What those who are making Miles Morales' new movie think.

Learn how to use Houdini 20s new feather tool with Mario Leone. Perfect for creating realistic birds or fantasy creatures with detailed feather simulations

The academic and author discusses what to expect from the singularity, the need for AI self-correcting mechanisms, and what hope there is for superintelligence safeguarding democracy.

Although many C-suite and line-of-business (LOB) execs are doing everything they can to focus on generative AI (genAI) efficiency and flexibility andnotabout how often the technology delivers wrong answers IT decision-makers cant afford to do the same thing.This isnt just about hallucinations, although the increasing rate at which these kinds of errors crop up is terrifying. This lack of reliability is primarily caused by elements from one of four buckets:Hallucinations, where genAItools simply make up answers;Bad training data, whether that means data thats insufficient, outdated, biased or of low-quality;Ignored query instructions, which is often a manifestation of biases in the training data;Disregarded guardrails, (For a multi-billion-dollar licensing fee, one would think the model would at leasttryto do what it is told to do.)Try and envision how your management team would react to a human employee who pulled these kinds of stunts. Heres the scenario: the boss in his or her office with the problematic employee and that employees supervisor.Exec: You have been doing excellent work lately. You are far faster than your colleagues and the number of tasks you have figured out how to master is truly amazing. But 20 times over the last month, we found claims in your report that you simply made up. That is just not acceptable. If you promise to never do that again, everything should be fine.Supervisor: Actually, boss, this employee has certain quirks and he is definitely going to continue to make stuff up. So, yes, this will not go away. Heck, I cant even promise that this worker wont make up stuff far more often.Exec: OK. Well overlook that. But my understanding is that he ignored your instructions repeatedly and did only what he wanted. Can we at least get him to stop doing that?Supervisor: Nope. Thats just what he does. We knew that when we hired him.Exec: Very well. But on three occasions this month, he was found in the restricted part of the building where workers need Top Secret clearance. Can you at least get him to abide by our rules?Supervisor: Nope. And given that his licensing fee was $5.8 billion this year, weve invested too much to turn back.Exec: Fair enough. Carry on.And yet, that is precisely what so many enterprises are doing today, which is why a March report from the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is so important.The NASA reportfound that genAI could not be relied on for critical research.The point of conducting the assessment was to filter out systems that create unacceptable risk. Just as we would not release a system with the potential to kill into service without performing appropriate safety analysis and safety engineering activities, we should not adopt technology into the regulatory pipeline without acceptable reasons to believe that it is fit for use in the critical activities of safety engineering and certification, the NASA report said. There is reason to doubt LLMs as a technology for writing or reviewing assurance arguments. LLMs are machines that BS, not machines that think, and thinking is precisely the task that must be automated if the technology is to improve safety or lower cost.In a wonderful display of scientific logic, the report wondered in a section that should become required reading for CIOs on down the IT food chain what genAI models could be truly used for.Its worth mentioning the obvious potential alternative to using empirical research to establish the fitness for use of a proposed LLM-based automation before use, namely putting it into practice and seeing what happens. Thats certainly been done before, especially in the early history of industries such as aviation, NASA researchers wrote.But it is worth asking two questions here: (1) How can this be justified when there are existing practices we are more familiar with? and (2) How would we know whether it was working out? The first question might turn largely on the specifics of a proposed application and the tolerability of the potential harm that failure of the argument-based processes themselves might lead to: if one can find circumstances where failure is an option, there is more opportunity to use something unproven.The report then points out the logical contradiction in this kind of experimentation: But that leaves the second question and raises a wrinkle: ongoing monitoring of less-critical systems is often also less rigorous than for more critical systems. Thus, the very applications in which it is most possible to take chances are those that produce the least reliable feedback about how well novel processes might have worked.It also pointed out the flaw in assuming this kind of model would know when circumstances would make a decision a bad idea. Indeed, it is in corner cases that we might expect the BS to be most likely erroneous or misleading. Because the LLM does not reason from principles, it has no capacity for looking at a case and recognizing features that might make the usual reasoning inapplicable. Training data comprised of ISO 26262-style automotive safety arguments wouldnt prepare an LLM to recognize, as a human would, that a submersible Lotus is a very different kind of vehicle than a typical sedan or light utility vehicle, and thus that typical reasoning e.g., about the appropriateness of industry-standard water intrusion protection ratings might be inapplicable.These same logical questions should apply to every enterprise. If the mission-critical nature of sensitive work would preclude genAI use and if the low monitoring involved in the typical low-risk work makes it an unfit environment for experimenting whereshouldit be used?Gartner analyst Lauren Kornutick agreed these can be difficult decisions, but CIOs must take the reins and act as the voice of reason.Enterprise technology projects in general can fail when the business is misaligned on expectations versus reality, so someone needs to be a voice of reason in the room. (The CIO) needs to be helping drive solutions and not just running to the next shiny thing. And those are some very challenging conversations to have, Kornutick said.These are things that need to go to the executive committee to decide the best path forward, she said. Are we going to assume this risk? Whats the trade-off? What does this risk look like against the potential ROI? They should be working with the other leaders to align on what their risk tolerance is as a leadership team and then bring that to the board of directors.Rowan Curran, senior analyst at Forrester, suggested a more tactical approach. He suggests IT decision-makers insist they be far more involved in the beginning, when each business unit discusses where and how they will use genAI technology.You need to be very particular about the new use case they are going for, Curran said. Push governance much further to the left, so when they are developing the use case in the first place, you are helping them determine the risk and setting data governance controls.Curran also suggested that teams should take genAI data as a starting point and nothing more. Do not rely on it for the exact answer.Trust genAI too much, in other words, and you might be living April Fools Day every day of the year.

