Danish firm C.F. Møller has won first place in a competition to design an extension and renovation of Vendsyssel Hospital in Hjørring, Denmark. This winning proposal will add 14,000 square meters to the existing structure, incorporating a new treatment center, a ward for mothers and children, and a rooftop children’s playground. The new facilities are arranged around large courtyards, and make use of large windows to display the path of travel through the hospital. This helps make navigating through the large building as easy as possible.
Construction has begun on 3XN’s first project in India. Aesthetically inspired by local foliage, the 136-meter “Grove Towers” are designed to interweave at their base, much like the roots of the native mangrove trees. These lower, “interwoven” floors will house retail establishments, while the upper floors will be given over to residential units.
Non-profit organization DawnTown has chosen Design with Company as the winner of its second official design-build competition. The Chicago-based practice’s winning entry, Pavilion MMM (Miami Many-a-chair Monument), will tell the multicultural story of Miami through metaphor by constructing a temporary monument of recycled chairs collected from local yard sales on Miami’s Cultural Plaza.
As a part of his ongoing film series about Japanese architecture, French architect and filmmaker Vincent Hecht has created this visual exploration of SunnyHills at Minami-Aoyama by Kengo Kuma. Designed to resemble a bamboo basket, this pineapple cake shop is built using the traditional Japanese joint technique of “Jiigoku-Gumi.” The wooden latticework is meant to provide visual contrast with the concrete facades of the building’s neighbors.
The world economy has endured a series of crises over the past century, and architecture has recently been recognized as a harbinger of these crises. Two years ago, British finance group Barclays released an index of skyscraper construction projects that correlate with the occurrence of economic downturns since 1873. Many of the tallest buildings in the world have been built at times of severe economic struggle, the most recent being Dubai's Burj Khalifa, built during the Great Recession of 2007 through 2010. According to Barclays, "the world’s tallest buildings are simply the edifice of a broader skyscraper building boom, reflecting a widespread misallocation of capital and an impending economic correction."
All the major financial crises in the past century, and the buildings that predicted them after the break...
Danish architecture firm ADEPT has won first place in a competition to add three new buildings to the Danish Armed Forces Complex in Aalborg, Denmark. In keeping with the Armed Forces’ Green Establishments initiative, a project that encourages the lowering of energy use and CO2 emissions, the new barracks will be a visible model of sustainability.
Vertigo by Tom Radclyfe. Image Courtesy of drawingarchitecture.tumblr.com/
Tumblr is full of well curated blogs featuring creative works from architecture students, professionals, and enthusiasts; Drawing ARCHITECTURE is one of these blogs we’ve found to be particularly intriguing. From charcoal masterpieces to computer renderings, the architectural drawings featured on this Tumblr are stunning.
Check out some of our favorite selections, after the break...
The Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) has chosen to honor six of the "most distinguished publications" released in the last two years with their prestigious Publication Awards. The annual prize awards publications in architectural history, urban history, landscape history, preservation, and architectural exhibition catalogs, as well as the best article published in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians by an emerging scholar. View all the winners, after the break...
Major natural disasters caused by climate change are becoming an unfortunate certainty worldwide. Prevention of these events is something that no single architect can accomplish, but preparation for them can be. To that end, Open Online Academy (OOAc) has challenged architects worldwide to design disaster-resistant architecture with their online course "Designing Resilient Schools." Architecture firm MAT-TERhas responded to this challenge with a new design for Guiuan National High School in the Philippines, an area hit especially hard by last year’s Typhoon Haiyan. The design is a singular, compact structure designed to better withstand the forces of major storms, doubling as both a school and a community emergency shelter.
International design firm 3XN has recently won a competition to design a residential building in downtown Vienna, Austria. Being so close to the historic center of the city, the project required a unique but unobtrusive appearance. With this in mind, a subtle, curving façade composed of warm colors was developed for the exterior.
