Stories | Assemble Papers

122 Roseneath St: Starting with Community – Part I

122 Roseneath St was completed in 2018 by Fieldwork Architects: the first building developed by Assemble, serving as a testing grounds for the company's ethos and philosophy. Introducing the first of our two-part special on the small footprint project close to our hearts, this week we visit one of the architects on the project, who now lives on this address.

Blueprint City

Lived Solidarity: Housing Co-operatives

Housing co-operatives offer a way to pursue quality of life at an affordable price: even the United Nations considers them a necessary approach to address global housing challenges. But what is a housing co-operative? Manuel Lutz tells us how co-operatives came to exist in the German-speaking Europe, how they operate in contemporary world, and what lessons they can offer us.

Practical Matter

Play Matters: The Style and Substance of the Berlin Spielplatz

Germany has some of the world's most exciting playgrounds, thanks to a combination of social values and wise design regulations. On her sojourn in Berlin, planning lawyer Mitra Anderson-Oliver gets to explore (mit kind!) this essential infrastructure of childhood.

Environment

Expecting the Unexpected

As global warming causes our planet to heat up, weather disasters are becoming increasingly common. Jeff McAllister, a chemical engineer at Arup’s Research, Foresight and Innovation team, investigates how we can use technology to create a built environment capable of responding to outside forces.

Assemblage

Mary Featherston: The Slow Evolution of School

The design of our schools still reflects a belief in a hierarchical society: teachers up the front, students sitting passively. Designer Mary Featherston has been researching and developing learning environments for more than 40 years. She tells AP assistant editor Cat McGauran that young people deserve more from the education system.

Environment

Greening NYC: Piet Oudolf’s New Perennialism

Architect Elliet Spring lived in New York for most of her twenties. On her recent return, she was greeted by a different city: no longer so much a concrete jungle, but a city layered with rich, generous vegetation - from the High Line to The Battery. The turn has been in no small measure the influence of one person, Dutch garden designer Piet Oudolf. Here, Elliet looks at Piet's seasonally sensitive, emotionally rich approach to planting, which has spanned a movement: New Perennialism.

Perspectives

A Bubble to Call Your Own: Home Futures

Every year. IKEA publishes a report on its research into how we live: our homes, after all, are a reflection of our lives. Just as our ideas of home are changing at an unprecedented pace - courtesy of WeLive, build-to-rent and co-living experiments - a lively exhibition at London's Design Museum looks at what the future of home looked like in the past decades. Alexis Kalagas muses on home utopias and dystopias.

Environment

Heirloom Seed Hero

Clive Blazey and his wife Penny were early leaders in protecting heirloom seed varieties from extinction. His story features in The Planthunter: Truth, Beauty, Chaos and Plants by Georgina Reid with photography by Daniel Shipp.

Blueprint City

The Great Disruption: Proptech & ‘Generation Rent’

Move over, Airbnb: here comes 'proptech'. The new generation of apps goes beyond the dubiously-named 'sharing economy' to affect real estate in far more complex ways, from virtual bond deposits to micro-investing. Alexis Kalagas reports from London, where proptech is booming - together with the property market.

Eyes

Real Estate Boom House

Some years during the Spanish real estate boom, which began in the mid-1980s and ended abruptly in 2008, more than 500,000 houses were being constructed annually all over Spain. In the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis, a photography and design project by Lluís Alexandre Casanovas Blanco, architect, curator and scholar at Princeton University, examines what is left.