Sebastian Jordana
eVolo 2010 Skyscraper Competition
After several years of organizing the annual Skyscraper Competition it has become a renowned architectural prize around the world. The best projects of each competition are widely published from architecture, design, and fashion publications to technology, business, and entertainment magazines. The winning projects are also featured in websites, television documentaries, and galleries.
We would like to invite students and professional architects, engineers, and designers to take part in the 2010 Skyscraper Competition. The main idea of this contest is to examine the relationship between the skyscraper and the natural world, the skyscraper and the community and the skyscraper and urban living.
The aim of the competition is to push our imagination to redefine the term skyscraper through the use of new materials, technology, aesthetics, programs, and spatial organizations. Globalization, environmental warming, flexibility, adaptability, and the digital revolution are just some of the multi-layered elements that should be taken in consideration.
There are no restrictions in regards to site, program or size. The objective is to provide maximum freedom to propose the most innovative projects for this fascinating architectural genre. Ultimately, the designs should help the environment, restructure our cities and improve our way of life.
Participants must register by January 12, 2010 at www.evolo-arch.com. You can find more details about fees and schedule at the official site.
Passive House at Parsons The New School for Design
Passive House Consultants’ Training Program will take place at Parsons The New School for Design from July 6 till July 17. The program is designed as a series of three, three-day sessions. These sessions are meant for those architects and building system designers who want to learn how to successfully implement Passive House design principles in residential, commercial, and retrofit scenarios.
The Program is an overview of:
•Principles of Passive House Design – Heat Transfer, Airtightness, Super-insulation, Ventilation and Moisture Control
•Instruction in the Passive House Planning Package (PHPP), our powerful and precise energy modeling software
•Mechanical Systems
•Construction Examples
•Materials Selection
•Quality Assurance
You can register for phases I, II and/or III here.
The Roundtable Discussion: Passive House in the US will take place at Kellen Auditorium, 66 Fifth Av., New York, NY, this July 14 from 6:30pm-8:30pm. It’s open to public, but please RSVP to sce@newschool.edu.
AD Round Up: Health Architecture Part I
Different kinds of health architecture in different parts of the world. From Portugal, Netherlands, Japan, Sudan and Burkina Faso, we bring you our Round Up of previously featured health architecture projects on ArchDaily.
Kinderstad / Sponge Architects & Rupali Gupta + IOU Architecture
The goal of “Kinderstad” is to extract the sick child, its family and friends from the unpleasant surrounding of a hospital and to enable an encounter in a much better atmosphere. This new specialised type of health care for sick children gives the visitors the chance to forget for a moment that the child is sick and to facilitate the normal development of the young patients (read more…)
Vila de Conde Hospital Pediatric Wing / 100 Planos Arquitectura
We were asked to build a pediatric wing on a very damaged XIX century hospital. The idea was to create a building that didn’t look like a hospital, where children and adults feld as if they were at home. An emotional, simple and non clinic, yet efficient space, were blue a white domain, under the doctors colorful closes. The interior space is organized by two parallel corridors (read more…)
Children’s Center for Psychiatric Rehabilitation / Sou Fujimoto
This is the treatment center for mentally disturbed children where they live together to get regaining their mental health. It may be thought that it is a very special building when I write so, but it is truly rich life space that requested in origin like a large house and also like a small city, the intimacy of a house and also the variety of the city. This is a proposal of a loose method (read more…)
Women’s Health Centre / FARE
The social/health-services program developed by AIDOS, together with its local partners was focused on providing the educational services, information and awareness about women’s sexual and reproductive rights in Sector 27 of Ouagadougou, a peripheral urban area settled by the rural population. The social program called for the realization of a building complex (read more…)
Salam Centre for Cardiac Surgery / Studio Tam associati
The hospital has been developed around an empty space, physically and ideally occupied by two enormous mango trees, located at the centre of the site (a plot of land on the banks of the Nile about 20 km from Khartoum). This is a symbolic space from which all the trajectories along which the building grew, were born. In line with traditional housing structures, the hospital is configured around a hollow space (read more…)
Three student projects from Tulane City Center
The Tulane City Center houses the Tulane University School of Architecture’s urban research and outreach programs. So far this year, the students at the Tulane School of Architecture have built three projects, a Green Pavillion (a sustainable exhibition on rainwater re-use, a Farmer’s Market in Hollygrove, and a LEED certified (soon to be) house in Central City. All of these projects are located in New Orleans.
You can find more on the Tulane City Center here. Images and description of the three projects, after the break.
