architecture

Inside Amazon’s Spheres

Like most adventurous designs the Spheres are divisive: some call them an eyesore or attention-seeking behavior by Amazon, but others will admire the originality and intelligent use of space. Seattle

The canaries in a coal mine

I’ve seen startups come and go over the years and I was particularly interested to see what happened to August Home today. The company originally tapped Yves Behar to make a better smart lock,

It’s just gotten a lot easier to reprint keys from photographs

If you’re in the business of opening locked doors for business or pleasure, it just got a little easier. Using a parametric file for SCAD, you can easily recreate a Kwikset key with a few keystr

Eat the suburbs

The cicadas rev up as the summer sun bakes the carefully tended lawns of suburban Dublin, Ohio. Houses sit exposed like cattle in the heat, the trees too small to offer a shaded window or cool spot on

UpCodes makes researching building regulations less exhausting for architects

For architects, complying with building codes means navigating labyrinthine layers of regulations that vary between municipalities. Sorting through different codes and keeping track of updates is a da

Aurora is a set of connectable, color-changing LED wall panels

Looking for a piece of wall art that doubles as lighting for your home? You’re in luck. Aurora, launched by Canadian smart-lighting startup Nanoleaf, is a set of smart LED panels designed to go

IrisVR raises $8M to bring virtual reality to architecture and design

New York City startup IrisVR is announcing that it has raised $8 million in Series A funding. The company has built virtual reality tools for the architecture and design industries. Iris Prospect allo

DIRTT’s ICEreality puts VR to use for interior, office design

  A manufacturer of custom prefabricated elements to be built into offices and other work spaces, DIRTT Environmental Solutions is the latest corporation to adopt virtual reality for the enterpr

Gilt Groupe Founder Kevin Ryan Unveils His Latest Startup With Kontor, A Houzz For Office Design

Serial entrepreneur Kevin Ryan has founded a number of businesses, including Gilt Groupe, Business Insider, database firm MongoDB, and wedding registry startup Zola. That experience has given him more

Flux Emerges From Google X And Nabs $8M To Help Build Eco-Friendly Buildings

Flux, a platform that lets the building industry design eco-friendly homes by drawing on big data to do a lot of the hard work, is coming out of stealth with $8 million in funding from a pretty stella

Rotating Solar House Generates Five Times The Energy It Consumes

<img src='http://tctechcrunch.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/heliotrope.jpg'> What's cooler than a rotating house? One whose solar panels produce five times the energy the house uses. That's pretty incr

Inverted, ocean-bound "seascrapers": aqua-communes for the future?

<img src="http://www.crunchgear.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/seascraper.jpg" />You guys, I'm freaking out about how cool these things could be. A recent skyscraper concept competition yielded some r

Someone needs to stop playing Shadowrun: New Orleans Arcology Habitat

<img src="http://www.crunchgear.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/noah-01.jpg" alt="noah-01" title="noah-01" />I remember dreaming about living in an arcology while I read William Gibson's <a href="http:

Ultimate staircase features built-in slide

<img src="http://www.crunchgear.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/hosl01-green-house.jpg">Some people are dreamers while others are doers. London architect Alex Michaelis is a doer. He built his dream ho

35-story indoor ski resort planned for Long Island

The official car of Long Island The Great Indoors? Developers out on Long Island, the fashion capital of the world, plan to build a $2 billion resort, whose crown jewel will be a 35-story ski mountain

15 real world Blade Runner buildings

Blade Runner, the just-OK movie we’ve been led to believe is amazing, is set in a terribly oppressive Los Angeles (redundant?), where it’s always raining and it’s always nighttime. T