David Lake and Ted Flato of Texas studio Lake Flato Architects have been awarded this year’s AIA Gold Medal for their engagement with “controversial environmental and socio-political issues”.

Lake and Flato won the 2024 American Insitute of Architects (AIA) Gold Medal, which is considered one of the most prestigious to be given to architects.

The two architects, who cofounded their studio, Lake Flato Architects, in San Antonio, Texas in 1984, were cited by the eight-person jury for their ability to make “sustainability exciting in a way few other architects have accomplished”.

“The projects they envision have raised the collective consciousness surrounding our climate crisis while simultaneously captivating a broad audience with buildings that are both beautiful and sustainable,” continued the AIA.

“While Texas, a region grappling with unprecedented growth and climate change, seems an unlikely place for a firm focused on sustainability to thrive, they have nevertheless helped clients see architecture and sustainability as inextricably linked.”

The pair has been at the helm of their studio for the last 40 years, and have expanded, opening up offices in Austin and creating projects internationally, while always focusing on Texas’ built environment.

The jurors cited projects such as a pavilion in Decatur, Texas as examples of the studio’s focus on sustainability.

This pavilion, the first Living Building Challenge-certified project in Texas, was designed for an organisation promoting healthy water systems and included features that mitigated wastewater’s effects on marshland – a method the studio has replicated in projects such as a pavilion at Confluence Park.

Also cited was the studio’s work on a grocery chain operating in Mexico and Texas called H-E-B, for whom Lake Flato created sustainable elements that set “the benchmark for resiliency in a big-box store”.

Restoration has also been high on the studio’s agenda in projects such as the Marine Education Center in Ocean Springs, Mississippi, which was constructed on the site of destruction from Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and was built to withstand further disasters.

“Tireless environmental advocacy”

Lake Flato Architects has also designed many works of residential architecture, such as a recent Corten-steel-clad house in Texas that was designed to “sit lightly on the land”.

Technological innovation also features in their work, and Lake and Flato’s studio has been on the cutting edge of 3D printing in architecture, working with Texas building technology company ICON to create houses with 3D-printed elements in Austin.

According to the AIA, the studio’s approach has led to important ties between conservation and architecture.

“Throughout all of their groundbreaking work, Lake and Flato have ensured their buildings sit lightly on the land and nurture the life that interacts with them,” said AIA.

“Their process, collaborations, and tireless environmental advocacy have directly preserved access to more than 50,000 acres of land in Texas, where less than four per cent of land is publicly available, and conserved 35,000 acres of habitats stretching from West Virginia to Florida’s Everglades.”

Lake Flato has been the recipient of other honours, including the AIA Firm of the Year Award in 2004, as well as hundreds of other awards including COTE’s 15 Top Ten Green Project Awards and the Global Award for Sustainable Architecture in 2014.

The Gold Medal was established in 1907. Last year, the award went to Chicago architect Carol Ross Barney and other recipients include Angela Brooks and Lawrence Scarpa (jointly) as well as British architect Richard Rogers.

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3D printing has brought a lot of changes when it comes to designing products. It has made experimentation with various materials and prototyping these proposed designs easier and more efficient. We’re seeing a lot of concepts get past the initial product rendering stage just by utilizing various 3D printing techniques and tools that are now available and is constantly evolving.

Designer: Nils Sorger

The +/- Brace is one such concept for a pain relieving elbow brace that can be used when doing physical labor or any kind of sports that requires strenuous activity so you can minimize the risk of injury. It’s something that can be created and customized using an app. choosing your size, form, structure, and padding. The final product you created can then be fabricated on your own, ordered through the maker community, or ordered through the creator’s app platform.

The 3D printing and laser cutting machine is called Grasshopper with a custom built script so body measurements inputted can be used to generate the data output. They used various iterations to find the optimal pattern for the brace and ended up with the 4-way stretch softshell fabric which is made up of 49% Polyester, 30% Polyamide, 12% Polyurethane, and 9% Elasthan. This is the best one for breathability and flexibility as well as a comfortable and flexible fit so you can still do all the activities you need to do. For the additive, they also tested several FDM-printed pads and ended up with something that is like foam or gel.