4th International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam
How and what can architects and urbanistst contribute to the way we live in cities? What is the Open City? How do people work, think, dream and act there? And why is it urgent to re-imagine the Open City?
These are just some of the questions that will confront the visitor to Open City: Designing Coexistence.
The 4th edition of the IABR will take place from 24 September 2009 until 10 January 2010 in Rotterdam and Amsterdam. You can find the program on the official site, including debates, lectures, and theater performances .
Perkins Eastman proposal for Kohinoor Design Competition
As one of five international architecture firms invited by Kohinoor CTNL Infrastructure Co. Ltd. to participate in a design competition to create a mixed-use urban development in Mumbai, India, Perkins Eastman submitted two bold approaches-one, a singular 33-story, 1.16M sf (108,000 sm) high-rise tower and two-story retail base; the other, a low- and mid-rise, 750,000 sf (69,700 sm) two building scheme. Each is a visionary catalyst for smart, green urban development that establishes an iconic sense of place amid juxtapositions of traditional and modern India.
Both schemes incorporate sustainable elements to create an indoor environment that is healthy to occupy and cost-effective to operate: intelligent facade design, harnessing alternative energies, harvesting and recycling rainwater, and incorporating smart technologies such as solar chimneys and abundant facade plantings to filter and improve air quality.
In each, colored glass and richly colored terra cotta contrast with cool sleek aluminum elements amid verdant landscaping. Both schemes utilize a bright and energizing palette of materials that integrate the colorful aspects of Indian culture with an unwavering commitment to a more sustainable environment.
More images after the break.
Al Maktoum A&E Hospital / Perkins Eastman
Our friends from Perkins Eastman sent us their design for Al Maktoum Accident and Emergency (A&E) Hospital-the newest and most sophisticated Accident and Emergency Hospital of its kind in the UAE.
Chosen by the Dubai Health Authority and the Department of Health and Medical Services (DOHMS) to create an advanced A/E hospital, Perkins Eastman designed a facility capable of providing immediate care for minor- to high-level trauma. An ambulance receiving area is directly linked to a surgical trauma operating suite and a diagnostic imaging unit with MRI, CT, and X-ray capabilities. The 300-bed, 85,000 facility includes a large, five-floor nursing unit providing specialized treatment and care for patients recovering from surgery.
More images after the break.
AD Round Up: Norwegian Architecture Part I
Those who have been lucky enough to visit Norway surely know how beautiful its landscape is. But not only its sorroundings are amazing, they have some pretty amazing architecture. So to finish this week of Round Up, we bring you previously featured Norwegian architecture.
Oslo Opera House / Snohetta
The operahouse is the realisation of the winning competion entry. Four diagrams, which were part of the entry, explain the building’s basic concept. Opera and ballet are young artforms in Norway. These artforms evolve in an international setting. The Bjørvika peninsula is part of a harbour city, which is historically the meeting point with the rest of the world (read more…)
Hotel Kirkenes / Sami Rintala
Kirkenes is a city of 6000 inhabitants (ca. 9500 in the larger area) in North East Norway next to Russia. Far enough from the political and economical centers, such as capitals, bigger cities, giant business headquarter and cultural institutions, this Barents city has created its own way of international and dynamic interactivity on a grass root level in necessary everyday survival activity like fishing (read more…)
Tautra Monastery / JSA
The project is situated on Tautra island in Trondheimsfjorden. It is a new monastery for 18 nuns, complete with a small church and all the facilities needed to make a living, as areas for production and so on. The original programme has been reduced with around 30% by eliminating almost all the corridors in the project. This has been possible by analyzing the way the monastery works (read more…)
Oslo School of Architecture / JVA
The project won 1st prize in an open architectural competition in 1998. The exterior of the existing building has a conservation status. The architects have kept the block open towards the river, and combined the new programme with the logic of the existing building together with the surroundings in one spatial sequence. An access court has been cut out of the existing 1st floor slab (read more…)
Strandkanten / 70ºN Arkitektur
This project is part of a masterplan that looks to develop a reclaimed area of the Tromsø strait. It’s amazing what is being done in Europe in terms of new dwellings. The construction of the rest of the masterplan is currently in progress. Strandkanten is a new housing area just south of the centre of Tromsø, attractively situated on a reclaimed area in the Tromsø strait (read more…)
L.A. in Wien / Wien in L.A., an exhibition in SCI-Arc
The Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) is pleased to present L.A. in Wien / Wien in L.A, an exhibition featuring works by Hitoshi Abe, Peter Cook, Zaha Hadid, Thom Mayne, and Eric Owen Moss juxtaposed with those by R.M. Schindler and Richard Neutra that investigate the architecture of both Los Angeles and Vienna and their respective influences on one another over the last century. L.A. in Wien / Wien in L.A. is on view July 24 through September 13 at the SCI-Arc Library Gallery, 960 E. 3rd Street, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, CA 90013.
