With over 900 discrete openings, Openings Studio was an incredible timesaver for DLR Group as they wrapped up the CDs for Joplin High School in Missouri.

Architecture isn’t all about willful form making. There are also the pesky important details that have to be worked out that eat up a lot of your design time. Take door schedules, for instance. You’d give anything not to have to sift through those endless Excel spreadsheets and just get back to making things, right? Well, try out ASSAABLOY’s Openings Studio™ program, which takes care of the tedious task of door scheduling and lets you focus on design. Continue.

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AA Arena w/GKD Mediamesh Plaza, Miami

A building’s signage can make or break the best architecture. Fortunately, Arquitectonica, the architects behind the American Airlines Arena in Miami, wisely opted for GKD Mediamesh, an easily integrated signage system that turn off and on with all the effort of flipping a light switch. While bold when showing LeBron James showing his stuff or airing Lady Gaga traipsing across the stage clad in cold cuts, the screen can go blank—and transparent—at night.

In the last few years, downtown Miami has come to be affectionately dubbed “Times Square South”, in no small part due to the AA Arena’s energy-efficient digital media façade. The marquee, the largest in the southeast, displays concert and game footage in the plaza, in essence creating a public gathering space. Continue.

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Westside Shopping and Leisure Center; All photos: Architekt Daniel Libeskind AG

Shopping malls have long been dismissed by “serious” architects as beneath their artistic sensibilities. Not Daniel Libeskind, whose design for the Westside Shopping and Leisure Center in Bern-Brünnen, Switzerland is meant to be a “radical” departure from the conventional, hollow big-box scenario that has found widespread application throughout the world. The project, which spans an area of 120,000-square-meters, is among the architect’s largest, with a diverse program that includes space for 55 shops, 10 restaurants, a multiplex, luxury hotel, a wellness center, housing, and a spa and waterpark, not to mention its own traffic and parking systems. At the time of ground breaking in 2008, it was the largest private construction site in Switzerland.

To tackle the immense problem of effectively servicing each of these diverse entities, the Pritzker laureate and his design studio, Architekt Daniel Libeskind AG, employed Vectorworks Architect software in the project’s design and construction stages. Continue.

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Fake wood is endemic to interiors these days, thanks to the prohibitive cost of real wood panels and the big box retailers who sell faux wood particleboard furniture (we’re looking at you, IKEA!). If you want real wood in your home (or in the home of a client), you’re going to endure a slow, expensive, and imperfect manufacturing process.

Enter Shinnoki, a new system represented by the material whizzes at Robin Reigi that lets you choose from 16 shades of real wood veneer that’s easy to finish and spec. Shinnoki combines the warmth of real wood with the quick turnaround and sturdy construction of MDF. In short, it’s the best of both worlds.

Because it’s easy to manufacture Shinnoki panels, you can mix shades and shapes easily and still keep a consistent look. Shinnoki has built an interactive online app that lets you try out their diverse library of shades, from pale Ivory Aspen to chocolaty Nero Lati. Half of the shades are also available as flooring. Even if you’re not in the market, it’s kind of fun to play with, so check it out here.

Robin Reigi, who pride themselves on maintaining a library of forward-thinking design materials, tell us that Shinnoki panels are the product of a sustainable forest management initiatives. Unlike typical melanine (AKA particleboard) panels, Shinnoki is contains no added formaldehyde – they’re actually the first to forgo the toxic add-ins.

You can find  out more about Shinnoki here, or check out their clever introduction below. Then go play with the app!

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It’s been in the seventies in New York this week, which means a few things: outdoor beers, the return of jorts, and the planning of summer outdoor spaces. Whether yours is on a fire escape or an actual plot of ground, gardens and patios are a great source of pride for many of us.

So, as Design Within Reach’s Semiannual Sale reaches its final days (one more week!), we decided to highlight a few great outdoor pieces from the thousands of on-sale items. Click through for firepits, swings, and giant outdoor lamps.