After much prototyping, the +/- Brace ended up with an aesthetic that seems like a combination of a Bluetooth speaker and a honeycomb packaging. It looks pretty flexible and comfortable, which are important characteristics of this kind of product so the user will not really feel like the brace is hindering their movement. All thanks to the improvement and enhancement of the 3D printed fabric-based manufacturing plus open source process, they were able to conceptualize and actually prototype this kind of individualized brace that shouldn’t break the bank.

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London-based pop-up museum The Museum of Architecture has installed a city of gingerbread buildings, bridges and boats by local architecture studios at an exhibit in New York‘s Seaport district.

Called the Gingerbread City, the exhibit showcases a variety of gingerbread housing typologies and infrastructure based on the architecture of five distinct regions, including a desert landscape, an urban floodplain, and an underwater environment.

A handful of New York architecture offices and institutions including Archi-tectonics, Nina Rappaport, Robert A.M. Stern Architects and the New York City Housing Authority baked and created models for the exhibit, which asked participants “to think about how we can design and build water-sensitive cities and protect this vital resource”.

London-based office Madeline Kessler Architecture and Tibbalds Planning and Urban Design created a master plan for the landscape, which included a program for each plot, as well as height restrictions.

Highlights included the Cloudtopida Stadium by MeierPartners, which features a central “stadium” made of a mass of glowing orbs.

Gummy bear guests filter into its doors, while others sit around campfires outside or sledge down small, sugary hills.

“MeierPartners’ prompt is a stadium for sporting events and concerts situated within an urban floodplain,” said the office.

“Embracing the site conditions, the building is formed out of a cloud as a means to embody the water cycle within the realm of architecture.”

After periods of heavy torrential rain, rainbow bridges are formed, creating paths that bring visitors through a misty landscape and into the luminous, expansive stadium.”

Design studio Marvel created a curving bridge for its plot, made of pavers of gingerbread lined with marshmallows.

A marshland made of gummy bears, icing, candy canes and pretzel trees surrounds the bridge, which connects two wetland sites that neighbour the plot.

“Our office has architects and landscape architects,” Marvel associate Sharon Kim told Dezeen. “We wanted something everyone could contribute to, so with the bridge, it has structure, it has landscape. “

“We wanted to make sure everyone felt like we were all equally providing input. Even though it’s gingerbread.”

Of the process, Kim and Marvel associate Ishita Gaur explained they used the studio’s office to bake the gingerbread and construct the model over a period of six evenings.

“Gingerbread is not forgiving,” said Kim of working with the material.

The Gingerbread City was conceptualised by museum founder Melissa Woolford. The museum focuses on creating events for the public to engage with architecture.

Other gingerbread structures include a checkered gingerbread house built in a California modernist style by Kelly Wearstler in 2021.

The Gingerbread City is on view at the South Street Seaport Museum in New York City from 17 Nov to 7 Jan, 2023. See Dezeen Events Guide for an up-to-date list of architecture and design events taking place around the world.

The photography is by Leandro Justen

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During our third demo with headset the nuances of spatial video come to life

In iOS 17.2, Apple enabled Spatial Video recording on iPhone models 15 Pro and Pro Max. These iPhones capture spatial content using the phone’s main and ultrawide cameras simultaneously, and the format utilizes the stereoscopic difference between the two camera positions and focal lengths to render three dimensional video when viewed using the Apple Vision Pro headset. My first Spatial Video demo got me thinking about use cases, and I’ve been recording a range of content to try out. Yesterday I had the opportunity to see my videos come to life on a Vision Pro headset.

Recording Spatial Video on an iPhone requires a bit of imagination—what you see on-screen is the same flat, familiar preview you see in the regular video recording mode. I was curious to experiment with light, reflection, distance from the subject and movement in my recordings and had both correct and incorrect guesses about how they’d feel in the Vision Pro. Here are my initial findings and impressions.