The L.A. in Wien/Wien in L.A exhibition begins with a digital presentation of photographs and drawings, entitled Schindler/Neutra: Vienna/Los Angeles 2.0, offering a brief overview tracing the architectural link between the cities when Vienna-born architects R.M. Schindler and Richard Neutra first settled in Los Angeles. The overview highlights their respective architectural innovations, while exploring the questions: What do architects from Vienna bring to Los Angeles (and vice-versa), and conversely, how does Los Angeles influence their work?
L.A. in Wien/Wien in L.A continues with an in-depth study of five invited entries from the competition held in fall 2008 by the Vienna University of Economics and Business. Seminal L.A.-based and international architects- Zaha Hadid Architects (Hamburg, Germany/London), Atelier Hitoshi Abe (Sendai, Japan/Los Angeles), Eric Owen Moss Architects (Los Angeles), Thom Mayne/Morphosis Architects (New York/Los Angeles) and Peter Cook, Archigram/CRABstudio Architects (London)- offered their solutions to integrate campus and urban life in Vienna, while also complementing the given Master Plan designed by BUSarchitektur. Through drawings and renderings, the exhibition presents each architect’s detailed approach to infrastructure and urban planning.
Admission is free. Seating is first come, first served. Events are broadcast live online at http://www.sciarc.edu/live/
Top 250 US Architectural Firms
Architectural Record recently published their Top 250 architecture firms. Companies are ranked according to revenue for architectural services performed in 2008 in $ millions.
Firms engaged in the business of architectural design that responded to Engineering News-Record’s annual Top 500 Design Firms survey submitted these revenue figures. Number 1 was for AECOM Technology Corporation (in the picture), an engineer-architect firm from Los Angeles, California.
The firms classify themselves by:
A=Architect
AE=Architects-Engineer
AEC=Architect-Engineer-Contractor
EA=Engineer-Architect
You can see the top 25, after the break.
BIG wins International Competition to design Tallinn’s new City Hall
UPDATE: Thanks to your comments, BIG sent us the drawings and diagrams of the project. Check them out in the gallery!
An international idea competition was held for Tallinn’s new City Hall in Estonia and the best concept was presented by the Bjarke Ingels Group from Denmark together with Adams Kara Taylor of the UK.
The purpose of the international idea contest was to find the best architectural solution for the new administrative building of the city government that will be situated on a 35,000 m2 plot near the Linnahall building. The contest for the new city was met with a great interest, 81 architects and their teams were willing to present an entry. Of those, the international jury chose the best 9 to shortlist as finalists into the second phase of the competition. By May 15 the finalists handed in their final solutions. The international jury’s decision to award BIG’s entry first place in the competition was unanimous and was presided by the vice mayor Taavi Aas.
More images after the break.
RMJM designs luxury resort on Vietnam
International architectural company RMJM has revealed details of the luxurious new Hyatt Regency Danang Resort and Spa in Vietnam, which it is designing on behalf of developers Indochina Land. Hyatt Regency Danang Resort and Spa is located on China Beach, in Danang, which was named by Forbes magazine as one of the top 10 most beautiful beaches in the world.
The resort includes a range of luxury residences and a five-star resort hotel, the 200-room Hyatt Regency Danang Resort and Spa. It is designed to resemble a traditional Vietnamese townscape, with the various buildings arranged in clusters, taking particular inspiration from the historic town of Hue, located just six miles away.
Construction has just started on the beach resort and the planned luxury residences have now been opened for sale. As well as the hotel and spa, the village resort includes 174 luxury condominiums and 27 oceanfront pool villas, covering 50 acres of land stretching along a half-mile of China Beach. The master planning has been designed by RMJM so that each villa and condominium offers maximum views of the scenic Marble Mountain and the South China Sea.
More images after the break.
AD Round Up: Religious Architecture Part I
Architecture is also present is perhaps one of the most ancient and traditional subjects in history: Religion. So to start this week’s Round Up, we bring you previously featured religious architecture.