The honor of designing Thailand’s pavilion for the 2015 Milan Exposition has officially been awarded to The Office of Bangkok Architects (OBA). The firm’s winning design incorporates the Expo’s theme of “Feeding the Planet, Energy for Life” with the agrarian and religious qualities that define the Kingdom of Thailand. Located centrally on the Expo’s main avenue, the pavilion will be adjacent to a canal that will be used as a part of the exhibition, relating back to Bangkok’s informal title as the “Venice of Asia.”
Humanity’s ability to construct and change an urban landscape is incredible, but rarely do we get to see that interaction at full scale. Beno Saradzic’s "BEYOND: Memoirs in a Timelapse" captures just that. Taken from more than two years of footage from Abu Dhabi and Dubai, this film showcases hourly transformations wrought on some of the city’s most famous buildings, such as the Al Bahar Towers and Burj Khalifa.
Twenty years ago, one of the world’s most unusual and unexpected pieces of architecture was razed to the ground: Hong Kong’s Kowloon Walled City, the most densely populated area on earth. Squalid, dark, and labyrinthine, the informal city was not only a hotbed for organized crime, but also a vibrant community of commerce and hope. Now, the Wall Street Journal has released this short documentary, bringing the city back to life and revealing why it holds a special place in world culture today.
Disney-backed garden suburb, Celebration, Fla.. Image Courtesy of Robert A.M. Stern via NYT
The modern suburb has become an unruly sprawl, homogenous in style and over-dependent on the automobile. However, according to Robert A. M. Stern's new manifesto “Paradise Planned: The Garden Suburb and the Modern City,” there is a superior alternative for suburban development that could attract millennials and preserve quality of life in terms of health, economic savings, and physical safety: the centrally planned, pedestrian-friendly garden suburb. You can learn more about Stern’s 1,072 page manifesto on the garden suburb in this article by the New York Times.
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Death in Venice will focus partially on the changing design of hospitals, places that many people die in every year. Image Courtesy of The Wellcome Library
This year’s Venice Architecture Biennale focuses on the fundamentals of architecture, and the theme of "absorbing modernity." Official exhibitions will highlight the basics of modern building, but one exhibition (unaffiliated with the official biennale) will take a unique approach to the term. Architects Alison Killing and Ania Molenda will devote their installation to the most fundamental quality of all: death.
Titled Death in Venice, this presentation will focus on how architecture has facilitated the act of dying during the past 100 years. All of the funding for the exhibition materials has been provided by the Fund for Creative Industries NL, but to transport the show to Venice, Killing and Molenda have started a Kickstarter campaign.
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Courtesy of Javier Corvalan + Colectivo Aqua Alta
Paraguay means “water that flows toward the sea” in the language of the country’s indigenous Guarani people. It is no surprise, then, that Paraguay’s entry for the 2014 Venice Biennale uses water as the primary structural member. Titled “Aqua Alta,” the Paraguayan pavilion responds to the Biennale’s focus on modern fundamentals by stating that modern architecture must achieve more with less.
Today marks the fifth anniversary of the opening of OMA’s Prada Transformer. This fantastical temporary structure, erected in 2009 adjacent to Gyeonghui Palace in Seoul, Korea, is one of Rem Koolhaas’ most popular projects to date. Composed of a stark white membrane stretched across four steel frame shapes, The Transformer was often referred to as an "anti-blob" --a hexagon, a rectangle, a cross, and a circle leaning against each other to create a tetrahedron-like object reminiscent of a circus tent. The name Transformer came from the idea that any one of the pavilion's sides could serve as the building's floor, allowing for four unique spaces in one building devoted to exhibitions of modern art, fashion and design.
The Prada Transformer played host to four such events, being lifted up and repositioned onto a different face each time via crane. The first was a garment exhibition, displayed using the hexagonal floor plan. The second, a film festival that took place on the rectangular floor plan. A fashion show was staged using the Transformer's circular floor plan, and an art installation was shown using the cruciform floor plan. As patron Miuccia Prada stated in an interview with The New York Times, “In my mind they [the arts] may be mixed but I want to keep them separate… So the Transformer concept was not for a generic space, but to be very specific, with all things separate in one building.”
We asked OMA's Vincent McIlduff to tell us more about this project. See his answers, a photo gallery and a time-lapse video of the transformation after the break!
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