Available light

On a few occasions while recording the iPhone warned “More light recommended”.  I was pleasantly surprised when viewing that content in the headset: the movies still had plenty of depth and the image quality remained crisp and not grainy. One clip, certainly a moment from the future, was from a night drive in an autonomous Waymo on the streets of San Francisco. In another clip there was a strong, focused spotlight on peonies sitting on a table in a dark bar. This contrast made for a nice dramatic moment and even the objects in the shadowy background had depth.

Distance from subject

Keeping the subject between 2 and 8 feet from the camera resulted in plenty of depth between foreground and background. The best scenes had multiple focal points within that 2 to 8 feet range, and gave the most significant and satisfying sense of immersion. A slow walk through Ugo Rondinone’s stained glass clocks at Art Basel Miami last week played back just like my experience in the original visit.

Movement

Movement is where it gets a little more complicated. Knowing the viewer will be static and the content immersive, it’s best to avoid creating too much difference between what the viewer is seeing and what they’re feeling because it can feel disorienting and create nausea. Shots with the camera stationary (such as on a tripod) are ideal, but camera movement is often necessary or desired to make a satisfying story. I found that recording linear and gently curved movements, especially in open spaces, created videos that were easy to view. By contrast, sharp turns in close quarters created more jarring videos. Given that a stationary camera is ideal, we found that optimizing for movement of the subject is even more important for dynamic, engaging experiences. In multiple videos with Rory, our jovial canine mascot, his presence was felt as he ran, played and chomped on his toys.

Sound

The audio captured in my video recordings completed the spatial experience on the Vision Pro, and I had an incredibly accurate sense of where the sounds were coming from. Closer sounds were especially satisfying—Rory’s chomping on a chew toy had ASMR-level satisfaction.

I also had a chance to look at some static images I captured with a DSLR and my iPhone, non-spatial (2D) videos, and panoramas. Similar to my experience at the previous demo I was keen to expand the image viewer as large as possible and placed it on the wall across the room. I immediately noticed how delightfully exacting the color rendering of photos was in Vision Pro compared to the iPhone 15 Pro Max screen—the gentle sunset pinks behind thick rain clouds over a dark ocean looked the same to me as they do on the iPhone’s HDR Retina screen.

Looking at panoramas in immersive view was also a treat, and surprisingly it wasn’t the distant landscape shots that were the most impressive: the panoramas from tighter, closer spaces—like at the Karnak Temple in Luxor, Egypt or JR’s epic collage, The Chronicles of Miami, rendered so perfectly in the headset that they almost felt 3D, despite looking distorted here in their flat view.

Apple has not yet announced a release date for Vision Pro beyond “early next year” and after this third demo of it that timeline feels promising. Every nuance of the experience has tightened and improved with each subsequent demo and we’re eagerly awaiting its release. Simply viewing photos and videos in the headset is already a luxury of focused attention combined with incredible color and resolution quality, and the prospect of creating new content for this new spatial world is intriguing.

Dezeen School Shows: an adaptive reuse project that converts a power station into a community centre is included in Dezeen’s latest school show by students at the University of New South Wales.

Also included is a playful multi-level interior structure that fosters physical and mental wellbeing and a theatre inserted into a disused power plant.

University of New South Wales

Institution: University of New South Wales
School: School of the Built Environment
Courses: Bachelor of Architectural Studies, Master of Architecture and Bachelor of Interior Architecture (Honours)
Tutors: Dr Paul Hogben, Dr Sing D’Arcy, Shaowen Wang, Raffaelle Pernice, John Cabello, Carly Martin, John Gamble, Felipe Miranda, Matthew Bolton, Peter Farman, Philip Thalis, John Gamble, Shaowen Wang, Raffaele Pernice, Eva Lloyd, Bernadette Hardy, Gillian Barlow, Natarsha Tezcan, Iva Durakovic, Lucy Moroney, Melissa Liando and Olivia Green

School statement:

“At UNSW Built Environment, we focus on the challenges of cities at every scale, from industrial-designed products to the architectural design of buildings and landscapes, as well as urban and regional policy and planning.

“We design high-performing built environments that contribute to tackling the climate crisis, while our social-impact design ethos responds to the needs of both the individual, as well as society as a whole.