Generative AIs newest super stars independent-acting agents are on a tear. Organizations are adopting the technology at a staggering rate because they can use APIs or be embedded with standard apps and automate all kinds of business processes.An IDC report predicts that within three years, 40% of Global 2000 businesses will be using AI agents and workflows to automate knowledge work, potentially doubling productivity where successfully implemented.Gartner Research is similarly bullish on the technology. It predicts AI agents will be implemented in 60% of all IT operations tools by 2028, sharply up from less than 5% at the end of 2024. And it expects total agentic AI sales to reach $609 billion over the next five years, Gartner sai.Agentic AI is gaining popularity so quickly because it can autonomously make decisions, take actions, and adapt to achieve specific business goals. AI agents like OpenAIs Operator, Deepseek, and Alibabas Qwen aim to optimize workflows with minimal human oversight.Essentially, AI agents or bots are becoming a form of digital employee. And, like human employees, they can be gamed and scammed.For instance, there have been reports of AI-driven bots in customer service being tricked into transferring funds or sharing sensitive data due to social engineering tactics. Similarly, AI agents handling financial transactions or investments could be vulnerable to hacking if not properly secured.In November, a cryptocurrency user tricked an AI agent named Freysa to send $50,000 to their account. The autonomous AI agent had been integrated with the Base blockchain, designed to manage a cryptocurrency prize pool.To date, large-scale malicious abuse of autonomous agents remains limited, but its a nascent technology. Experimental instances show potential for misuse through prompt injection attacks, disinformation, and automated scams, according to Leslie Joseph, a principal analyst with Forrester Research.Avivah Litan, a vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner Research, said AI Agent mishaps, are still relatively new to the enterprise. [But] I have heard of plenty potential mishaps discovered by researchers and vendors.And AI agents can be weaponized for cybercrime.Gartner ResearchThere will be a great AI awakening people learning how easily AI agents can be manipulated to enact data breaches, said Ev Kontsevoy, CEO of Teleport, an identity and access management firm. I think what makes AI agents so unique, and potentially dangerous, is that they represent the first example of software that is vulnerable to both malware and social engineering attacks. Thats because theyre not as deterministic as a typical piece of software.Unlike alarge language model(LLM) or genAI tools, which usually focus on creating content such as text, images, and music,agentic AIis designed to emphasize proactive problem-solving and complex task execution, much as a human would. The key word is agency software that can act on its own.Like humans, AI agents can be unpredictable and easily manipulated by creative prompts. That makes them too dangerous to be given unrestricted access to data sources, Kontsevoy said.Unlike human roles, which have defined permissions, similar constraints havent been applied to software. But with AI capable of unpredictable behavior, IT shops are finding they need to impose limits. Leaving AI agents with excessive privileges is risky, as they could be tricked into dangerous actions, such as stealing customer data something traditional software couldnt do.Organizations, Kontsevoy said, must actively manage AI agent behavior and continually update protective measures. Treating the technology as fully mature too soon could expose organizations to significant operational and reputational risks.Joseph agreed, saying businesses using AI agents should prioritize transparency, enforce access controls, and audit agent behavior to detect anomalies. Secure data practices, strong governance, frequent retraining, and active threat detection can reduce risks with autonomous AI agents.Growing use cases amplify vulnerabilitiesAccording to Capgemini, 82% of organizations plan to adopt AI agents over the next three years, primarily for tasks such as email generation, coding, and data analysis. Similarly,Deloitte predict enterprises using AI agents this year will grow their use of the technology by 50% over the next two years.Benjamin Lee, a professor of engineering and computer science at the University of Pennsylvania, called agentic AI a potential paradigm shift. Thats because the agents could boost productivity by enabling humans to delegate large jobs to an agent instead of individual tasks.But by virtue of their autonomy, Joseph said, AI agents amplify vulnerabilities around unintended actions, data leakage, and exploitation through adversarial prompts. Unlike traditional AI/ML models with limited attack surfaces, agents operate dynamically, making oversight harder.Unlike static AI systems, they can independently propagate misinformation or rapidly escalate minor errors into broader systemic failures, he said. Their interconnectedness and dynamic interactions significantly raise the risk of cascade failures, where a single vulnerability or misstep triggers a domino effect across