Tautra Monastery / JSA
The project is situated on Tautra island in Trondheimsfjorden. It is a new monastery for 18 nuns, complete with a small church and all the facilities needed to make a living, as areas for production and so on. The original programme has been reduced with around 30% by eliminating almost all the corridors in the project (read more…)
Tanatorio Municipal de Leon / BAAS
The building is conceived as a tomb of tombs. A completely buried construction, it eludes its volume and its signification in order to camouflage itself in the interstices of a too-close residential area. A sheet of water by way of a roof constitutes the single facade, reflecting León’s sky like an allegory of death. All that emerges from the water (read more…)
The Church of the Holy Cross / KHR
The church of the holy cross was conceived as part of the landscape around Jyllinge. With its glass façade facing the fjord and a “fishing net” dividing the space of the church, the design clearly takes the history of the place seriously. The place has an emotional power with its spatial topography that seems to make time stand still (read more…)
Temporary chapel for the Deaconesses of St-Loup / Localarchitecture
In the summer of 2007, Localarchitecture and architect Danilo Mondada were awarded the contract to renovate the mother house of the Deaconess Community of St-Loup. The commission involves the complete renovation of a historic building (read more…)
The Prayer Chapel / debartolo architects
The PRAYER PAVILION OF LIGHT is part of a 58-acre church campus in Phoenix, USA. Sited along the edge of a desert preserve, a series of inclined, landscaped planes are incised by a 600 foot-long processional walk, progressively revealing the chapel as one gradually ascends the 28 vertical feet between the chapel mount and garden entrance (read more…)
Spaceport America began construction last Friday
Spaceport America, the first spaceport ever began construction last Friday in New Mexico. The spaceport, designed by Foster + Partners and URS Corporation will host commercial operations by private space travel companies, like Virgin Galactic.
The 110,000-plus square foot facility will use cost-effective, energy-efficient green building practices and will be built to be LEED-certified. From earth-tubes that will pre-condition the air to reduce HVAC costs by 50-70% to solar thermal panels on the roof for hot water to the embedded in-floor loop system, Spaceport America is both unique and iconic in terms of visual and environmental design.
Seen at Gizmodo. More images after the break.
AD Round Up: Interiors Part II
Not everything is big buildings or beautiful houses with big patios. Architecture is also about interiors. So to finish this week’s Round Up, we bring you our second part (check the first one) of previously featured interior works.
Sheet Lightning Cafeteria / Die Baupiloten
The Baupiloten have constructed a new cafeteria within the framework of a new master plan for the remodeling of the TU Berlin’s main building. The cafeteria connects two courtyards located within the listed 19th century building and provides them with a new function. The cafeteria’s distinctive luminous ceiling is already visible from the university’s foyer and through the windows of the inner courtyards (read more…)
Night Club / Moomoo
Nowadays, to choose where to go out to have some drinks may be a difficult one. But this cool night club makes it easy. Designed by architects Jakub Majewski and Lukasz Pastuszka from Moomoo this great night club in Poland was completed in 2008. It has some very stylish interiors. I like the curtain-like skin that encloses spaces, as it lets light drop on it, generating an ever-changing interior (read more…)
White Apartment / Parasite Studio
The apartment is located on the first floor of a building raised in the last century in the central area of Timisoara, within an area of protected buildings. From the first design sketches we tried to get distance from the interventions that have become „standard procedures” in the local scene of designing within old buildings. The owner, a jazz passionate, wished for an elegant and flexible apartment (read more…)
Future Hotel Showcase / LAVA
The Future Hotel forms part of the IAO Inhaus2, a program that focuses on meeting the expectations and requirements of hotel guests using tomorrow’s technology. Blurring the definition between technology and interior space, the showcase room features the latest innovations in the fields of media and visual communication, along with prototypical products developed by renowned manufacturers (read more…)
Rosso Restaurant / SO Architecture
The Rosso restaurant is situated in Ramat Yishay, a town in the valley of Yezre-el in the Northern part if Israel. The beautiful scenery of the Northern part of Israel, with its landscapes of green and red fields, covering the low hills, is a popular tourist attraction, inviting visitors to excursions, with quiet fields, and inviting places to rest in the shadow of oak trees (read more…)
OSKA Architects Selected for Pre-design Study of Burke Museum
The University of Washington Board of Regents has approved a recommendation to contract with Olson Sundberg Kundig Allen Architects on a pre-design study for the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture at the University of Washington in Seattle.
The pre-design is the precursor to a major expansion of the museum, which currently occupies a 1962 campus building. The study will clarify facility needs and evaluate options for improvements that could involve renovation, expansion, or a brand new facility at the current campus. The pre-design will begin in July and be completed by the end of December 2009.
Seattle-based Olson Sundberg Kundig Allen Architects is the 2009 winner of the American Institute of Architects’ National AIA Firm Award. This annual award – often referred to as the “Firm of the Year” award – is the highest honor the national AIA bestows on an architectural firm and recognizes a firm that has consistently produced distinguished architecture for at least ten years. Olson Sundberg Kundig Allen also has experience designing Seattle-area museums, including the Wing Luke Asian Museum (2008) and the Frye Art Museum (1997).
