AD Round Up: Best from Flickr Part II
As you all may know, last month we started featuring a selection of the best pictures from our Flickr pool. The pool has been growing a lot lately so we will keep on showing you some pictures in the future. You can also add yours, just click here and learn how! And remember that besides our Flickr pool you can also follow us through Twitter and our Facebook Page.
The picture of the Neuer Zollhof in Düsseldorf, Germany, was taken by arne boell. Check the other four after the break. (more…)
AD Round Up: BIG
Housing projects, a new City Hall for an Estonian city, a master plan for an island and the Danish Pavillion for Shanghai Expo 2010 are just some of the enormous variety of projects designed by BIG. Check them out on our first Round Up of the week.
Denmark Pavillion for Shanghai Expo 2010
In my opinion Bjarke Ingels, founder of BIG, is one of the best architects when it comes to give shape to the interests of an “unspoken” client on public buildings,either representing the values of a country or a culture. All with exceptional syntax and presentation skills. And BIG’s latest project (in collaboration with Arup and 2+1), the Danish Pavilion for the Shanghai 2010 Expo, does it again (read more…)
Zira Island Carbon Neutral Master Plan
Carbon Neutral master plans are being adopted in several countries, in times when energy and emissions are becoming very important. And that´s exactly what Azerbaijan will do to develop Zira Island on the Caspian Sea, located in the bay of the capital city Baku. The master plan was developed with danish BIG Architects and Ramboll engineers, with an architectural proposal based upon the country’s dramatic natural setting (read more…)
Mountain Dwellings
How do you combine the splendours of the suburban backyard with the social intensity of urban density? The Mountain Dwellings are the 2nd generation of the VM Houses. The program, however, is 2/3 parking and 1/3 living. What if the parking area became the base upon which to place terraced housing – like a concrete hillside covered by a thin layer of housing, cascading from the 11th floor to the street edge? (read more…)
Kaufhauskanal Metrozone (with Topotek1)
The IBA Hamburg is a building exhibition which is running in Hamburg until 2013 and has as its mission to develop solutions for the future of the metropolis. One in a long line of building exhibitions held throughout Germany which also included the 1927 Weißenhofsiedlung in Stuttgart which showed the latest developments in architecture and house construction (read more…)
Tallinn’s new City Hall
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 (read more…)
AD Round Up: Theatres Part I
There are few things more entertaining than enjoying a good show in a good theatre. From all over Europe and USA, we bring you our Round Up of previously featured theatres in ArchDaily.
Quarterhouse Performing Arts and Business Centre in Folkestone
Secretary of State for Cultura Media and Sport Andy Burnham, will officially open Alison Brooks Architect’s Quarterhouse Performing Arts and Business Centre in Folkestone, located in the Kent district, England. The ceremony will take place in March 5. The building is the centrepiece of the city’s arts-led regeneration programme spearheaded by client The Creative Foundation (read more…)
Vila Joiosa Auditorium Theatre / Arquitecturas Torres Nadal
The importance of the project of La Villa Joiosa is it’s ability to build itself as a public project generating a public space. Indeed, the volume of construction which requires the program of a large auditorium is huge. It is one of the programs with a greater volume to be inserted in the city. And it is essentially, a horizontal volume. And generally, unless it falls into a capricious situation, the ideal is to be blind (read more…)
Bijlmer Park Theater / Paul de Ruiter
In 2004, Paul de Ruiter was invited to compete in the selection of the architect who would design a cultural building in the southeast district of the city of Amsterdam. This cultural building was to be a multifunctional building for four users; a circus (Circus Elleboog), a theatre (Krater Theater), the Youth Theatre School and the Theatre Workplace, all professional organisations in the field of talent development (read more…)
UNStudio wins competition to design dance theatre in St. Petersburg
UNStudio’s design has won a competition to build a 21,000 square meter dance theatre in the historic centre of St. Petersburg, Russia. The new complex houses the Eifman Ballet of St. Petersburg, headed by choreographer Boris Eifman. From the four projects presented (Jean Nouvel, UNStudio, Snøhetta & Zao), UNStudio’s design was yesterday unanimously chosen by the jury for realisation (read more…)
Bengt Sjostrom Starlight Theatre / Studio Gang Architects
Rock Valley College wanted to develop a new regional facility for the performing arts at Starlight Theatre to replace an existing outdoor venue. Expanded facilities and a roof enclosure were needed so that performances could go on without the threat of rainouts. At the same time, there was a strong desire to maintain the sense of being outdoors (read more…)
AD Round Up: Cultural Centers Part I
From Mexico, Greece, USA, Denmark, and China. For today’s Round Up, we bring you previously featured Cultural Centers from all over the world on AD.
The Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center by Renzo Piano
The design for the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center at the Faliron Delta area in Athens, Greece. The building is being designed by -in my opinion- the master of sustainable architecture: Renzo Piano. The SNFCC is not an ordinary building, as it will house a very important program: the National Library of Greece and the Greek National Opera. This 187,800 sqm project will have a cost of € $450m (read more…)
Vladimir Kaspe Cultural Center / Jorge Hernandez de la Garza
The composition of the of the building is based on three fundamental and concordant elements to form a complete balanced one; on one hand a skeleton made of steel. Followed by an extremely sure and and resistant armed concrete body and to give the touch of subtle solidity, glass. The pieces that conform it, are assembled by means of punctual elements made by these materials (read more…)
Youth Recreation & Culture Center / Dorte Mandrup + Cebra
The building is situated in a residential area in a northern suburb of Copenhagen, Denmark. The area predominately consists of large villas from the turn of the century. The site is long and narrow- on one side bordering the railroad and on the other a busy road- Gersonsvej – hence there was a noise problem to be solved. The program was a mixed use complex containing several different institutions (read more…)
Alice Tully Hall Lincoln Center / Diller Scofidio + Renfro Architects
Dutch photographer Iwan Baan shared with us this great photographs he took for Domus Magazine’s June edition. This building is a part of the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in NYC and it was created thanks to the donoations of Alice Tully, a chamber music benefactor and patron of the arts. This is the first major renovation since the Juilliard School building, designed by Pietro Belluschi, opened in 1969 (read more…)
Guangzh Culture Center / Shuhei Endo
Japanese architect Shuhei Endo sent us some impressive images of his latest project: the Guangzh Culture Center in China. You can see all the images after the break (see more…)
AD Round Up: Houses in Brazil
Brazilian architects have always surprised us with their architecture. You can see some creative houses from Brazil previously featured on AD with this last Round Up of the month!
Joanopolis House / UNA Arquitetos
The house was designed for friends who used to visit Carambó, a farm two kilometers away where we built a pavilion in 2002. The region is located at the foot of the one thousand feet high Mantiqueira Mountain, on the border of São Paulo and Minas Gerais states. The condominium is located along the banks of Piracaia Lake which belongs to the water supply system of the capital (read more…)
Osler House / Marcio Kogan
In front of the entrance of the Osler House, located in Brasilia, there is a panel of tiles by the artist Athos Bulcão, designed especially for this wall. Dozens of buildings in Brasilia have panels by Athos, among them are: Planalto Palace, Itamaraty and the National Theater, all by Niemeyer. The artist’s modular tiles are an outstanding feature incorporated into the modern architecture (read more…)
Rio de Janeiro Residence / TAMABI
Two basic principles guided our project for the construction of a new penthouse foor to house a single 234-square-meter apartment, located at the base of the Corcovado Mountain in Rio de Janeiro’s forested Jardim Botânico neighborhood. The first was a demand for an open space with the least possible amount of internal subdivisions, with the intent to provide good cross ventilation (read more…)
Bento Golçalves House / Studio Paralelo
The house is located in the city of Bento Gonçalves, mountain region of Rio Grande do Sul – Brazil, in an area that originally was part of a rural site. The proposal was developed for a couple that will receive, eventually, its three children. The land, almost a square, 32 x 30 meters has flat topography broken by a smooth declivity in the North limit. Next to that natural irregularity, a set of araucarias trees (read more…)
Carapicuiba house / Angelo Bucci & Alvaro Puntoni
The most remarkable feature of the site where the house is located is its depression, in topographical terms. From the street, we cannot clearly see its ground level because the ground surface falls abruptly into a little valley and woods: a stage 6 m below. The program joins two different purposes: a house and an office, it is a place to both live and work. Although these two functions share the same space, it is as separate as possible (read more…)
AD Round Up: Awarded Competitions Part I
Many great projects are a result of important competitions around the world. So to start this week’s Round Up, we bring you previously featured awarded competitions from Croatia, Denmark, France, Spain, and Norway.
