#architect — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #architect, aggregated by home.social.
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New Book from Glenn Burwell
Somewhat Grumpy Press is proud to announce we’ve signed a publishing agreement with Vancouver writer Glenn Burwell, for his latest crime novel Pacific.
Dieter van der Rohe, an architect who sometimes claims Mies van der Rohe as a relative, is divorced, working at a second rate firm, and found a dead art consultant at his latest site visit. Now someone wants to frame him for murder. On the plus side, his love life is improving — but murdered acquaintances make him a dangerous person to be around.
Burwell, who has written five novels about Vancouver detective Robert Lui, is taking a different perspective in this book. Fans of Robert Lui will appreciate the familiar setting — crime, development, and good meals — and the different approach to the story.
Pacific has been edited by Burwell’s long-time editor DA Brown, and will be published later this year or early next year.
#architect #art #artFiction #books #crimeFiction #fiction #Vancouver #writing -
MMORPG Architect Land of Exiles is headed for a wider PC/mobile launch across in SE Asia
🔗 https://massivelyop.com/2026/08/19/mmorpg-architect-land-of-exiles-is-headed-for-a-wider-pc-mobile-launch-across-in-se-asia
#Architect #LandofExiles #MMORPG -
English language Passive House Designer course in the autumn of 2026. Find details and register now at https://passivehouse.com/en/home/training-courses/ Early bird discount applicable until mid-August! ⌚ #Passivhaus #passivehouse #EnerPHit #lifelonglearning #architect #engineer #HeatingVentilationandCoolingHVAC
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#MissKittyPolitics how to take care of the United States #books and #taxes all at once. Booyah! She's a solution #architect for justice. Otherwise known as #human #rights. 🔦🔦🔦
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PROMPT:
Describe how the tax theft described in the attachment would not have been possible if the United States books... -
"#Synagogues often give those inside them a sense of connection to the heavens, although they do not normally float through the sky. But in #Nabatele, a large, outdoor installation by #artist and #architect #AnnaKamyshan, a #shtetl-style #synagogue appears to hover over #Venice, perched on a massive rock suspended above water.
The work, an official collateral event of the 61st International #Art Exhibition of #LaBiennalediVenezia, will be on view from July 16 to September 16 at Arsenale Nord in the #Castello district of Venice.
It will be presented in collaboration with the #Montreal #Jewish #Museum and curated by #MariaVeits and #YevgeniyFiks.
At once playful, spiritual, and unsettling, Nabatele imagines a Jewish house of worship without ground beneath it."
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Hello! Joining the flock:
#Architect and #VisualArtist based in #Brussels. My work spans mostly between #Belgium and #Romania, with focus towards #collective, #sustainable and #adaptivereuse means into the #builtenvironment.
As a multidisciplinary practice, my soup of interests includes: #architecture #design #architecturaldesign #belgianarchitecture #romanianarchitecture #europeanarchitecture #scenography #drawing #illustration #art #ecology #foss
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Chris Tate’s 'The Bunker' in Piha Wins Design Awards for Its Innovative Response to a Harsh Coastal Environment
📰 Original title: winning Piha bach redefines coastal living
🤖 IA: It's not clickbait ✅
👥 Users: It's not clickbait ✅ -
What Good Architecture Actually Looks Like: ARRCC’s Michele Rhoda on the WAN Awards Jury Room
Judging an architecture award is a strange kind of pressure test. Michele Rhoda, Principal at Cape Town-based studio ARRCC, walked into the WAN Awards jury room primed for the familiar signals—polished renders, confident diagrams, and the grammar of “design excellence.” The deliberations quickly demanded something else entirely. What she observed from inside the jury room wasn’t a parade of aesthetic triumphs. It was something harder to define and far more instructive.
Rhoda’s reflections cut through the usual award-season noise. They arrive at a moment when the architecture and design industry faces real pressure to define what “good” actually means—not in terms of visual impact, but in terms of use, longevity, and responsibility. That question is overdue. And her three principles, drawn directly from the jury deliberations, offer a framework that designers, clients, and critics should pay close attention to.
