block of steel in factory
Swedish company HYBRIT delivers first carbon-free steel to the Volvo Group

For the last few years, the building industry has sought environmentally-friendly alternatives to steel production, estimated to cause 8 percent of all carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions annually. Cross-laminated timber (CLT) and other structural materials have been considered as relatively non-intensive stand-ins for the tried and true medium, leaving nearly a quarter of all steel companies

A screenshot of flight simulator 2020 showing a plane over the mountains of brazil
Flight Simulator 2020 provides a worldwide playset for architects and urbanists

Microsoft’s Flight Simulator 2020 is a technological masterpiece. Reviews are nearly uniformly glowing, adopting tones both confessional (“the most incredible experience I’ve ever had on a computer”) and epochal (a “once-in-a-generation wow moment”). The game’s devotion to realism begins in the mechanical and aesthetic accuracy of the aircraft you pilot but is also extended, in

A church in the fog from the venice shore
As Venice sinks, a research team is trying to digitally preserve its heritage

It should, perhaps, come as no surprise that the “city of canals” is being threatened by rising tides. It has been less than a year since Venice, Italy, experienced its highest level of flooding in half a century years, as two-thirds of the city was swamped in mid-November. Some areas saw as much as six

A top-down view of a white plastic tile with a 3D map of a city.
Boston architects come together to make a 3D-printable map of the city

The Boston Planning & Development Agency (BPDA) has long kept 3D models of its city. However, cobbled together over the years, the files are at times cumbersome and as firms increasingly turn to 3D printing for model making and testing, not so useful. Printers don’t know how to process them or they are not designed

A dark map with green lines over the grid of Manhattan, created by MIT's Senseable City Lab
Can you capture a portrait of a city with a sensor-mounted taxi?

Big data and its purported utility comes with the attendant need to actually collect that data in the first place, meaning an increase of sensing devices being attached to all manner of things. That includes treating many everyday things, from skyscrapers to human beings, as sensors themselves. When it comes to the urban environment, data

A digital model simulated city appears in a screenshot with a toolbar at left
Chicago-based start up wants to make a digital clone of a city

In Jorge Luis Borges’s 1946 one-paragraph short story “On Exactitude in Science,” a fictional 17th-century individual, Suarez Miranda, tells of a time that the “Cartographers Guilds” made a map of their empire so accurately that it matched it entirely, at 1:1 scale, point by point. Of course, this map was utterly useless. This meditation on

A view of different textures on a 3D rendering of a sculpture
A French startup is using drones and AI to save the world’s architectural heritage

Now active in over 30 countries around the world, French startup Iconem is working to preserve global architectural and urban heritage one photograph at a time. Leveraging complex modeling algorithms, drone technology, cloud computing, and, increasingly, artificial intelligence (AI), the firm has documented major sites like Palmyra and Leptis Magna, producing digital versions of at-risk sites at

Microsoft’s Redmond campus opens to the public…in Minecraft

The massive expansion of Microsoft’s Redmond campus—just east of Seattle in Washington—isn’t expected to wrap up until 2022, but curious gamers can get a sneak peek of the renovation four years early. LMN, NBBJ, WRNS Studio, and ZGF Architects were originally tapped to upgrade 72 acres of the existing 500-acre campus and add another 1.8-million-square-feet of occupiable office space, all of which has now been recreated

Switzerland-based Imverse is generating virtual reality software with creative architectural applications

Imverse, a Switzerland-based 3D computer graphics company, is pushing forward with immersive virtual reality experiences with potential architectural applications. Imverse’s Elastic Time, which premiered at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival, is a mixed reality documentary experience that allows the user to see their own body hologram with unlimited freedom of movement. The volumetric 3D environment provides

SITU Research and Amnesty International’s new interactive platform maps atrocities in Myanmar

On Wednesday, SITU Research, an interdisciplinary practice within the Brooklyn-based firm SITU, launched a new collaboration with Amnesty International detailing the systematic destruction of the Rohingya Muslim population and its villages by the Myanmar military. This interactive digital platform weaves together evidence collected from maps, satellite images, testimonies, as well as verified photographs and videos to