Topic description and stories

Ephemeral exhibit at the London Design Biennale 2023

House of moveable wooden walls promising cheaper, greener alternative to ‘knocking through’, wins award

22 Jun 2023

Cambridge architects have won a public choice award at the London Design Biennale for a prototype home constructed with flexible wooden partition...

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People installing a living roof in 2012

COP must reverse rising pessimism over building sector decarbonisation

17 Nov 2022

Social media engagement with climate policy events is vital to reducing building emissions and ensuring environmental justice, research led by...

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The energy researcher who wants to build better to consume less

15 Sep 2021

Against a global backdrop of rising energy demands and finite resources, Rihab Khalid set out to understand how buildings can become more energy...

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Digital resurrection: bringing one of Italy's most important lost churches back to life

03 Aug 2020

Art historians have created a new app which allows users to roam around one of Florence’s oldest and most important churches, San Pier Maggiore, 240...

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Fixing India’s slum rehabilitation housing

13 Feb 2020

Millions of new houses being built for former slum-dwellers are failing their residents and fuelling unnecessary energy use. New research aims to...

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New book shows how to build a more flood resilient future

04 Feb 2020

We urgently need to adapt our built and natural environment to be more flood resilient in the face of climate change, a new book shows.

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A skyscraper against a blue sky.

Sowing seeds for timber skyscrapers can rewind the carbon footprint of the concrete industry

28 Jun 2019

The Centre for Natural Material Innovation exhibited their proposals for timber skyscrapers at the Royal Society’s Summer Science Exhibition.

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Innovative stadium will be the home of cricket in East Africa

27 Oct 2017

Cambridge architectural engineer is part of the team that has built Rwanda’s first international stadium

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Back to the future of skyscraper design

01 Mar 2017

Answers to the problem of crippling electricity use by skyscrapers and large public buildings could be ‘exhumed’ from ingenious but forgotten...

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Vanishing point

‘Glue’ that makes plant cell walls strong could hold the key to wooden skyscrapers

21 Dec 2016

Molecules 10,000 times narrower than the width of a human hair could hold the key to making possible wooden skyscrapers and more energy-efficient...

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Shrine in Tinghir, southern Morocco

Bringing Berber empires into focus as contributors to Islamic culture

06 Jul 2016

The Almoravid and Almohad empires flourished in the western Mediterranean of the 11th and 12th centuries. Despite controlling vast tracts of land...

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Screenshots from D.W. Griffith’s The Lonely Villa (1909)

Grand designs: the role of the house in American film

27 May 2016

It’s black and white, silent and just short of ten minutes in length. But D.W. Griffith’s 1909 classic The Lonely Villa inspired Dr John David Rhodes...

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