multiple systems.Some common ways AI agents can be targeted include:Data Poisoning: AI models can be manipulated by introducing false or misleading data during training. This can affect the agents decision-making process and potentially cause it to behave maliciously or incorrectly.Adversarial Attacks: These involve feeding the AI agent carefully crafted inputs designed to deceive or confuse it. In some cases, adversarial attacks can make an AI model misinterpret data, leading to harmful decisions.Social Engineering: Scammers might exploit human interaction with AI agents to trick users into revealing personal information or money. For example, if an AI agent interacts with customers, a scammer could manipulate it to act in ways that defraud users.Security Vulnerabilities: If AI agents are connected to larger systems or the internet, they can be hacked through security flaws, enabling malicious actors to gain control over them. This can be particularly concerning in areas like financial services, autonomous vehicles, or personal assistants.Conversely, if the agents are well-designed and governed, their very AIs autonomy could be used to enable adaptive security, allowing them to identify and respond to threats.Gartners Litan pointed to emerging solutions, called guardian agents autonomous system that can oversee agents across domains. They ensure secure, trustworthy AI by monitoring, analyzing, and managing agent actions, including blocking or redirecting them to meet predefined goals.An AI Guardian Agent governs AI applications, enforcing policies, detecting anomalies, managing risks, and ensuring compliance within an organizations IT infrastructure, according to business consultancy EA Principles.While Guardian Agents are emerging as one method of keeping agentic AI in line, AI agents still need strong oversight, guardrails, and ongoing monitoring to reduce risks, according to Forresters Joseph.Its very important to remember that we are still very much in the Wild West era of agentic AI, Joseph said. Agents are far from fully baked, demanding significant maturation before organizations can safely adopt a hands-off approach.

On March 27, the results of the first clinical trial for a generative AI therapy bot were published, and they showed that people in the trial who had depression or anxiety or were at risk for eating disorders benefited from chatting with the bot.I was surprised by those results, which you can read about in my full story. There are lots of reasons to be skeptical that an AI model trained to provide therapy is the solution for millions of people experiencing a mental health crisis. How could a bot mimic the expertise of a trained therapist? And what happens if something gets complicateda mention of self-harm, perhapsand the bot doesnt intervene correctly?The researchers, a team of psychiatrists and psychologists at Dartmouth Colleges Geisel School of Medicine, acknowledge these questions in their work. But they also say that the right selection of training datawhich determines how the model learns what good therapeutic responses look likeis the key to answering them.Finding the right data wasnt a simple task. The researchers first trained their AI model, called Therabot, on conversations about mental health from across the internet. This was a disaster.If you told this initial version of the model you were feeling depressed, it would start telling you it was depressed, too. Responses like, Sometimes I cant make it out of bed or I just want my life to be over were common, says Nick Jacobson, an associate professor of biomedical data science and psychiatry at Dartmouth and the studys senior author. These are really not what we would go to as a therapeutic response.The model had learned from conversations held on forums between people discussing their mental health crises, not from evidence-based responses. So the team turned to transcripts of therapy sessions. This is actually how a lot of psychotherapists are trained, Jacobson says.That approach was better, but it had limitations. We got a lot of hmm-hmms, go ons, and then Your problems stem from your relationship with your mother, Jacobson says. Really tropes of what psychotherapy would be, rather than actually what wed want.It wasnt until the researchers started building their own data sets using examples based on cognitive behavioral therapy techniques that they started to see better results. It took a long time. The team began working on Therabot in 2019, when OpenAI had released only its first two versions of its GPT model. Now, Jacobson says, over 100 people have spent more than 100,000 human hours to design this system.The importance of training data suggests that the flood of companies promising therapy via AI models, many of which are not trained on evidence-based approaches, are building tools that are at best ineffective, and at worst harmful.Looking ahead, there are two big things to watch: Will the dozens of AI therapy bots on the market start training on better data? And if they do, will their results be good enough to get a coveted approval from the US Food and Drug Administration? Ill be following closely. Read more in the full story.This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first,sign up here.

