The government has scrapped stamp duty on house purchases of up to £500,000 until 31 March 2021, potentially saving homebuyers thousands of pounds in tax.
The move, which was announced by Chancellor Rishi Sunak, is designed to reignite the property market after the COVID-19 outbreak.
With immediate effect, buyers in the UK are exempt from paying stamp duty on properties worth £500,000 or less. The change will affect around 90% of buyers, and will save each one an average £4,500, said Sunak.
Industry bodies have been calling for a stamp duty shakeup for some time to encourage people to buy. The Royal Institute for Chartered Surveyors and the National Federation for Builders were the biggest proponents for a cut.
Property professionals have welcomed the news on raising the threshold, which stands to benefit homeowners in the south-east most. Buyers in the bracket of £400k to £500k will now gain an average saving of £15,000 on their purchase. …
TMD STUDIO LTD continues to closely monitor the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic and is regularly reviewing our policies in line with current government advice.
As the lockdown in the UK comes to an end, life will slowly get back to normal.
Our priority is the health, safety, and wellbeing of our staff and the people we work with. …
As the demand of a sustainable lifestyle increases, cities are trying to find strategies to create environmentally friendly communities. From passive designs to recycled materials, architects are turning their attention to climate change and trying to find solutions through architecture and design.
Every building in the world — every home, office, school, factory — needs to be net zero carbon by 2050 to keep global temperatures below 2 degrees C. Estimates suggest that exceeding 2C by 2030 at least $4 trillion in assets will be at risk and another 100 million people driven into poverty.
Cities account for more than 70 percent of global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. About half of those emissions come from the energy consumed in buildings for lighting, electricity, heating and cooling. …
Epic Games, the creators of the Unreal Game Engine, recently acquired Twinmotion, a real-time 3D immersion software that produces high-quality images, panoramas and standard or 360º VR videos in seconds. This is big news in itself, as it gives the company exactly what it needs to get its powerful game engine technology into the hands of architects but the even bigger news is, it’s giving it away for free.
By now, you’ve likely heard about real-time rendering for architectural visualization and how it’s changing the way designs are presented. With real-time rendering, you can edit your design and see the changes updated instantly, at full quality, and you can produce animations and panoramas in minutes instead of days. Real-time rendering also opens the door to immersive experiences like 360° videos and virtual reality.
One of the easiest solutions for real-time rendering is Twinmotion. This visualization software features a highly intuitive interface and runs on both PC and Mac. Twinmotion is designed to simplify the process of creating stills, animation, and immersive media from your existing CAD models; it promises to get you up to speed and creating quickly, while not compromising on the quality of the output. …
It’s been a while since our last project intro, we thought we’d do another one. With summer in mind, there couldn’t be a better time to introduce you our project of two shipping container houses called Franskraal Strand.
The project is located in Franskraal on the coastal Overstrand region in the Western Cape, South Africa and consists of two houses: X and smaller Y. The client wants two houses that offers him privacy for his family but equally celebrates the unique views and would be built from the shipping containers.
Franskraal is situated on the southern coast of the Danger Point peninsula, about 5 kilometres (3 mi) to the southeast of Gansbaai. It lies between the neighbouring village of Van Dyksbaai to the west and the mouth of the Uilkraal River to the east. With its Mediterranean climate of wet, cool winters and warm summers, It is often cited as one of the main reasons Britons want to live in South Africa. The seasons are opposite to the UK, too, with summer occurring from November to March, when it can be rainier in most of the country, and winter lasting from June to August, when Cape Town experiences more rainfall. …
As old school as they are, GIFs can still be a low tech, highly shareable solution to communicate an architectural idea. If you are searching for fun new methods of architectural representation, look no further! The ‘Graphics Interchange Format’, or GIF, is a perfect tool.
In order to explain projects and design decisions properly, architects must use often rely on creative representation techniques instead of words. It’s part of the job. The quality of drawings — simple, complex, or anything in between — is fundamental for the correct reception of the ideas. Digital media has enabled new ways of representation including animation and adding a new dimension in a single image: processes.
Animated gifs can provide the same amount of information in constructive terms as a section, program distribution as a diagram and main decisions as a master plan, while at the same time showing the progress and chronology of the project. …
We’ve all seen the photos of our friends posing in some spectacularly stunning Airbnb somewhere in the world — filling us with envy and making us want to get online and book the place for ourselves. If you style your Airbnb right — your guests will do your marketing for you.
With more than 5 million listings worldwide and over 400 million travelers using the platform to date, Airbnb has never been more popular. The share economy has upturned the hospitality industry into a digital-first business where anyone can run their own hotel out of their home. Most people sleeping over at their destination would need a “home away from home.” Of course, there have always been companies that take care of that. …
Petr Kousal became the winner of the Kaplicky Internship, which supports students of architecture. The reward is a three-month internship in the Adjaye Associates in London. The program for young promising architects is organized by the Bakala Foundation in cooperation with the London Design Museum and the Kaplicky Center Foundation.
As a newly graduated student of the Faculty of Civil Engineering at the Technical University in Brno he took the jury by designing a pavilion in Brno fairs.
“Petr worked on a scale, which was for one person quite astonishing to me. …
Here is a sneak peak of a project currently on the boards in the studio that we will be illustrating over the next several months.
On a marvelous place like a piece of earthly paradise on the south coast of the island of Mallorca, Spain, the client wants a flexible off-grid house that offers him privacy but equally celebrates the unique views.
They said:
“We want a house that is a podium crowned by an upper horizontal plane. An infinite plane facing the infinite sea. Nothing more and nothing less.”
Txapela House is a holiday house with the strong, expressive volume which is anchored on a plot with steep slopes that offer views onto the bay and the Mediterranean sea.
Employing state-of-the-art construction methods and inventive design strategies, these contemporary facades seek to restore marble to its former glory.
Timeless, enduring, and stately, marble has been used since ancient Greece and Rome for the most important buildings of civilized society, from temples to bath houses to markets. The expense of quarrying and transporting the stone often constituted the bulk of construction costs, along with the workmanship of shaping and securing the heavy blocks. As the cost of labor increased, use of marble came to be reserved for the most socially significant buildings, such as courthouses and city halls. With technological advances in the last half-century, marble became available not only as traditional dimension stone, but as thin panel cladding.
Material Properties and History
Marble is a metamorphic rock that derives from the transformation of limestone and other sedimentary carbonate rocks under high heat and pressure. Unlike slate or mica, in which differential stress creates planes of cleavage, marble is non-foliated, which permits its widespread use in sculpture and construction. Hundreds of different types of marble are found throughout the world, including the United States, Europe, Egypt, and India. Characteristic veins and gradations in color result from impurities in the limestone, which move and re-crystallize as the stone metamorphoses into marble. …
