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Architecture and design magazine Volume Zero's UnBox 2017 competition challenged participants worldwide to design public spaces  out of recycled shipping containers. The 2017 edition attracted 323 proposals from 57 countries. The international jury — which comprised of Arjun Malik (Malik Architecture, India), Peter Walker (Cumulus Studio, Australia), Todd Henderson (Cumulus Studio, Australia), Ada Tolla (LOT-EK, USA), and Giuseppe Lignano (LOT-EK, USA) — selected three prize winners and 10 honorable mentions. Check them out below. First Place: The New Eye Participants: Reshma Esther Thomas, Ujjwal Sannala and Sai Sharanya Satoor | Country: India Justine Testado via Archinect - News http://bit.ly/2F3J2Kk

Global higher education analysis firm, Quacquarelli Symonds has released their 2018 rankings of the top universities in the world for the study of architecture and the built environment. Many of the leading names are university mainstays, with MIT topping the list for the fourth year in a row. Of the top 10, three are US-based schools, another three located within the UK, and the rest, scattered across parts of Europe with the exception of the National University of Singapore, which was the only non-Western University to make this top tier. Read on for the top 10 rankings. MIT UCL Delft University of Technology ETH Zürich UC Berkeley Harvard Manchester School of Architecture University of Cambridge Politecnico di Milano National University of Singapore You can check out the full list of 200 by visiting here . Mackenzie Goldberg via Archinect - News http://bit.ly/2F4fr3s

Downtown Boise in Idaho may soon have a new Main Library and civic center, which Safdie Architects and locally based firm CSHQA will be in charge of designing, following the Boise City Council's approval of a 12-week contract earlier this month. Located on Capitol Boulevard, the project is currently expected to cost $60-70 million. Originally built as a hardware warehouse in the 1940s and then converted into a library in 1973, the existing Main Library has been experiencing an increase in attendance and program participation, and will need an upgrade to meet the needs of residents and visitors. The new 150,000 square-foot library will dedicate 110,000 square-feet to library space, approximately 20,000 square-feet for the Department of Art & History's new offices, city archives and programming space, and about 20,000 square-feet for a new flexible 400-seat event space. The project will be funded through financing, public funding, and philanthropy. “The City of Boise has

Find the perfect surface-mounted light fixtures for your next project through Architizer’s new community marketplace for building-products. Click here for more information. It’s free for architects .  Are you a lighting manufacturer looking to connect with architects? Click here . When the sun goes down and spaces calls for artificial light, the single most important element to think about is the light fixture and whether it will site proud of a surface or be hidden away within the wall or ceiling plane. By having a physical object in mind, the idea of the level of illumination and the way light and shadow interact within space go hand in hand. There are countless shapes, sizes and finishes that lighting solutions take. When it comes to surface-mounted light fixtures, the shape and the materials used in their assembly are just as important as their luminous qualities. Surface-mounted lights not only introduce added shape to surface planes, but also work with the push and pull of l

Wendy Thompson Hut, Duffey Lake Rd, British Columbia Frédérique Lafontaine / @shrederique via Cabin Porn http://bit.ly/2F8XsfE

I continue to crush on the fabuolous Parisian apartments the ladies of Desjeux Delaye have designed. I continue to adore the details and the drama and the addition of colour. This dining room (though I'm unsure why it has a sink) is killer! LOVE that shelving! And the mirror! (Previous features here , here and here ) , KiM , via desire to inspire http://bit.ly/2oCBYxy

It may seem counterintuitive, but asymmetry matters in interior design. Image: Denver Image Photography Though trends are an important part of the interior design landscape, nothing can overtake the necessity of understanding the fundamentals of how design works. Which is why, today, we’re going back to basics. We’re about to take a look at why asymmetry is a crucial component of design in our homes. Keep reading to learn more about what exactly asymmetry is, why it matters and how you can pull it off in your own interiors. We’re sure by the time you’ve finished reading, you’ll be ready to make a few adjustments of your own. Asymmetry is a type of balance. Image: Clean Design What is asymmetry? Put simply, asymmetry is a type of balance that’s often used in design. Typically, when people consider balance as a concept, they stick to working with symmetry — or mirror images — in their interiors. While that’s always a viable option, it’s far from the only one to choose from.