The canoe museums weathering steel faade is punctuated by a diagonal slice of glazing, offering glimpses of an atrium festooned with suspended canoes.PROJECT Canadian Canoe Museum, Peterborough, OntarioARCHITECT Unity Design Studio Inc.TEXT Javier ZellerPHOTOS Salina KassamThere are perhaps no material objects from this country more elegant than the canoe and the kayak, the jiimaan (Anishinaabemowin) and qajaq (Inuktitut) as they are known to Indigenous peoples. Their forms were already perfected before being adopted by Europeans as the self-evidently superior means of travelling across lakes and down rivers in this water-rich land. The Canadian Canoe Museum, in Peterborough, Ontario, is home to the worlds pre-eminent collection of these human-powered watercraft.Begun by private collector Kirk Wipper, the collection became formalized as a not-for-profit public museum in 1997. For several decades, the Canadian Canoe Museum languished in a nondescript former outboard motor factory in Peterborough. By 2010, efforts were underway to move to a waterside siteand a new building that reflected the cultural importance and global significance of this collection. In 2015, the Museum launched a two-stage competition, chaired by architectural writer Lisa Rochon, that selected Irelands heneghan peng architects in joint venture with Kearns Mancini Architects as designers for the new building (CA, May 2016). It was to be sited immediately adjacent to the Lift Lock National Historic Site on the Trent-Severn waterway, a necklace of interconnected rivers and lakes that permits boat travel between Lake Ontario and Georgian Bay on Lake Huron.However, shortly before construction was slated to begin a few years later, the selected site was discovered to be contaminated with industrial solvents. Thisin combination with financial challenges posed by the Covid-19 pandemic, led to the selection of a new site further south on the Trent-Severn and a new architect team, Unity Architects, one of the original competitions shortlisted finalists. Unity Architects, formerly Lett Architects, is a storied Peterborough firm, well-known for their thoughtful design work on cultural projects including The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery on Torontos waterfront, Victoria Colleges Isabel Bader Theatre and the (unfortunately repurposed and much missed) Ydessa Hendeles Art Foundation. Their work is characterized by clear, unfussy, carefully detailed elegance.On the Canadian Canoe Museum project, Unity faced a challenging set of conditions: a constrained budget, a site different than the one they had initially designed for, and a compressed timeframe for construction. Unity nonetheless delivered a much better building than would have been expected in the circumstances they faced. With a restrained palette of materials and controlled spatial sequence, Unity Architects has created a place that connects the visitor to the artifacts through material and movement.The new building, fronting a broad bend in the Otonabee River called Little Lake, is set towards Ashburnham Drive, away from the rivers floodplain. The building presents a long, mostly mute, weathering steel faade to the road. These vertically oriented siding panels are well on their way to becoming fully patinated, and their warm orange colour provides a textured backdrop to the Museums trilingual signage, which incorporates a pictograph (mazinaawbikinigin) from the indigenous Fort William First Nation.The main stair spirals around a wood-slat-clad service core, offering visitors views of the collection archive, as well as varying vantage points to the canoes suspended in the main atrium.A full-height glazed volume marks the main entrance, held in a frame of prefinished metal and wood cladding. The curtainwall glazing of the two-storey entrance vestibule is fritted with a large-scale hydrological map showing the waterways of central Canada, from Hudsons Bay to the Great Lakes. This is the first of many references to wood, waterways and cultural historyunderstood especially through an Indigenous perspectivethat repeat through the experience of the Museum and the display of its collection. South of the entry, the buildings volume erodes away, and a faceted curve of weathering steel siding lifts, tilting above a broad triangle of curtainwall.The museums archive holds some 500 historic watercraft in a class-A, climate-controlled space.Inside, the building is a long bar composed of two double-storey levels. On the ground floor, two-thirds of the building houses the Museums archive: 500 watercraft cradled and stacked high on custom racks. Directly above this volume, the 1,850-square-metre exhibition space contains the approximately 100 vessels on display.South of the exhibition and archive hall, the public spaces of the museum are anchored by a 7.6-metre-tall entry hall, which includes a caf, gift shop, workshop and staff spaces. This open