A construction company in China have a claim to the title of fastest building firm in the world after erecting a 57-storey skyscraper in just 19 days. The building has been named Mini Sky City. Although construction was hindered twice by bursts of bad weather, the time-lapse video of the construction has been shared several million times on various platforms since it was first uploaded to YouTube. Chen Xiangqian, the company’s engineer, has stated that the traditional method of building a skyscraper is a brick by brick, but their method used 2,736 ready-assembled blocks of bricks, which meant it could be completed a lot more quickly. Continue reading →

A brand new competition by renowned house builder Barratt Homes and the Architects Journal (AJ) is giving designers and architects in London and the UK the chance to design the home of the future. They are being invited to create their vision of what a homeowner will want from a property between 2020 and 2025. Designs need to visualise how the properties will look and what features they’ll have in order to appeal to the mass market. Continue reading →

Traditionally, an architect would need to do a range of different sketches and produce professional drawings when designing a property. Electronic design software has changed this a great deal by making it easier for people to produce designs. There are advantages to using CAD (computer aided design) but hand drawn images and physical designs also still have an important part to play. Continue reading →