The first time seeing Black Flags by William Forsythe, I experienced a sense of wonder and awe that I could not quite explain. It is a familiar feeling, not unlike the times when I saw a brilliant sky, visited a grand cathedral or attended an affecting theatre production. I was intrigued to explore this sensation, hoping to inspire the same in my future artworks. Scholars have described awe to be “a moral, spiritual, and aesthetic emotion” that rests “in the upper reaches of pleasure and on the boundary of fear” (Keltner, D. and Haidt, J., 2003). It is interesting to note the mixture of both positive and negative feelings generated from awe, since I have not previously imagined such duality. In more details, Keltner and Haidt have listed the principal features that elicit awe and the situations in which we encounter it. The two central features are “vastness” and “accommodation”, while most of the experiences are related to religion, politics, nature, and art. The concept of “a

Ethics of the Viscous Body describes the human body as a viscous one – constantly negotiating with its environment as it seeks comfort. Comfort is the state for which the presence of the material environment disappears. It is when our body is uncomfortable that the physical environment is brought from the background to the foreground.   Pose Work for Plinths I 1971 Bruce McLean   Arakawa and Gins designed the Biocleave Hous e as an “inter-active laboratory of everyday life”, where the purpose of the architecture is to keep people on guard, and in a “tentative” relationship with their surroundings. People are made to use their bodies in unexpected ways as they go about their routines with heightened awareness. This state of awareness is when there is an active relationship between body and space. Emotiv, the EEG technology company, claims to be able to measure emotional states from the raw brainwave data gathered from the headset. These states include: engagement, excitement,

After our tutorial last week, we came to an agreement that the projection idea may be hindering other possibilities for the environment that may suit the robot’s aesthetic better. Aims for the week: -Build physical prototypes for the robot’s environment -Learn how to program in p5.js and get twitter input -Complete a basic sentiment analysis code and output sentiment to Arduino Environment For the environment, we were inspired by pop up books and paper sculptures, and we first experimented with recreating a few of the things we liked of what we found. Above photos of prototypes from experimentation Through this experimentation, we decided to create an environment made up of modules that individually represent different emotions that may get triggered. Programming To receive and send data from twitter, we used p5.js, the twitter API, and Twit, which is a twitter API client for Node. So far we have been able to stream tweets with the mention @Hex_yes which is the twitter ha

Boston Dynamics has just released a new video testing their four-legged robot SpotMini , where one helped another by opening a door. This video immediately went viral and received more than 8 million views over the course of two weeks. It also sparked discussion among us in the robotics cluster: one commented on the similarity of its movement to a spider, and most of us felt uneasy watching the video. Many commentators on the internet compared SpotMini to a dog, however, for anyone who has seen a dog in skeleton form , they would have noticed a difference in the back leg structure. For the majority of vertebrate mammals, like cats and dogs, the back legs are often bent forward. All the legs for SpotMini are engineered in such a way that is similar to insects, which might have been more effective for its function, but left me feeling deeply unsettled. I am not sure if it was Boston Dynamics’ intention to recall my cringing memory of reading The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka; if not, p

I decided to recreate Loren Carpenter’s experiment of audience control using coloured cards, enabling an audience to collaboratively play games. In this experiment, Carpenter observed his audience acting as an “amoeba”. I’m interested in the effects of this kind of collaborative thinking and decision making, and the potential to create a feeling of connection in participants, as well as the potential to produce interesting results. In recreating Carpenter’s experiment, I hoped to find some interesting observations which would inspire future work. Set up The auditorium was set up with plywood cards left on seats, and a camera below the screen. Light from a lamp next to the camera is bounced off reflective tape on the cards, into the camera. In Processing, the camera feed is analysed to see how many yellow and red cards are being held up. This information is then used to control various games, also coded in Processing. The audience were not told much information about what would

Last week I set up a simple recreation of Loren Carpenter’s Pong experiment and had some friends test it. I want to do this with larger audiences and have been working on making this happen. Along with a collaborator, Min, we made some play cards cut out of plywood. With 40 of these, I can start to test the patterns of behaviour that emerge in larger groups using this system of control. Setting up the room Last week I had my phone torch light set up to reflect light off the reflective tape and into the camera. I’ve now also tried using a desk lamp. This works better as it isn’t as bright in people’s eyes, and it gives a more dispersed light, which seems to allow for the players to be further away. I taped the paddles to the auditorium steps so that I could test the colours being picked up. Live Test Once this was working pretty well, I recruited some helpers to test the system and play Pong. It was interesting to see straight away how different people react. Some people s

RESEARCH:      GOALS OF THE WEEK  Centralized Vs Distributed Control Program Attiny 2313 in order to reduce cost for individual robots Make light weight structure in relation to support the torque of the vibration motors Test 3 simple behaviours : Light seeking, Line following, Button control for Human interaction Min via Interactive Architecture Lab http://bit.ly/2F8vaC6