M News

Regeneration of former industrial areas within the urban borders has represented for years a great challenge and unmissable opportunity for profound transformations allowing not only to reconnect different portions of the city, but also to restore neighborhoods livability.

Construction being one of the most polluting industries, in recent years architects have increased their efforts towards eco-efficient design and multiplied creative solutions for the built environment. Sustainability in buildings is now accomplished through multiple approaches, which define the end result of architects’ practice at progressively earlier stages. When resource efficiency is set as a primary design goal, buildings uncontroversially show it, no matter if this is achieved through integration of energy saving solutions, choice of materials, layout and construction solutions or the many more tools that traditional know-how as well as state of the art technology offer to the designer.

"A good part of the architecture and design of modernity is based on almost invisible inventions, on joints, hooks, mechanisms that have had the power to make the overall structure flexible and capable of accepting challenges and conditions unimaginable at the time of their conception. The challenge is in the detail ".

Drawing on the Salins du Midi, a historic salt extraction plant obtained from underground springs, Henna Burney and Kalijn Sibbel, material designers at Atelier Luma, developed the "Wall of Salt" project, consisting of over 4,000 square Camargue salt-based panels, which cover the walls of the elevator lobbies of nine of the twelve floors of the LUMA Arles Tower campus designed by Frank Gehry.

ecoLogicStudio, the London-based architecture studio led by Claudia Pasquero and Marco Poletto, has designed AirBubble air-purifying eco-machine, a futuristic transparent pavilion defined a bio-digital project whose intent is demonstrating how the advanced integration of biotechnology in the built environment can lead to a new generation of living architectures.

On October 21, Summit One Vanderbilt opened in Manhattan, the new, superscenographic observatory developed on four different floors and including transparent skyboxes, which transform the panoramic view of New York City into a highly immersive experience.