This article unpacks those principles, names them, and considers what they mean for architectural practice right now.
What Does the WAN Awards Jury Room Actually Reveal About Architecture Today?
Award juries are, in a quiet way, barometers. They reflect what the profession values at a given moment. So when a jury across categories as different as Adaptive Reuse and Future Leisure keeps returning to the same insistence—does this project meaningfully improve the lives of those who will inhabit it?—That’s worth noting.
Rhoda describes the recalibration that happened in the room. The strongest entries weren’t the loudest. They were legible: clear in their logic, disciplined in their restraint, and grounded in an understanding that sustainability is not a mood board of reclaimed timber and local stone. Instead, it’s a long game of use, adaptability, and continued relevance. The jury was, in effect, asking projects to prove their future value—not just their opening-day appeal.
Three principles emerged from those deliberations. Think of them as a jury-derived design framework: Operational Legibility, Disciplined Comfort, and Social Infrastructure Thinking. Each one challenges a comfortable assumption. Together, they amount to a clear argument about what contemporary architectural success should look like.
Principle One: Operational Legibility—Design for Use, Not a Perfect Frame
The first principle addresses a problem that’s easy to name and hard to solve. Too many projects optimize for the moment of documentation—the hero shot, the award submission, the opening-day spread. Rhoda calls this designing for a “picture-perfect frame.” And it’s a trap.
In both Adaptive Reuse and Future Leisure categories, the strongest proposals treated the design brief as provisional. Not because the work was unfinished, but because the world around it isn’t static. These projects did the harder upfront work: researching patterns of use, anticipating multiple user groups, and building in the flexibility to accommodate cultural and operational shifts over time.
The framework Rhoda describes is what we can call Operational Legibility—the degree to which a building’s logic is readable, adaptable, and functional across its full lifespan, not just at the point of completion. A building with high Operational Legibility can absorb change without losing coherence. A building without it is, as Rhoda puts it, already obsolete the moment it opens.
What Adaptive Reuse Gets Right
In the Adaptive Reuse category, Operational Legibility showed up as a discipline. The most successful projects didn’t treat preservation as sentiment. They made deliberate decisions about what to retain and what to remove—decisions grounded in how the building would actually be used, not how it would be perceived.
Rhoda points to ARRCC’s own Wave Villa as an example of this thinking. The restoration of the roof and key structural elements wasn’t treated as an aesthetic trophy. Instead, the design strategy anchored itself in daily life: how the house would breathe, perform, and support routine over time. That distinction matters. Preservation as image-making is decorative. Reuse as a living system is operational. The difference isn’t aesthetic; it’s fundamentally about intent.
Future Leisure and the Longevity Argument
Future Leisure sharpened the same point from another direction. Here, the sustainability argument often lived in the program itself—a clear public benefit beyond theatrical gestures, a building that genuinely belongs to its city rather than performing icon status, and spaces able to evolve past their first wave of novelty.
The projects that stood out could convincingly answer a specific question: how do longevity, delight, and responsibility reinforce each other rather than compete? That’s not a simple question. But the entries that engaged it seriously were the ones the jury kept returning to.
Principle Two: Disciplined Comfort—Minimalism Isn’t an Excuse for Less
Stripped-back architecture can be powerful. But only when restraint is a deliberate spatial strategy—not a budget decision dressed up in aesthetic language. Rhoda names this problem directly, and it’s one the industry rarely discusses openly.
The second principle, Disciplined Comfort, holds that spatial generosity and environmental performance are not optional extras. They’re design drivers. During deliberations, the jury repeatedly returned to human experience as something measurable and uncompromising. Daylight had to function beyond the promise of a render. Ventilation, thermal comfort, and acoustic performance were treated as primary considerations, not afterthoughts.
When Minimalism Becomes Negligence
There’s a version of minimalism that confuses visual austerity with spatial intelligence. It produces interiors that photograph well and inhabit poorly. Rhoda’s framework distinguishes between these clearly. What endures is not the absence of things—it’s disciplined calm: space shaped by material intelligence, proportion, and warmth rather than reduction for its own sake.
