Building and Construction

An international design competition has been won by architectural firm Henning Larson in collaboration with the Van den Berg Groep to create a unique entrance building at Emmen Zoo in the Netherlands. The theater and zoo entrance incorporates a number of innovative features within its passive solar design including floating walls that allow the spaces within it to be reconfigured according to their required use.  Read More

Nature (and its preservation) evidently played a major role in the unusual design of the Friend House, an innovative ecohotel situated on the banks of the Ukraine's Orel River, a tributary of the Dnieper. Actually in development for a number of years, the single story structure sits on 7.4 acres (3 hectares) of forested land about 19 miles (30 km) from the large city of Dnipropetrovs'k. Constructed exclusively of what its designers call "ecologically harmless" materials - clay, reed, wood and stone - this eye-catching edifice is also a contender for the World Architecture News (WAN) Awards 2012 Hotel of the Year.  Read More

Ideabox, an architectural firm from Portland, Oregon, has launched its "Aktiv" line of prefabricated homes which will be equipped with IKEA furnishings and appliances. The one-bedroom modular homes are claimed to be eco-friendly, and are designed with no wasted space.  Read More

Italian sculptor Arnaldo Pomodoro, who created the famous "Sphere Within Sphere" located at the Vatican, has constructed his first-ever architectural sculpture. Titled “The Carapace,” the structure reflects its name by taking on the shape of a tortoise shell. The building, which will be inaugurated this June, is located on the Castelbuono Estate in Umbria, Italy. It marks the first time that the Italian master has created a work on such a grand scale.  Read More

If you ever had more than one type of toy for building things as a child (LEGO, Tinkertoys, Duplo, etc.), odds are you tried to mix the sets together at some point with creative, though disastrous, results. Apparently the folks at F.A.T. Lab and Sy-Lab had the same experience and have created the Free Universal Construction Kit to solve this childhood dilemma. By downloading free designs and using a 3D printer, you could have your very own pieces to connect ten different brands of building toys to each other and construct even more elaborate contraptions and structures.  Read More

Germany’s IBA stands for “Internationale Bauausstellung,” which translates as international building exhibition. But the IBA_Hamburg site located on the Elbe islands of Hamburg isn’t just a place to showcase buildings, it also serves as a seven-year real-time research and development project aimed at delivering CO2-neutral city development. Central to the site is the IBA information center, known as the IBA_Dock, which is constructed upon a floating pontoon and integrates numerous renewable energy technologies.  Read More

What do you do when you want to build a worry-free home on land that also happens to be a 100-year flood plain? If you're smart, you'll do what the owner of Delta Shelter did and have Olson Kundig Architects build you a metal fortress to withstand the elements in style. The compact 1,000 sq ft (93 sq m) steel-walled hideaway with a footprint of only 200 sq ft (18.6 sq m) looks ready to handle whatever the Washington wilderness can throw at it - even, perhaps, a 1,000-year flood.  Read More

While we love the dangling treetop retreats located at Sweden's Treehotel, and the House Arc had us yearning for a private backyard hideaway, the eco-PERCH has to be the Rolls Royce of modern modular tree-houses. This eco-lodge concept was created by the UK architectural firm Blue Forest, which has a background in the design and construction of luxury treehouses and lodges.  Read More

The growing popularity of 3D printers, such as the Printbot or MakerBot's Thing-o-Matic, testify to the fact that additive manufacturing is slowly entering the mainstream. The devices are now small enough to fit on a desk and they can make all sorts of stuff, such as toys, chess figures, or spare door knobs. But what if you want to make something slightly bigger - say, a house? Then you need to turn to Enrico Dini, the founder of Monolite UK and the inventor of the D-Shape "robotic building system."  Read More