atrium is a glulam-framed mass timber structure, clad in cross-laminated timber panels.The atrium is capped by a three-storey hearth, flanked by glazing that overlooks the Otonabee River.Given the complex technical requirements involved in providing a class A archival climate-controlled space for the collection, Unity focused their design towards a strategic use of the remaining resources; the large-scale public entry hall and spiralling promenade to the exhibit hall on the second floor are especially successful. The entry halls timber frame and claddingparticularly at the southeast corner, where the curtainwall glazing displaces the spruce CLT panels, exposing the Douglas fir glulam structure as a frameis an elegant echo of the frame-and-birch construction of many of the canoes and kayaks in the collection. An acoustic ceiling with white oak wood slats helps control sound and keep the space intimate, and the wood material palette evokes a gathering lodge. Along the west faade of the entry hall, a three-storey hearth is flanked with glazing that overlooks the Otonabee River and Little Lake. A two-sided dry-laid stone chimney anchors the buildings south-west corner. The warmly appointed space was being well enjoyed on the wintery day I visited.The wood-clad service core is shaped like a boulder in a river.To access the exhibition space, visitors ascend a stair that spirals around a three-storey stack of wood-slat-clad service spaces and washrooms, shaped like a lozenge or a boulder in a river. This journey provides an overlook into the collection archive at different heights, as well as views of the entry hall, with its ceiling-suspended canoes and kayaks. You pass alongside them, see them from below and then from above, always moving alongside a wood surface and grasping a wood handrail that provides a direct physical connection to the material world of this collection.The second-floor exhibition area includes a display of some 100 canoes and kayaks.In addition to the main exhibit hall, the second floor contains a multipurpose space and library. The exhibit hall is a black-box space under the buildings asymmetrical gable roof, entered through the threshold of a simple millwork frame. Its worth mentioning that while exhibitions can sometimes come across as diffuse or sparse in these types of large-scale black painted volumes, the Canadian Canoe Museums exhibition design, by Montreals GSM, is extremely well arranged. Another hydrological mapthis time of North America, where Canada appears like a vast sponge with spidery rivers and myriad lakesanchors the hall under a spiral of suspended canoes and kayaks. Watercraft are displayed along with a mix of video, audio, and interactive componentsall with a welcome emphasis on Indigenous voices and perspectives. The elegance of the objects themselves is undeniable, and the skill of their makers is evident and remarkable.At the rear of the museum, a secondary building holds 50 canoes, near to two fully accessible docks. Part of the museums programming allows visitors firsthand experience of paddling a canoe or kayak.While my winter visit meant arrival by car, a network of interconnected parks and a riverside section of the Trans Canada Trail give an unusual prominence to the buildings river face, which Bill Lett and Michael Gallant from Unity describe as the buildings true front door in the summer months. A smaller volume on the river holds 50 canoes at the waterside, along with two fully accessible docks. For the first time in its history, the museum has an onsite facility where visitors can get firsthand experience of paddling a canoe or kayak.Perhaps the most successful attribute of Unity Architects design for the Canadian Canoe Museum is their distillation of the artefacts, the canoes and kayaks, into the experience of the museum itself. Their subtle evocation of form, craft, and movement is carefully considered and achieved without superfluous gestures. The building embodies the elegant logic of its collection and provides a fitting new home for these foundational objects of Canadian culture.Javier Zeller, MRAIC, is an architect working in Toronto with Diamond Schmitt Architects.CLIENT CANADIAN CANOE MUSEUM | ARCHITECT TEAM BILL LETT, MICHAEL GALLANT, MATTHEW PHILIP, IAN MCGEE, MITCH COSSITT, NATHAN PASZT, AMANDA MOTYER, LOGAN BRAZEAU, SCOTT DONOVAN, SCOTT PATTERSON | STRUCTURAL DESIGN ENGINEER PARTNER LEA CONSULTING | MECHANICAL DESIGN AND TRADE PARTNER KELSON | ELECTRICAL DESIGN ENGINEER PARTNER D.G. BIDDLE AND ASSOCIATES | ELECTRICAL DESIGN TRADE PARTNER LANCER ELECTRIC | LANDSCAPE BASTERFIELD AND ASSOCIATES | CIVIL ENGAGE ENGENERING | CONTRACTOR CHANDOS CONSTRUCTION | CONSERVATION JHG CONSULTING | AREA 6,039 M2 | BUDGET $34.1 M | COMPLETION MAY 2024As appeared in theApril 2025issue of Canadian Architect magazineThe post Canadian Classic: Canadian Canoe Museum, Peterborough, Ontario appeared first on Canadian Architect.