This applies across typologies. A contemporary interior—whether in affordable housing or high-end hospitality—must feel genuinely inhabitable. The benchmark isn’t visual restraint. It’s whether a person can spend time in the space comfortably, across seasons, across uses, across years. That’s a harder standard than most award submissions acknowledge.
The jury’s insistence on this point feels like a corrective to a broader trend. Minimalism has become a style. Disciplined Comfort is something more demanding: it requires knowing what has been removed, why it was removed, and what has been put in its place to ensure the space performs as well as it looks.
Principle Three: Social Infrastructure Thinking—Make Community the Brief, Not the By-Product
The third principle is perhaps the most consequential. It asks architects to answer one question clearly and early: who benefits?
Rhoda frames this as Social Infrastructure Thinking—an approach to design in which shared space is treated as deliberate social infrastructure rather than an amenity or a gesture toward inclusion. Buildings driven by spectacle or short-term impact fail when they cannot support real patterns of use over time. What matters is whether a project belongs to its context, strengthening public life and delivering value beyond image or market appeal.
The Design of Encounter
In practice, Social Infrastructure Thinking shapes specific design decisions. Circulation should invite encounter. Thresholds should reduce exclusion. Flexibility must allow use to evolve without the building losing its identity. These aren’t abstract principles—they produce different drawings, different section cuts, and different material choices.
Rhoda points to a project by Neri&Hu as a clear demonstration: restraint paired with clarity can be generous. Long-term public value is achieved through purpose, not through the accumulation of amenities or the performance of cultural significance. That distinction matters enormously in how we evaluate buildings that claim to serve communities.
Modularity and the Risk of Efficiency
One specific risk Rhoda identifies: modularity that optimizes for efficiency at the expense of identity. Repetition for its own sake—however economical—undermines dignity and specificity. Social Infrastructure Thinking demands that modularity support, rather than flatten, the sense of place. A housing block can be modular and still feel particular. The question is whether the designer treated the difference as a problem or as the point.
ARRCC Principal, Michele RhodaThree Frameworks That Should Change How Architecture Is Evaluated
Taken together, Operational Legibility, Disciplined Comfort, and Social Infrastructure Thinking amount to a coherent design evaluation framework—one that moves beyond aesthetic categories and demands functional, ethical, and temporal accountability from built work.
These principles didn’t emerge from a manifesto. They emerged from a jury room: from the friction of comparing real projects across different categories and trying to articulate what the best ones shared. That’s a more reliable source than most theoretical frameworks.
Consider what changes if awards were consistently evaluated against these three criteria. Projects that photograph well but perform poorly would struggle. Projects that demonstrate long-term thinking, genuine spatial generosity, and clear public benefit would rise. The incentive structure for the profession would shift—and that shift would eventually show up in the buildings themselves.
Rhoda’s reflections suggest that this shift is already beginning, at least in the jury room. The question is whether it travels far enough and fast enough to change what gets built.
Why This Matters Now: Architecture Under Pressure
The timing of these observations isn’t incidental. Architecture faces mounting pressure from multiple directions simultaneously. Climate commitments demand genuine sustainability thinking, not greenwashing. Affordability crises demand that social value be designed in from the start. Post-pandemic use patterns have exposed how many buildings were optimized for a specific, now-outdated model of occupation.
In that context, a jury framework that centers on use, comfort, and community isn’t idealistic—it’s practical. Buildings that fail these tests become financial and social liabilities. Buildings that pass them age well, serve multiple generations, and earn their place in the urban fabric.
Rhoda’s three principles give designers a cleaner language for a conversation that the industry has been having imprecisely for years. They’re not prescriptive about style or aesthetic. They’re demanding about intent and performance. That’s exactly the kind of critical framework that architectural practice needs more of right now.
The next time you look at an award shortlist—or commission a building—ask the three questions Rhoda’s jury kept returning to. Does this project design for use, not just appearance? Does it deliver genuine spatial comfort rather than visual restraint? And does it treat community as the brief, not the by-product? The answers will tell you a great deal about whether the work will last.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who is Michele Rhoda, and what is ARRCC?