Zamet Centre Competition
3LHD is a croatian office that has developed some interesting houses, sports facilities and urban projects. And now they just won the private competition for the Zamet sports and community centre in Rijeka, Croatia. Rijeka is an industrial harbour city on the Adriatic Sea and the new complex will provide it with a new civic hub for both business people and the general public (read more…)
New Incineration Line in Denmark Competition
Erick van Egeraat has won the international competition for the design of a new incineration line in Roskilde, Denmark for Kara/Noveren, a local waste management company. Due to its large scale, the incinerator is destined to become an outstanding structure in the wide and open landscape of the Roskilde area. After its completion in 2013, the facility will produce both electricity and heating for the Roskilde district (read more…)
New Market in Barcelona Competition
b720 just informed us that they won the ideas competition for the new Market dels Encants in Barcelona, Spain, commissioned by the city. Near the iconic Agbar Tower, the project develops as a continuous platform that deals with the topography of the site, covered with a big roof that unifies all the activities on this platform. The roof varies its inclination in order to reflect different views and daylight changes (read more…)
Tour La Signal at Paris Competition
The La Defense is a 160 ha business district in the west of Paris, currently under a renewal plan to strengthen its place among the great international business districts. The plan is managed by the EPAD (The Public Establishment for Installation of La Défense), an organization formed by local authorities, government and neighbors focused on developing the La Defense for the best interests of its 20.000 residents (read more…)
Oslo Central Station Competition
Norwegian architects Space Group won the competition for Oslo´s new Central Station. The project consists on demolishing a big part of the existing station, to build a 4 stories tall structure that will unify the station. It will include 2 floors for offices hanging over the station. Also, an adjacent U-shaped building will be occupied by the biggest conference hotel in Norway (read more…)
AD Round Up: Architecture in Dubai
Maybe no other place on Earth has made more notice over the last few years than Dubai. From tall buildings to a houseboat, you can find all sort of architecture in this fantastic city. Enjoy our last Round Up of the week!
Jumeirah Gardens / SOM & Adrian Smith
It seems no one told Dubai about the financial crisis, as new projects keep being unveiled. This time, our green friends over Inhabitat tipped us on a mega development, owned by Maraas Holding: The Jumeirah Gardens. The master plan for this project was designed by SOM Chicago, and consists of a mixed-use development that incorporates low, medium, and high-density zones for business, residences (read more…)
Anara Tower by Atkins Design Studio
Well, here we have another skyscrapper in Dubai, this time in the shape of a giant wind turbine. When I saw this, i thought it had this turbine to generate eolic energy, but actually it’s a structure that holds a panoramic restaurant in the glass capsule at the top of the building, as you can see on the further images. The 2,15 feet (655m) tall tower includes a mixed use developement (read more…)
Houseboat / X-Architects
The fundamental structure of the floating home is created from two catamaran beams (for stability), stainless steel and glass. The layout of the structure, which is 20 meters by 6.7 meters, includes an upper deck containing a concealed kitchen, living room and an informal dining area. The Lower deck houses the bedrooms, bathroom and steering cabin. It also features a terrace (read more…)
The Origami / Kann Finch
This proposition reconsiders the stereotypical residential tower, in pursuit of a unique structuring of a new language, that the vertical organization of apartment living might allow. The formal constraints that the site demands are eroded to realize a rich expression of three dimensional image, surface and livability. The fundamental elements of the colonnaded street edges (read more…)
Al Rostamini Headquarters / MAD
The site for the Al Rostamini group headquarters is a long waterfront within the central business area of Dubai. Rather than creating a traditional big office block on this site, and severing the water from the public, we wanted to build something above it. Our concept is a thin slab, which hovers above the waterfront. This gives every office a view over the water, and frees up the ground level, allowing the public direct access to enjoy the waterfront (read more…)
AD Round Up: Educational Architecture Part II
To start this week’s Round Up, we bring you previously featured educational architecture from Spain, Portugal, France, and Slovenia. Enjoy!
