Transmaterial Next was selected as one of the top ten books on the environment, cities, and landscape for 2017 by The…
Embodied Energy and Design
Making Architecture Between Metrics and Narratives Architecture accounts for one third of global carbon emissions, energy consumption, and waste. And…
Bio2 Design Lab
This study abroad course in Beijing and Tianjin, China, interrogates architecture’s new relationship with nature in two geographic locations and…
Hypernatural Studio
Hypernatural addresses the changing relationship between the designed environment and the natural world—as well as the opportunities that arise from…
Transmaterial Next
Virtually every revolution in architecture has been preceded by a revolution in materials: think iron, glass, steel, concrete, plastics, or…
Activating Architecture
Plagued by fear, anger and a widespread empathy deficit, our cultural and political climate thrives on exploiting, rather than exploring,…
Heavy Air
Today’s rapidly-growing Chinese megacities represent a breathtaking urban future. Skyscrapers, shopping malls, and massive infrastructure projects continue to appear in…
Material Transformations
Throughout history architecture has been shaped by the continual transformation of material technologies and application methods. Its course of development…
Biologically Motivated
Fields from architecture and art to engineering and nano-technology are increasingly looking to biology for inspiration. Strategies such as biomimicry…
Japan: Imagining Totalscape
“Whenever one goes to Japan, one encounters this continuous landscape, which links city to nature and in which the major…
Biologically Motivated Symposium
Biologically Motivated is an interdisciplinary graduate group at the University of Minnesota that emerged from conversations among faculty from the…
4545 Roosevelt
When the owner of a 100,000 SF property in Seattle’s University District approached NBBJ to design a mid-rise office building,…
Hypernatural Exhibition
Despite the ever-growing sophistication of synthetic and digital tools, it’s the natural world that captures the imaginations of today’s vanguard…
China Lab
Today’s rapidly-growing Chinese megacities like Shanghai and Guangzhou present fascinating examples of emerging urbanism suspended between influences of tradition and…
Hypernatural
Despite the ever-growing sophistication of synthetic and digital tools, it’s the natural world that captures the imaginations of today’s vanguard…
Designed for the Future
Biomimicry and biodesign—which involve creating lifelike or living systems, products, and technologies—give me hope about the future. Several architects and…
From Matter to X-Matter
The physical materials and processes used to design and construct the built environment reveal the growing application of information technology…
Shrivel and Shrink
When building 1:1, traditional methods of evaluating scale and size seem to no longer apply. Typical architectural elements of human…