Michele Rhoda is a Principal at ARRCC, a Cape Town-based architecture and interior design studio known for its work across residential, hospitality, and mixed-use typologies. ARRCC has an established international practice, with projects including Wave Villa cited as an example of their approach to adaptive reuse and long-term design thinking.
What are the WAN Awards?
The WAN Awards (World Architecture News Awards) are an internationally recognized set of architecture and design prizes that assess work across multiple categories, including Adaptive Reuse and Future Leisure. The awards attract entries from studios worldwide and are evaluated by juries that include leading practitioners.
What is Operational Legibility in architecture?
Operational Legibility is a framework introduced in this article to describe the degree to which a building’s design logic is readable, adaptable, and functional across its full lifespan. A building with high Operational Legibility can absorb changes in use and context without losing structural or spatial coherence. It contrasts with designs optimized purely for visual impact at the moment of completion.
How does Disciplined Comfort differ from minimalism?
Disciplined Comfort is a design standard that holds spatial generosity, environmental performance, and genuine inhabitability as non-negotiable. Minimalism, as commonly practiced, can become a style choice that reduces cost or visual complexity without delivering real comfort. Disciplined Comfort demands that restraint serve the occupant—through daylight quality, thermal performance, acoustic comfort, and spatial proportion—rather than serve the photograph.
What is Social Infrastructure Thinking in design?
Social Infrastructure Thinking is an approach to architecture in which shared and public spaces are treated as deliberate social infrastructure rather than amenities or symbolic gestures. It requires that circulation, thresholds, and program flexibility be designed to invite encounter, reduce exclusion, and allow use to evolve over time. The goal is long-term public value rather than short-term impact or market appeal.
What was the key insight from the WAN Awards jury process?
The central insight was that the strongest entries were not defined by a dominant aesthetic but by a shared insistence on originality with consequence. The most compelling projects could demonstrate that their design decisions would produce meaningful improvements in the lives of occupants over time—not just on opening day. Sustainability, in this context, was treated as a test of purpose under pressure rather than a material palette or a checklist.
How should architects apply these principles in practice?
Architects can apply these principles by shifting their primary evaluation criteria from visual impact to temporal performance. Practically, this means researching patterns of use before finalizing a brief, treating environmental comfort as a design driver rather than a post-completion specification, and designing circulation and shared spaces to actively support social encounter. It also means being disciplined about adaptive reuse decisions—retaining what matters, upgrading what fails, and designing the building’s future life as carefully as its present one.
All images © ARRCC. Feel free to browse WE AND THE COLOR’s Architecture section for more.
#architect #architecture #ARRCC #MicheleRhoda -
Claude Is Not Your Architect. Stop Letting It Pretend
https://www.hollandtech.net/claude-is-not-your-architect/
#HackerNews #Claude #Architect #AI #Technology #AI #Ethics #Design #Thinking
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Шесть аудиторий вашей карьеры: пятеро за моим столом
История одного вечера на кухне, в течение которого пятеро карьерно застрявших людей узнали, что они застряли структурно, а не лично.
https://habr.com/ru/articles/1035428/
#карьера #architect #analyst #devops #developer #junior #mddle #senior
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Vibe-coder du lourd avec Kilocode !
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Rain garden to rooftop farm: Inside the Delhi house of man who built AIIMS https://www.allforgardening.com/1737267/rain-garden-to-rooftop-farm-inside-the-delhi-house-of-man-who-built-aiims/ #architect #DelhiArchitecture #EnergyEfficient #garden #gardening #GardeningAustralia #LandscapeArchitect #RainwaterHarvesting #UrbanJungle
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Lola Alvarez Bravo
Untitled (Arches of the Church of Our Lady of the Miraculous Medal), Architect: Felix Candela, Mexico City, Mexico, 1954
#lolaalvarezbravo #architect #photography -
Allison Janney & Andrew Rannells Drama ‘Miss You, Love You’ Heads To Cannes Market
#News #Architect #Cannes #CannesMarket #MissYouLoveYouhttps://deadline.com/2026/04/allison-janney-andrew-rannells-miss-you-love-you-cannes-1236870664/