Gold ranking, Atelier Ten, a consultancy known for engineering sustainable solutions for very high performance buildings, focused on ways to cut energy use and carbon emissions, create a comprehensive waste management system, and incorporate sustainable materials. Their emphasis for this project, however, was water conservation. Read more…

Of all the kind holiday greetings that flooded our inbox this year, this one was the most wonderful by far. In its 64 year-long history, the engineering and design consultancy Arup has been involved in creating some of the most iconic buildings and infrastructure in the world. But it has often had to play second fiddle to attention-seeking starchitects. So the firm decided to send us a little reminder that Norman Foster’s 30 St. Mary Axe building (the Gherkin), Herzog & de Mueron’s Beijing National Stadium (the Bird’s Nest) or even Jørn Utzon’s Sydney Opera House couldn’t have realized their fantastic shapes without a little behind-the-scenes help from Arup.

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Point taken. Arup is remarkable not just for the enormous quantity of game-changing work it produces each year, but also for how it works as a consultancy. The firm is a fully independent entity: no shareholders to pacify, no investors to be beholden to. Instead, it is owned in trust for the benefit of its employees, who each receive a share of the firm’s profit every year. The organization is held together by its commitment to quality – and to design. Arup puts out an annual Design Yearbook — a portfolio of the fantastic projects it has been involved in through the year. Past issues are available for free download, but for a real architectural treat, we suggest you go check out their just-published 2010 yearbook here.

The 2011 TED Prize-winner is the artist who goes by the tag, JR. His enormous photographic installations obscure the facades of buildings, overlay streets, and sometimes collage to cover clusters of buildings in one massive broken image.

While some shy away from calling his work “street art,” I don’t see any shame in this—especially given the clear social justice objectives inherent in the imagery. It presents the faces, literally but never as cliché, of invisible and overlooked peoples. In this way, it is street art in the best sense of the term. You walk into the street and there it is and it has something to tell you. It takes buildings and turns them into indexes of shame, embarrassment, nobility, hope—whatever you might associate with the everyday struggles of the displaced lower-classes. Read more…

Sheep 16850 by drunkenbutterfly

Scott Draves (aka SPOT) produces software art that makes my brain melt. I’m almost positive it’s doing something neurological similar to the pink beam of light fired at Horselover Fat’s brain in Philip K. Dick’s novel, VALIS. These self-generative, evolving, extremely beautiful and complex images are encoded with information words do not adequately capture. Moreover, they warp conventional understandings of computer-generated imagery. Read more…

What would Ferrari be if not eye-catching? The same aesthetic that has people stopping and staring on the street is now doing just that on a grandiose scale with Ferrari World, on Yas Island in Abu Dhabi. The 200,000 square meters of flat roof emerges out of the desert in startling iconographic clarity which can only elicit images of a Ferrari GT and get your blood pumping by the massive use of Ferrari’s trademark red. And if the pronged extraterrestrial roof isn’t enough to make your brain scream “FERRARI!”, Benoy Architects of London have added the world’s largest Ferrari logo, scaled at a little over 213 feet by 159 feet. Beneath the roof, a mosaic vertical structure of red aluminum paneling and Ipasol solar control glass creates a façade which is inclined at 10 degrees towards the interior and allows some of the outside light to penetrate the interior  while protecting the building from overheating. Read more…

Ironically, classrooms often receive the least design attention in institutions of higher education. As Peter Hall pointed out in our June 2010 issue, funds from donors go towards building more glamorous spaces like galleries, high-tech research labs, even libraries. Yet the space where students spend most of their time is the old, regimented, sleep-inducing common classroom.

In working to redesign college classrooms around the country, the furniture manufacturer Steelcase had to first understand that classrooms had to change because students have changed. In the age of the online social network, students are more inclined to collaborative learning. They are taking charge in the classroom, driving the education process through discussion and teamwork, rather than being passive listeners. One of the things holding them back is the outmoded space that encourages outmoded classroom practices.

Steelcase’s experiences at the Stanford d.school take me back to my own design school days, where every semester was a struggle with studio furniture. Read more…

The architecture firm HOK has some experience designing sustainable buildings in problem locations. Their design for the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia is the world’s largest LEED platinum project, and made it to AIA’s list of the top ten green projects of 2010. But this year the firm decided to set itself an even tougher challenge.

In a ten-month long virtual design charette, HOK and the energy and daylighting consultant The Weidt Group set out to prove that it is possible to use currently available technology and build a commercially viable, Net Zero Emissions office building. And they picked a particularly difficult site in midtown St. Louis, Mo. The region has a four-season climate, meaning that the building would have to adapt its energy requirements to ever-changing environmental conditions. St. Louis also generates 81 percent of its electricity from coal. Read more…

How can introducing a design curriculum to a high school, in one of America’s poorest rural counties, create new opportunities? Emily Pilloton, author of Design Revolution: 100 Products that Empower People, published in 2009 by Metropolis Books, shows us, in her TED Talk about her recent project Studio H.

Read more…

In an age when public schools are constantly weighing the importance of subjects and programs against each other, one New York school is getting the ultimate hands-on lesson in sustainability and science. This summer and fall, New York Sun Works constructed a greenhouse atop PS 333, hopefully one of many similar projects. The new greenhouse is a large step from growing seedlings in Dixie Cups on classroom window sills. Read more…

We all know that water is a scarce resource, yet we go about wringing our hands under our faucets and standing under our showers as if the stream is endless. The US Environmental Protection Agency projects a nationwide water shortage in the next 20 years, and the ones guilty of precipitating this scary situation are not just big corporations or heavy industries – our homes use up 66% of the water publicly supplied in the U.S.

The designers at Teague figured that this is because we are blissfully unaware of exactly how much water we use, on a daily basis. In the U.S., water is billed in units of 100 cubic feet (CCF), which translates to increments of 784 gallons. The tiny numbers in CCFs that show up on our water bills actually hide the enormous quantity of water that goes down the drain. So Teague’s interaction designers set up a little experiment.

Read more…