The unofficial theme of geography and mapping firm Esri’s fourth-annual Geodesign Summit might as well have been “the cloud.” Nearly every presenter at the event, held on January 24th and 25th in Redlands, California, referred to the decentralized, virtual network of software and data storage as the key factor in the growing importance of geographic information systems systems (GIS). The summit brought together architects, engineers, geographers, and software programmers for presentations focused on software like Esri’s ubiquitous ArcGIS and for discussions about how such tools will eventually, if not quite yet, underpin landscape, urban, and planning design projects. Image courtesy

In digitally sophisticated Los Angeles, the Southern California Institute of Architecture's new Robot House ups the ante. The architects Peter Testa and Devyn Weiser like to point out that the robots are not people. The robots, in this case, are five white robotic arm Stäubli instruments installed last spring in the new Robot House at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) in Los Angeles. For that matter, the Robot House is not a house, but rather a converted double-height space at the south end of SCI-Arc’s main building. The room has two glass walls and a catwalk overhead, which

Countless buildings were destroyed during the recent floods in northeastern Australia. As the rebuilding gets under way, many are questioning exactly how to move forward. Photo courtesy Australian Institute of Architects Flooding in Brisbane, the state capital. After more than a month of severe flooding, a major recovery effort is under way in the northeastern state of Queensland. There is much to be done. Flooding that began in late December and peaked in mid-January killed at least 22 people, left thousands homeless, destroyed countless buildings, and damaged highways and rail lines. Overall, 70 percent of the state—an area the size

Tony Chenchow and Stephanie Little belong to a crowded field of husband-and-wife architectural practices in Australia.

Interviewed in his Tokyo office, the Japanese structural engineer reflects on the dramatic turn his work has taken since Toyo Ito's Sendai Mediatheque, nearly eight years ago. The seemingly random arrangement of columns at Sendai, as well as the organic inspiration of seaweed transformed digitally into structure, suggests a strong precedent for the so-called “flux structure” that Sasaki designed for Isozaki’s Florence train station. He implemented a new shape-analysis approach, broadly described at the beginning of this article, that he calls Extended Evolutionary Structural Optimization (EESO). This is Sasaki’s own version of ESO (he added “Extended”), which is a relatively