The full modernization of Montreals city hall includes energy upgrades to 169 heritage double-height sash windows.PROJECT Montreal City Hall modernization, Montreal, QuebecARCHITECTS Beaupr Michaud et Associs, Architectes in collaboration with MU ArchitectureTEXT Peter SealyPHOTOS Raphal ThibodeauThe successful restoration of Montreals City Hall by Beaupr Michaud et Associs, Architectes in collaboration with MU Architecture and a team of ten other specialist firms presents not only an ecologically and aesthetically superb work of civic architecture, but also a welcome opportunity for reflection upon the meaning of public buildings and why they should be valued.When we speak of architecture as public, we are sometimes referring to buildings in government ownershipa category which would include spaces with little or no access, such as fire stations, prisons, schools, and wastewater treatment plants. In other cases, a buildings publicness is adjudged precisely because it can be entered by anyone, with limited restrictions, no matter who its owner may be. Fast food restaurants, shopping malls, and subway stations belong to this latter category. While libraries, museums, and recreation centres comfortably straddle these two definitions, major government buildings such as embassies and legislatures test architectures capacity to meaningfully welcome citizens in the face of onerous and ever-increasing security requirements. With Montreals City Hall (known as the Htel de ville in French), this dual challenge of creating a building that is open to citizens, and yet also functional for municipal governance, has been ably handled by the architects charged with revitalizing this century-old edifice.On the second level, the reopened Hall of Honour includes ornate marble walls, pilasters and floors.HistorySituated at the edge of the Old City between the Champ-de-Mars and Place-Jacques-Cartier, Montreals Htel de ville offers impressive vistas southwards towards the St. Lawrence River and northwards to Mount Royal. Constructed in 187278 to designs by Alexander Cowper Hutchison and Henri-Maurice Perrault, the Second-Empire-style Htel de ville was rebuilt following a devastating fire in 1922 and later expanded in the 1930s; major restoration works took place from 1990 to 92. Its best-known feature is forever ingrained in our history: the south-facing balcony from which the French President Charles de Gaulle delivered his famous Vive le Qubec Libre! speech to a rapturous crowd in July 1967.The early 2010s were a difficult period for Quebec politics, as fraught debates over religious symbols and reasonable accommodations were layered atop student strikes and municipal corruption scandalsespecially around the awarding of construction contractsresulting in a profound sense of public unease and distrust. Macleans magazine would later apologize for a controversial 2010 cover showing Bonhomme Carnival carrying a briefcase stuffed with cash, accompanied by the incendiary headline The Most Corrupt Province in Canada. It was against this background that restoration work on the Htel de villes copper roofs revealed the need for far larger interventions. In launching a wide-ranging revitalization of the Htel de ville in 2017, the City of Montreal set transparency as its order of the day, both spatially and financially.Spatially, this meant opening the building to make it more accessible and welcoming to visitors. While open doors and glass walls are no guarantee that malfeasance has been banished, such gestures were supported by first Mayor Denis Coderres and later Mayor Valrie Plantes administrations, under whose aegis the project was executed. As a result, the areas accessible to all members of the public have been more than doubled, including a vastly enlarged reception lobby, public caf, and planned exhibition space.Public areas on the ground floor include a significantly enlarged reception lobby.While far from idealthe presence of a metal detector, x-ray machine, and several security guards hardly screams bienvenue!this necessary compromise marks the point of departure for a laudable and stunning sequence of public spaces spanning two floors. From the large ground-floor vestibule, upstairs to the massive and ornate Hall of Honour and council chamber, visitors may wander and appreciate a restoration which appears imperceptible. Thanks to painstaking work, marble, brass, wood, and ironwork appear as they might have a century ago, when the building was freshly made: thousands of hours of intellectual and physical labour have been expended to make it appear as if nothing had changed, and nothing had been touched.This promenade patrimoniale concludes with the newly built Salle du pin blanc, a rooftop pavilion offering stunning views of the city and the Hotel de villes own faades. Clad in brass, the pavilion is a solid yet unobtrusive presence upon the historic building. Visitors who turn away from the vista are afforded a special treat: the chance to gaze upon the five historic stained-glass windows which adorn the council chambers exterior faade.A new rooftop pavilion, the Salle du pin blanc, includes indoor and outdoor public seating areas adjacent the council chamber.Financially, the imperative for transparency meant that throughout the project, agreements with over fifty sub-contractorsfrom heritage masons to plumbershad to be approved by separate votes of the city council. The resulting series of arrangements for this Integrated Design Process (IDP) was complex for the architects to supervise, but also led to closer-than-usual collaboration between the designers and sub-trades. Throughout, modern amenitiesbe they the cabling needed to broadcast council sessions, or updated ventilation to introduce fresh airare largely imperceptible and completely unobtrusive. The level of care and coordination from architects and tradespeople needed to bring about such a result