“Many of our student projects engage with ‘Country’, which associate professor Bernadette Hardy, a traditional owner of dharug and gamilaraay descent, redefines for First Nations people as a profound union of the physical and spiritual, deeply connected to the world’s oldest living culture.

“Country is a living entity spanning land, sky, water, sun, moon, a life-sustaining teacher, which shapes belonging, custodianship and reciprocity.

“Overall, at UNSW Built Environment we seek to develop skilled and enquiring graduates, with a conscience, who can positively engage, adapt and shape our cities for the benefit of all people and life on earth, with the environment firmly in mind.”

RE:MODA by Roy Yue

“This project aims to explore alternatives to fast fashion and overconsumption by questioning how architecture can support a vibrant fashion culture that reinforces local artistic identity, whilst creating public awareness of overconsumption and waste.

“The project proposes a recycling fashion hub that incorporates commercial, cultural and industrial purposes to create a shift from a linear fashion economy to a circular economy that focuses on reuse, repair, repurposing, redesign, recycling and rebranding.”

Student: Roy Yue
Course: Master of Architecture
Tutors: Shaowen Wang and Raffaelle Pernice
Email: xiangyu.yue[at]student.unsw.edu.au

Dhungala by Noah Sunderland

“Dhungala is a community offering concerned with the preservation of indigenous knowledge and cultural repair.

“The site acts as a compass to reorient Bungambawathra (Albury, NSW) to the significant relationships it has with its past and present, both in its immediate surrounds and its periphery.

“A variety of programmes are provided, each offering a unique relationship with the landscape, migration, time and people. The project serves as a means of realising a relational worldview in a quiet architecture, shaped by the country it sits within.”

Student: Noah Sunderland
Course: Bachelor of Architectural Studies
Tutors: John Cabello, Carly Martin and John Gamble
Email: n.sunderland[at]student.unsw.edu.au

Diversifying the Dream by Stephanie Kennedy

“Diversifying the Dream proposes a radical funding and tenure model to increase housing affordability and longevity in North Eveleigh, Sydney.

“By integrating different housing types, the project diversifies the demographic appeal and attitudes to home ownership, with forms, colours and materials that generate an iconic place.

“Drawing inspiration from surrounding typologies, each block has a distinct form and colour scheme, generating a strong sense of place and identity overall and within the precinct.”

Student: Stephanie Kennedy
Course: Master of Architecture
Tutors: Felipe Miranda and Matthew Bolton
Email: s.dodd[at]student.unsw.edu.au

Downwards Into by Jesse Chengyan Xu

“Central to the area’s transformation, the library complex in the Sydney suburb of Rosehill consists of three major elements vertically linked yet able to operate independently from each other.

“Through the facade, the community room opens towards public grounds. The staircase provides a sense of visibility leading up into the library, while the reading area cantilevers address activities around a light rail station.

“The exhibition spaces extrude from the top, leading towards the entry tower, which pinpoints the very centre of the immediate site.”

Student: Jesse Chengyan Xu
Course: Bachelor of Architectural Studies
Tutors: Peter Farman, Philip Thalis and John Gamble
Email: chengyan.xu[at]student.unsw.edu.au

Private Suburb, Public Backyard by Zhirong Leslie Zhu

“Private Suburb, Public Backyard proposes an urban social complex for the wider community to appreciate Sydney Harbour in the privileged suburb of Lavender Bay.

“Nestled in the steep topography, the building cascades along Lavender Bay crescent and stretches out to reach Lavender Bay railway, capturing the landscape and the harbour.

“This project explores the relationship between water and human experience, celebrating the overlap between multiple urban activities to enrich our urban environment.”

Student: Zhirong Leslie Zhu
Course: Master of Architecture
Tutors: Shaowen Wang and Raffaele Pernice
Email: zhirong.zhu[at]student.unsw.edu.au

White Bay Power Station by Samantha Goodsell

“The White Bay Power Station is so large and overwhelming and devoid of its country that it is hard to believe that humans ever inhabited such a place.

“This project embraces human diversity and encourages the idea that variety and difference amongst us is our strength and unlocking and celebrating this is our human potential.

