Joe Addo looks beyond architecture for his native Ghana. Joe Addo Twenty years after leaving his native Ghana to attend the Architectural Association in London and then seek employment abroad, Joe Osae-Addo found himself contemplating a return to his homeland during a visit in 2000. The West African nation had just elected a new president, and Addo sensed a “democratic fervor” that had not existed before. “There was an atmosphere of optimism and euphoria, and I wanted to be part of it,” he says. In Los Angeles he had started a practice in the early 1990s focusing on small civic
One of the limitations of relying on images to explain architecture is that the practice can sometimes encourage viewers to see buildings primarily as objects.
With the official release of GenerativeComponents (GC) as part of Bentley Systems’ MicroStation platform late last year, this parametric design tool could be poised to move beyond its traditional base of users in academia and at technologically advanced design firms.
Now that the New Museum on Manhattan’s Lower East Side is complete, and its structure enclosed, there is little evidence of the system that supports the seven-story building that seems to be made up of nothing heavier than precariously stacked cardboard boxes.
The Fourth Factor: A Historical Perspective on Architecture and Medicine, by John Michael Currie. Washington, D.C.: The American Institute of Architects, 2007, 191 pages, $39.99. The title of this book refers to the words of Hippocrates of Kos, widely regarded as the father of Western medicine. He held that there were “three factors” important to the success of medical care: the disease, the patient, and the physician. But here, author John Michael Currie, AIA, expands this list to acknowledge the role of the built environment in the healing process. Illustrated with historical images that Currie has been collecting for almost
The U.S. Army, in conjunction with private industry, is involved in a multiyear research project that could yield stronger, lighter, and longer-span structures, for both civil and military applications. The research is examining the benefits of adding vanadium to steel. Photos courtesy Simpson Gumpertz & Heger Engineers subjected vanadium-based steel angles (top) and fully assembled trusses (above) to various loads to analyze the components' behavior. Vanadium is an element distributed widely through a variety of minerals. But in the U.S., it is primarily recovered from by-products of chemical and petroleum processing. The addition of a small amount to steel, from
In the not-too-distant future, there could be two U.S. standards for green buildings. The American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE), in conjunction with two other industry organizations, is developing the Standard for the Design of High-Performance Green Buildings Except Low-Rise Residential Buildings. Meanwhile, the three-year-old, nonprofit Green Building Initiative (GBI) is also working toward establishing its Green Globes rating system for commercial buildings as an official standard. Both organizations are following the protocols of the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) and expect to release fully completed and approved documents by the end of 2008. Photo courtesy Green