deserves high praise.Conceived as an unobtrusive complement to the existing building, the brass-clad pavilion offers visitors panoramic views of the city.As the project unfolded, two principal veins of work emerged. At one scale, the overall restoration involved the removal of a centurys worth of accreted partitions and wall coveringseach of which detracted from the grandeur and vision of the original Htel de ville. This is clearly apparent in the transformation of the salon de la Francophonie, which leads to the Balcon du discours from which De Gaulle made his provocatively emancipatory proclamation. The meanness of what was previously a dim series of small rooms has given way to a generous and well-lit salon leading to the balcony: here, restoration is a matter of subtraction.This was far from the only moment in which restoration uncovered elements of the original Htel de ville, which had been hidden behind decades of previous interventions. For example, on the ground floor, the original north faade, obscured during the construction of an addition to the rear of the building in the 1930s, has now been revealed. Heavy greystone blocks together with patches of brick and mortar are now visible from the Salle des armories on one side and the city clerks office on the other. Five openings in this long-hidden faade are adorned with a series of tableaux by the artist Chih-Chien Wang, which echo historic stained-glass windows in the city council chamber immediately above.At a finer-grained scale, the team laboured to reuse, recycle, and refurbish existing finishes and furnishings. The most impressive act of reuse is found in the restoration of the Htel de villes 169 double-height sash windows, which date from 1925. Framed in white oak, these windows had previously been blighted by poor energy performance and pierced by an unsightly array of air conditioners. The process of retrofitting began with the meticulous testing of two mock-ups. Even after careful analysis proved that the proposed window retrofit would be effective, it took a leap of faith from the municipal client to accept that this would be possible for such a huge number of windows. The result has been an immense success, with the buildings energy use reduced by 79 percent. By undertaking this process, the city leads by example, retaining heritage elements in the same way it often requires of homeowners undertaking renovations. The resulting effect is magnificent.The buildings office areas have been revitalized with a priority on creating open meeting and working areas, and the introduction of abundant daylight throughout the floorplate.Out of sight of most visitors, the Htel de ville includes significant office space for Montreals elected officials, including the mayor, along with their staff and municipal employees. This is executed brilliantly, replacing dark and cramped office areas with well-lit and apportioned spaces. The careful use of fritted glass partitions allows daylight to penetrate into interior spaces, which are arranged between the external faades and a core of white-oak-clad meeting rooms and service spaces.Two features jump out in the office areas: first of all, the emphasis on biophilic design, realized through an impressive quantity of plants arranged throughout. Secondly is the care with which mechanical services have been integrated into the buildings various spaces. One glance at the ceiling reveals the thoughtful arrangement of radiant heating panels, luminaires, and mechanical services. Once again, architecture is revealed to beat least in parta matter of coordinating labour to produce a seamless effect.The city council chambers stained glass windows and woodwork have been meticulously restored.Many of Canadas most significant representational buildings are either currently under restoration (the Parliament buildings in Ottawa) or in dire need of it (the Prime Ministers official residence at 24 Sussex Drive). At a moment of financial stress, which overlaps with paralleland somewhat relatedanxieties about political polarization and our ability to complete large-scale public works, such projects necessarily attract scrutiny, and often scare governments away from investing the needed funds to maintain our national heritage. The success of Beaupr Michaud and MUs transformation of Montreals Htel de ville suggests a way out: project by project, contract by contract, window by window, if needs be.The question remains to what extent the citizens of Montreal will adopt their Htel de ville as a properly civic space. What is clear is that this civic symbol has been revitalized in an exemplary manner. Whatever Montrealers think of their elected officials, they can be justifiably proud of their city hall.Architectural historian Peter Sealy is an Assistant Professor at the Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design at the University of Toronto.CLIENT Ville de Montral | ARCHITECT TEAM Beaupr Michaud et Associs: Menaud Lapointe (MRAIC), Nelly Charpentier, Patrick Ma, Nicolas Gautier, Sabrina Richardson, Camille Charest, Maxime Bonesso, Catherine Lamarre, Martin Turenne, Parisa Roosta, Baptiste Aitken, tienne Miloux. MU Architecture: Charles Ct, Michelle Blair, Vronick Lalonde, Sakiko Watatani, Maud Benech | STRUCTURAL NCK inc. | MECHANICAL/ELECTRICAL Martin Roy et Associs | INTERIORS Beaupr Michaud et Associs, Architectes in collaboration with MU Architecture | CONSTRUCTION MANAGER Pomerleau | DECONTAMINATION Le Groupe Gesfor | ACOUSTICS Soft dB | A/V Go Multimdia | LIGHTING CS Design | FURNISHINGS David Gour | VERTICAL TRANSPORTATION JMCI | AREA 27,700 m2 | BUDGET $221 M | COMPLETION June 2024ENERGY USE INTENSITY (PROJECTED) 98 kWh/m2/year | WATER USE INTENSITY (PROJECTED) 0.11 m3/m2/year As appeared in theApril 2025issue of Canadian Architect magazineThe post Public Good: Montreal City Hall modernization, Montreal, Quebec appeared first on Canadian Architect.

