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