Stadiums for the 2014 World Cup in Brazil
Although the 2010 World Cup in South Africa is a little bit less than a year away, in Brazil they already started to prepare for the 2014 World Cup. Brazil has won more World Cups than any other country in the world, so they want to make sure their stadiums are as spectacular as their soccer team.
The 12 cities that will host the World Cup are Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Belo Horizonte, Porto Alegre, Curitiba, Brasília, Cuiabá, Manaus, Fortaleza, Salvador, Recife and Natal. You can see 6 great stadiums after the break.
Thanks to our reader Luis for sending us this info!
AD Round Up: Brick Houses Part I
I’ve always like brick houses. There are just so many ways to use brick and make it look amazing on your place. So to show you some really good examples, we bring you our first selection of previously featured brick houses on AD.
Richmond Place House / Boyd Cody Architects
The house is located in a conservation area close to Dublin’s city centre, on a small but prominent infill corner site at the junction between Mountpleasant Avenue and Richmond Place. A modest dwelling built to replace the existing cottage located on the site. The accommodation consists of 2no. bedrooms, 2no. bathrooms, kitchen, utility and living / dining area set over three separate levels (read more…)
House Baetens / JagerJanssen architecten
The intersection of a planned green strip and an existing avenue provide an architectural opportunity for this a two-storey dwelling. The first floor appears to be cumbersome and heavy materialised: dark bricks with continuous seams result in an abstract rugged character. The second floor will be a wooden shaft: lighter in colour, weight and design. The cooking ilse is lit by a translucent plane (read more…)
Mona Vale House / Choi Ropiha
The client for the project has a long standing interest in building sustainability developed through working at the Sustainable Energy Development Authority, a government agency in sustainability. With this interest in mind, the client approached Choi Ropiha to design a house that would demonstrate and test a number of active and passive sustainable initiatives whilst accommodating a contemporary coastal lifestyle (read more…)
The house of Clay and Oak / Dow Jones Architects
Poplar Cottage is a small house on The Green in Walberswick built in the early 1920s. Over the past eighty years a number of piecemeal extensions had resulted in a peculiar internal organisation that cut the house off from its garden. Our brief was to demolish it and to make a new house, but initial conversation with both the planners and Parish Council suggested that there would be much opposition to this (read more…)
Franzen house / SchappacherWhite
This house was built on a historic rock outcropping adjacent to an eighteenth century landmark lighthouse facing the sea. This modern classic, almost a fallen victim to total demolition, has undergone a complete renovation and expansion by SchappacherWhite Ltd. and Brennan Beer Gorman/Architects (BBG), that honors Franzen’s original design intent while satisfying the needs of a 21st century family (read more…)
The Architecture of Star Wars
Many of us, long before we even knew about architecture dreamed about a fantastic world in a galaxy far far away. Nowadays, Star Wars continue to surprise people all around the world, and we can now see the movie with a different eye. Perhaps, the architect’s eye.
At The Architect’s Journal, they selected the best Star Wars buildings. The top ten, after the break.
Oscar Niemeyer auditorium under construction
Ravello, off South Italy’s coast, is said to be one of the most beautiful spots on earth. And Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer’s all-white curvaceous auditorium is set amongst its luxuriant rocky hillsides and against the backdrop of the refined Amalfi coastal town’s trademark awe-inspiring brilliant blue sea and endless open skies.
Completion is due in September, ready to showcase the new auditorium’s unique feature: its over-hanging canopied roof (or solaio a sbalzo in Italian). More plainly put, this means that while the amenities are set off the entrance piazza or in the floors below, a section of the 1,500m2 canopy, which contains the actual auditorium space, literally and strikingly, hangs in the air supported by nothing.
Seen at Wallpaper. More images after the break (we searched all over the web for more images, if you can find some, please post the links!)
Saxo Bank awarded RIBA International Award 2009
Danish firm 3XN won the RIBA International Award 2009 for their design of Saxo Bank (previously featured on AD), the new headquarters for the Investment Bank.
Kim Herforth Nielsen, Principal Architect of 3XN comments on the design saying, “The building is designed in such a way that it challenges the surroundings and yet contributes to a unified setting. The interior has been designed in close collaboration with Saxo Bank to create an environment of learning; encouraging interaction and sharing of knowledge”.
The RIBA International Award recognizes excellence conceived by its members from around the world. The awards ceremony will be held in London on July 14th.