Rafael Arozarena High School / Felipe Artengo…
The building is set on a plot of land that is very close to the historic town centre of La Orotava and this large building blends in perfectly with, and relates to the urban lay-out, the topography of the land around and in its visual relations from the near-by listed buildings. The school has been resolved as a plinth for the buildings located on the edge of the city centre, on the axes Colegio Street – S. Francisco Street (read more…)
Faculty of Mathematics / Bevk Perović arhitekti
New building for the Faculty of Mathematics, built in the main University area in Ljubljana is not a building in a standard sense of the word. It is, in fact, an addition, a three story slab built on top of the existing two story building, containing completely different programme. The new building literally grows out of the old structure, but despite its dominant role it allows the old structure its independence and dignity (read more…)
Barreiro College of Technology / ARX
The building site assigned for the School is located in the outskirts of the city of Barreiro. These are rural territories which were invaded by recent constructions intersecting green-gardens and reed plots. Residence houses are predominant and other functions were not predicted for this area and so this neighbourhood is now just a suburb with little urban life (read more…)
Research Facilities in UMH University / SUBARQUITECTURA
The building is located inside the Campus de los Desamparados in Orihuela, next to a lemon orchard. There, the conditions of light, lack of rain and heat are really extreme, exceeding 40º C during the summer months. Laboratories and departments are grouped by a structure of interspersed rings, which contain a system of semi-outdoor courtyards connected with each other at different levels (read more…)
Renovation of workshops at Joliot-Curie / Atelier Phileas
The renovation project presented a major advantage as well as a major difficulty. The advantage: the school is nested in a tree-shaded park. The difficulty: after asbestos removal, rooms in use had to be renovated. Due to this constraint, the architecture had to be both rigourous and structured. During the restructuring-extension of the workshops, our aim was to harmonise both existing and new architectures (read more…)
AD Round Up: Best from Flickr Part I
Starting today, every month we will feature a selection of the best pictures from our Flickr pool. You can also add yours! Just click here and learn how. Remember you can also follow us on Twitter, and throught our Facebook page!
This picture of the Audiotório do Ibirapuera, in Sao Paulo, Brazil, was taken by pedro kok. Check the other four after the break. (more…)
AD Round Up: Housing in Netherlands
Dutch architects have a lot to show us from their projects. So to start this week’s Round Up, we bring you previously featured housing projects from Netherlands.
De Rokade / Arons en Gelauff Architecten
In 2003, Groningen municipal council launched a project “The Intense City” to keep the city compact by increasing the building density of districts around the Centre. The Rokade Residential Tower Block is situated on one of the first increased density locations, and marks the corner of the Corpus den Hoorn Laan and the Sportlaan, the avenue providing access to the Hoornse Meer district (read more…)
De Plussenburgh / Arons en Gelauff Architecten
In 2001, a competition by invitation requested a design for a retirement housing project. The objective of this competition was a design to set a standard of architectural quality for upcoming projects in the ambitious redevelopment of the centre of IJsselmonde. The design for seniors aged 55 and older was inspired by the forthcoming retirement of the hippie generation (read more…)
FARO wins sustainable design competition with residencial tower
The city of Almere organized a design competition for urban villas and a residential tower for the Cascade park. These designs needed to fit within the ambition to develop the Cascade park as a ‘window of sustainability’: an inspiring example for ecological, social and economical sustainability (read more…)
Block 16 / René van Zuuk Architekten
Block 16 is part of the master plan designed by OMA for a new prestigious city centre in Almere. The autonomous expressive block reacts on two conditions: the billowing end marks as a kind of gatekeeper the harbour entrance. At the other end the movement is smoothened and the building fits in with the right-angled grid of the adjacent glass high-rise housing blocks (read more…)
Westerdok Apartments / MVRDV
The building which has just been completed with a total surface of 6000 m2 contains 46 apartments and a day-care centre. Each apartment has a balcony of varying depths which stretch as bands along the entire facade, offering varied outside spaces and views over the western docklands of Amsterdam. The floor-to-ceiling glass façade can be fully opened and contrasts with the other buildings (read more…)
AD Round Up: Foster + Partners
The works of Foster+Partners are recognized worldwide. In this Round Up, we show you an office in the UK and Amsterdam, an airport in Beijing, a pavillion for Shanghai 2010 and a superyacht.