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Sound the alarms! Design Within Reach - that venerable purveyor of accessible Modernism – is putting their Knoll Classics line on sale until March 4. The Knoll Classics line is made up of the most famed pieces of Modern design, from Barcelona loungers to Tulips Chairs, and it’s rarely been offered on sale.

If you’re like us, humming-and-hawing over that Wassily Chair as the seasons wax and wane, consider this a sign. Go check out the full line at 15% off (plus free shipping), and make good on that promise you made to yourself on investing in good design.

In the meantime, here’s a little quiz about Knoll’s most legendary designers. Who was a velocipede enthusiast? Who worked in on the pages of Playboy? Who wrote the best love letters? Find out, below.

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The quest for CES credits may sometimes seem like a never-ending cycle of programming – of which little seems to address broader challenges facing the architects today. Here are a few, just off the top of our heads: Can I use social media to raise money for our project? Should I be concerned about image reproduction and copyright practices in the age of the Internet? Can I really find clients online? How should my office be using social media to promote our work in a meaningful (non-time wasting) way? In short, is the online world really as much as an asset to my business as everyone claims?

The answer to that last one is undoubtedly “yes,” with a caveat: the internet can transform your office’s public profile, when used correctly. That’s why we’re excited to invite you to a day of CES learning that will include a dialogue speaking directly to all these questions, between two architects who have leveraged the internet as a design tool with great success: HWKN principle and Architizer co-founder Marc Kushner and Playlab, Inc. co-founder and +Pool creator, Archie Lee Coates IV. More information after the jump.

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Remember watching a flat screen TV for the first time? Everything – right down to the most banal infomercial – was exciting to watch on that waifish screen, hanging delicately from your parents’ living room wall. We’re guessing Planar Mosaic, a new video wall system that allows you to tile flatscreen LCDs in any configuration imaginable, will have a similarly hypnotizing effect.

Mosaic addresses a common pitfall of current digital screen technology: the seamless integration of a complex piece of electronics with architecture. For example, think back to the last time you were in a gallery using flatscreen displays. Did you notice the clunky power supplies hanging from the back of the screens? Or the awkward off-the-shelf sizing of the screens? Using digital screens to display art was once an imperfect means to an end. Mosaic takes the functionality of the LCD screen and integrates it tidily into the architecture of a space.

It’s flatscreen as building material (think tiles or wallpaper) rather than flatscreen as appliqué. Read on.

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That’s the question we found ourselves asking this week as we checked out Cesana, the Italian manufacturer of luxury shower enclosures. Calling Cesana’s products “shower doors” is something of a misnomer: the 40-year-old company’s products are architecture and hardware at the same time, offering a remarkable alternative to a part of your bathroom you’ve probably never even though about before.

As New Yorkers, we’re used to a shower experience that qualifies as “luxurious” if it includes a shower curtain, water pressure higher than an old garden hose, and a brief respite from the noisy neighbors. But as Cesana’s catalog attests, bathing should be a spatially remarkable experience, one that activates the space in which it takes place. Let’s take a look at a few of the coolest, shall we?

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Viva Day Spa, by Harris Welker Architects.

The cannon of modern architecture relies most heavily on a single visual device: the stripping away of ornament. Blankness, rationality, and austerity in place of serpentine curves, ironwork, and gaudy colors. Bringing us to modernism’s ultimate trope: the white wall. Simple enough, right?

Well, not exactly. As critic and historian Mark Wigley famously argued in White Walls, Designer Dresses, white is anything but the absence of ornament. Even the most rational, austere spaces are embedded with whole library of signs and symbols, all relying on fashion to drive them. In short, evading style perpetuates style.

We wanted to get a read on how today’s architects are dealing with white, so we went straight to the source, asking five young designers how to pick a shade of white. Sherwin Williams has more than 1,500 shades in their color catalogue, but for this post we asked our architect-friends to choose from their palette of whites. Their picks, after the jump.

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