A portrait of a man in a suit and glasses in front of a lawn and buildings; Dennis Shelden
A Q+A with Dennis Shelden, RPI’s Center for Architecture Science and Ecology new director

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s Center for Architecture Science and Ecology (CASE) has announced that architect and entrepreneur Dennis Shelden will be taking over as its director. The academic-industrial research and teaching alliance, focused on using technology to address concerns of “built ecology,” was founded in 2007, and is located across RPI’s main campus in Troy, New

A black-and-white photo of a woman in a dark suit smiling and holding papers.
Upali Nanda uses neuroscience to understand buildings as living organisms

Doctor Upali Nanda is reimagining the role of the architect. Where design today is often top-down and architects move on to new projects before doors of the project open, Nanda believes the role of architecture is to create living systems that respond to inhabitants’ changing needs, and architects have to stay involved during occupancy to

A shot looking up to Big Ben
How the U.K. forged a path to global BIM standards

During my days as a technology vendor, I chafed at the idea of introducing government standards for technology developed by a polyglot group of stakeholders. Users, software companies, and bureaucrats often sought a “lowest common denominator” between various software, sacrificing innovation and progress for vague notions like “open access.” In the early days of Building Information

New social network wants to change how young AEC professionals connect

As a new generation of freshly minted architects, engineers, and construction professionals enter the field, one company is trying to get ahead of the curve with a social network for people who “shape our cities.” Named Ticco, after the nearly 10,000-year-old Norwegian tree Old Tjikko, the social network is designed for Gen Z and Millennial AEC

Will the new AutoCAD help kill the laptop?

On October 30, Apple CEO Tim Cook took the stage at the Brooklyn Academy of Music to unveil the tech giant’s new and improved iPad Pro tablet. The latest iPad Pro features a complete desktop version of AutoCAD, with pro-users being able to create, edit, and view drawings directly on the mobile device. According to Marcus O’Brien, senior product line manager

WeWork lands in London’s postmodern One Poultry building

Global co-working (and education, and fitness, and budding neighborhood planning) company WeWork first announced that it would be taking over London’s protected Grade II* Number One Poultry building back in November of last year. Now the company has finished its move into James Stirling’s postmodern icon and released photos of the interior conversion. Completed in 1997, five years after Stirling’s death, One Poultry

The Tech+ Workplace conference leads the cutting edge of workplace design

On September 25, The Architect’s Newspaper hosted its inaugural Tech+Workplace conference. Located in New York City’s Urban Tech Hub, the event brought together experts in the fields of office design, space planning, and facilities. Panels were split into three categories: Designing for Wellness, Designing for Performance, and Designing for the Future. Melissa Marsh, Founder and Executive director of PLASTARC and

Office Depot rolls out a new shared workspace

Last week, Office Depot opened its first co-working space, dubbed the Workonomy Hub. The first location of this service is located in the chain’s supply store in Los Gatos, California. The American office supply company owns approximately 1,400 locations servicing just under 30 million customers. According to Propmodo, Office Depot is offering their new co-working

WeWork slated to redesign UBS’s Lincoln Harbor campus

On July 30th, WeWork announced its large-scale renovation of UBS’s Weehawken, New Jersey Lincoln Harbor campus. WeWork’s renovation is largely focused on a 100,000 square-foot common space area. The company’s team of designers and architects relied on qualitative and quantitative data, employee interviews and spatial analytics to create their proposal. Similar to WeWork’s shared office

San Francisco-based Monograph promises architects a seamless project-planning platform

In 2018, San Francisco-based software company Monograph launched its project-planning platform, Dashboard for Architects. The objective of the platform is to shift the myriad planning tools used by architects to a singular and cohesive application. The Dashboard for Architects allows firms to manage their practice and projects in a visually straightforward format, with an emphasis

WeWork is using user data to chart their meteoric expansion

With a quarter million members in 283 buildings across 75 different cities (and another 183 locations in the pipeline), WeWork is on an expansion tear that’s grown to include retail, education, and maybe even full neighborhoods somewhere down the line. With the company’s first ground-up building, Dock 72, nearly complete in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, AN spoke with the designers and researchers who are making

Harvard study suggests open-office layouts hurt communication

Open-plan offices are all the rage. Companies continue to strip away walls, push desks together, and create higher energy environments in the name of fostering face-to-face interaction, but a new article titled “The impact of the ‘open’ workspace on human collaboration” published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences presents findings

Autodesk puts R&D first with its BUILD Space in Boston

Meet the incubators and accelerators producing the new guard of design and architecture start-ups. This is part of a series profiling incubators and accelerators from our April 2018 Technology issue.  Located on the first two floors of a concrete-framed former army base in South Boston, Autodesk’s BUILD Space (BUILD stands for building, innovation, learning, and design), which opened in

Brooklyn’s New Lab goes big with a tech hub for urban entrepreneurs

Meet the incubators and accelerators producing the new guard of design and architecture start-ups. This is part of a series profiling incubators and accelerators from our April 2018 Technology issue.  Located in a former shipbuilding space at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, New Lab is an 84,000-square-foot collaborative tech hub dedicated to entrepreneurs working on scalable technologies and products. New Lab supports companies in nine

For L.A.-based start-ups, a downtown tech incubator offers a boost up

Meet the incubators and accelerators producing the new guard of design and architecture start-ups. This is part of a series profiling incubators and accelerators from our April 2018 Technology issue.  At the Los Angeles Cleantech Incubator (LACI), participating members get a lot of bang for their buck. Originally started in 2011, the outfit moved in 2016 into a 60,000-square-foot