“This is a centre of potential, challenging our past and suggesting change through the celebration of physical and cultural inclusion and neurodiversity.”

Student: Samantha Goodsell
Course: Bachelor of Interior Architecture (Honours)
Tutors: Eva Lloyd, Sing D’Arcy, Bernadette Hardy, Gillian Barlow and Natarsha Tezcan
Email: sam.goodsell01[at]gmail.com

The Creation Station: Inspired by Country. For Creatives. Forever by Brianna Cassisi

“This project proposes a diverse civic and community centre that celebrates the power of its country to ignite and inspire the creative community for future practice.

“The centre goes beyond the sense of sight and delves into a more complex experience of creative stimulation through enriching one’s senses of sound, smell, taste and movement with strategies inspired by and reflecting its country.

“This heightens one’s understanding, knowledge and appreciation for its country and seeks to inspire the unimaginable, to create a community of people who are better connected to their inner creative, community and country.”

Student: Brianna Cassisi
Course: Bachelor of Interior Architecture (Honours)
Tutors: Eva Lloyd, Sing D’Arcy, Bernadette Hardy, Gillian Barlow and Melissa Liando
Email: brianna.cassisi1[at]gmail.com

Confluence by Jessica Leigh-Ryan

“How humans operate within a workplace is highly influenced or controlled by their subconscious reaction to their conscious reality – sound is a big part of this.

“The level and type of frequencies can ignite certain neural pathways, overall impacting productivity and concentration.

“Evidence has shown that white noise is a highly effective sonic source regarding acting as sound barriers and sound sifters: the ‘buzz’ sound falls under this category.

“Bees are the most-renowned living organism for their productivity, work ethic and overall functioning as an ecosystem that without them, our earth wouldn’t survive. The established rules and roles of the bees within each hive allow for certain behaviours to occur.

“This project aims to create a workplace that conceptualises the invisibility and tangibility of that confluence.

“The act of breaking and merging of habitation environments, using living organisms  –bees – as a building block to shape space and inform human behaviour, considering sound/ acoustics to create ultimate opacity and synergy between nature and humanity.”

Student: Jessica Leigh-Ryan
Course: Bachelor of Interior Architecture (Honours)
Tutors: Iva Durakovic and Lucy Moroney
Email: jessicaleigh.ryan[at]student.unsw.edu.au

The Lens: Presented by Phantasmagoria by Jenna Fisher

“Decommissioned in 1983, the desolate Boiler House at White Bay Power Station has undergone an adaptive reuse scheme, allowing The Lens to emerge.

“The project proposes a civic innovation centre, intrinsically underpinned and guided by its country.

“It is a space of varied perception, constant immersion and thought inspired by architecture – a space where storytelling is encouraged, sustainability is embraced and community can flourish.

“The boundless space is guided by its Indigenous history, its industrial past and renewed adaptable future.”

Student: Jenna Fisher
Course: Bachelor of Interior Architecture (Honours)
Tutors: Eva Lloyd, Sing D’Arcy, Bernadette Hardy, Gillian Barlow and Olivia Green
Email: jenna.fisher0208[at]gmail.com

Stimulate Recreate by Eamon White

“This project proposes a transformative, multigenerational playscape guided by a deep connection to the value of its country, fostering playfulness and community engagement that breathes new life into a repurposed space.

“To become ‘stimulated’ and interact through ‘recreation’ comes in various forms.

“Play as power, fantasy, self and progress act as the guide for the overall experience and sense of space.

“Simultaneously, the design encompasses themes of sensory, cognitive, social and neuromuscular forms of play, and how people are immersed in playfulness.

“The project responds to contemporary issues in the creative sector about physical and mental wellbeing.”

Student: Eamon White
Course: Bachelor of Interior Architecture (Honours)
Tutors: Eva Lloyd, Sing D’Arcy, Bernadette Hardy, Gillian Barlow and Melissa Liando
Email: eamonwhite31[at]gmail.com

Partnership content

This school show is a partnership between Dezeen and the University of New South Wales. Find out more about Dezeen partnership content here.

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