Articles by Collin Abdallah

The contemporary work environment is evolving. This new office building from Cloud Architects captures the essence of this evolution through multiple green terraces, a large atrium, and elegant materiality. The U219 Business Center in Vilnius, Lithuania, provides 15,000 square meters of rentable area into two horizontal volumes. 

The Bank of Canada has recently unveiled a new $10 banknote featuring Viola Desmond, a black Nova-Scotian businesswoman who challenged racial segregation in 1946 by refusing to vacate a “whites-only” area of a theater. To reinforce this pro-human rights message, the reverse side of the bill will feature an image of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, designed by Antoine Predock and completed in 2014.

Perhaps as a form of “abstract urbanism,” artist Benjamin Sack uses pen and paper to build cities and worlds that come to life as he draws. Towers and low-rise buildings merge together to form familiar yet unimaginably intricate cityscapes with complex spatial arrangements, and, in some cases, in human form. This brand of “abstract urbanism” introduces a provocative perspective on urban context and its relation to those who inhabit it.

Perhaps as a form of “abstract urbanism,” artist Benjamin Sack uses pen and paper to build cities and worlds that come to life as he draws. Towers and low-rise buildings merge together to form familiar yet unimaginably intricate cityscapes with complex spatial arrangements, and, in some cases, in human form. This brand of “abstract urbanism” introduces a provocative perspective on urban context and its relation to those who inhabit it.

Bee Breeders has announced the winners of the recent Sydney Affordable Housing Challenge. The international architecture competition asked entrants to address the growing affordable housing crisis in Sydney. The challenge aimed at “garnering global attention to the important issue of housing in Sydney, Australia, where the economy is strong but the residential market is among the least affordable, according to surveys of major metropolitan markets.”

Since the devastating Grenfell Tower fire in June 2017, the people of London have been searching for an answer to the exact cause of the fire that killed 71 people. Now Forensic Architecture—the Goldsmiths, University of London-based research group headed by Eyal Weizman—seeks to aid in the search for answers with their new Grenfell Media Archive. This online crowdsourcing database intended to collect people’s first-person accounts in order to map them onto a 3D model of the tower and analyze exactly what happened to the tower.

Bee Breeders has announced the winners of the recent Sydney Affordable Housing Challenge. The international architecture competition asked entrants to address the growing affordable housing crisis in Sydney. The challenge aimed at “garnering global attention to the important issue of housing in Sydney, Australia, where the economy is strong but the residential market is among the least affordable, according to surveys of major metropolitan markets.”

NP2F, in collaboration with Marion Bernard, Point Supreme and Jacques Lucan, has won the competition for a new institute on Porte d’Aix Plaza in Marseille, France. A combination of research and education at a Mediterranean scale, the Mediterranean Institute of Cities and Territories will link three programmatic volumes: the Atelier Building, the Forum Building and the Experimentation and Research Building. The three forms compound a “progressive system and precise composition” oriented around a Y-shaped courtyard.

The development company Fisher Brothers’ “Beyond the Centerline” competition was launched in October 2017 as an open call to “enliven and activate the medians for a new generation of New Yorkers.” The competition addresses the Park Avenue commercial district, which sits between 46th and 57th Streets.

The role of the architect—and even architecture itself—in society today is changing. A lack of interest in critical social issues from a profession that holds such high responsibility within a community is a problem that should no longer be avoided.