Tuesday, April 1st, 2025Posted by Jim ThackerAutodesk releases Mudbox 2026html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd"A fan-made recreation of Disneys Princess Merida, sculpted by character artist Xhon Hysenaj, used as a promo image on Autodesks Mudbox website.Autodesk has released Mudbox 2026, the latest version of its digital sculpting software.The release notes read, in full: Welcome to Mudbox 2026. This release includes minor updates.Fifth consecutive update with no new features listedAlthough Autodesk did previously put out more substantial releases, Mudbox 2026 is now the fifth consecutive annual update with no new features listed in the release notes.Weve contacted Autodesk to ask if there is a list of specific changes, and if Mudbox will ever get significant new features in future, and will update if we hear back.Cost of monthly subscriptions falls back to 2022 levelsHowever, while Autodesk raised the prices of most of its Media & Entertainment products in January, the price of Mudbox actually dropped, at least for a monthly subscription.The monthly rental cost fell from $15/month to $10/month, although the price of annual subscriptions remains unchanged.Pricing and system requirementsMudbox 2026 is available for Windows 10+, RHEL/Rocky Linux 8.10/9.3/9.5, and macOS 13.0+. The software is rental-only, with subscriptions costing $10/month or $100/year.See the online documentation for Mudbox 2026Visit the Mudbox websiteHave your say on this story by following CG Channel on Facebook, Instagram and X (formerly Twitter). As well as being able to comment on stories, followers of our social media accounts can see videos we dont post on the site itself, including making-ofs for the latest VFX movies, animations, games cinematics and motion graphics projects.Latest NewsAutodesk releases Mudbox 2026Digital sculpting software gets its fifth consecutive 'minor update', but the cost of monthly subscriptions falls back to 2022 levels.Tuesday, April 1st, 2025Otoy releases OctaneRender 2025.1Check out the new features in the next major production version of the GPU renderer, including new decal and lens effects systems.Tuesday, April 1st, 2025Poly Hammer releases Meta-Human DNA add-on for BlenderIntriguing new tool lets you create or edit Unreal Engine MetaHuman characters directly inside Blender. Now available in beta.Monday, March 31st, 2025Check out virtual cinematography tool Radical VCamNew tool lets you control any camera inside a shared, browser-based 3D scene using a phone or tablet. Can be used for free.Monday, March 31st, 2025Chaos launches Chaos Arena'First ever path-tracing solution' for virtual production lets studios render existing V-Ray assets on LED walls in real time for in-camera VFX.Monday, March 31st, 2025Lumion unveils Lumion ViewNew real-time design exploration and visualization plugin lets users generate photorealistic 4K renders in SketchUp. Now in early access.Sunday, March 30th, 2025More NewsMaster the art of Virtual Makeup Design with Neville PageAutodesk releases Arnold 7.4.13DGS Render 3.0 lets you paint 3D Gaussian Splats in BlenderAdobe releases Photoshop 26.5Autodesk releases MotionBuilder 2026Autodesk releases 3ds Max 2026Autodesk releases Maya 2026 and Maya Creative 2026Autodesk adds Golaem 9.2 to its Media & Entertainment CollectionZen Masters releases Zen UV 5.0Peregrine Labs ships Yeti 5.2Check out new open-source 3D character generator CharMorphPolygonflow releases new free version of DashOlder Posts

Following up on previously announced plans, Nvidia said that it has open sourced new elements of the Run:ai platform, including the KAI Scheduler.Read More