Willis Headquarters at Lime Street
This two buildings are developed as a series of overlapping curved shells while its section is arranged in three steps. The roof terraces overlooking the plaza on the lower two steps are directly accessible from the office spaces. Both buildings have a central core to provide open floor plates and maximum flexibility in use. The entire development is visually unified by its highly reflective façade (read more…)
Beijing Airport
After 4 years the Beijing Airport -currently the biggest one in the world- is finished, just in time for the 2008 Olympics. The airport, designed by Foster + Partners, turned out to be a very efficient building in terms of in terms of operational efficiency, passenger comfort, sustainability and access to natural light. As an interpretation of traditional chinese culture the roof of the airport has a dragon-like form (read more…)
Ernst & Young Headquarters, Amsterdam
Foster + Partners just finished the first tower in Amsterdam, at the Vivaldi-park area of the new Zuidas district, south of the city. The 24-storey building is divided into two twelve metre-wide column free towers with open, flexible floor plates. The blocks are staggered in plan to admit as much natural light as possible, helping this tower to be ten per cent more efficient than the target Dutch environmental standards (read more…)
UAE Pavillion for Shanghai Expo 2010
Foster + partners decided to base on a sand dune for their UAE Pavillion design for the Shanghai Expo 2010. The pavillion is a reference to the symbolic feature of the desert landscape shared by all seven emirates. The peak rises to 20 meters in height and it is entered via a glazed lip at the pavillions base. Light penetrates the building’s business center and VIP area through glazed vertical strips (read more…)
Super-yacht
The fractional ownership super-yacht company YachtPlus launched its first yacht – The Ocean Emerald – in La Spezia, Italy on April 25 in the presence of Norman Foster. This contemporary 41 metre yacht has been designed with a strong emphasis on space and light and has five suites for up to 12 guests, who will be looked after by a permanent, highly trained crew of seven. The internal planning of the yacht offers total flexibility (read more…)
AD Round Up: Houses in Japan Part I
We have featured some pretty peculiar houses on AD. Many of them come from Japan. So to start this week’s Round Up we bring you our first selection of houses in Japan.
House & Atelier / Atelier Bow-Wow
As it is hard to run 3 places including the university laboratory, we were looking for a site for our house and atelier and ‘a flag shape site’ was up for nomination. A flag shape site is surrounded by buildings and only connected to the road by a narrow strip of land. It is therefore hard to plan or construct on and it is cheaper. It is a chance to utilize our past experience having changed challenging conditions (read more…)
House in Kohoku / Torafu
This site is located in a quiet residential region reclaimed on a hill of Yokohama. With neighboring houses lined very close together, this flag-shaped site meets a road at a verge of no more than 3 meters in width. Since the site is tilted to the north, and the neighboring house to the south is two-storied and built on a higher ground, at first it seemed almost impossible to let in light from the south (read more…)
House N / Sou Fujimoto
A home for two plus a dog. The house itself is comprised of three shells of progressive size nested inside one another. The outermost shell covers the entire premises, creating a covered, semi-indoor garden. Second shell encloses a limited space inside the covered outdoor space. Third shell creates a smaller interior space. Residents build their life inside this gradation of domain (read more…)
M house / Architecture W
Located in one of Nagoya’s more attractive neighborhoods, but with only 2.5 meters of dead end street access and set on a difficult site that steps down from this access level a total of 7 meters, M-House is designed to address the site conditions that rendered the site “unbuildable” by the local real estate community and provide for a simple, modern lifestyle for the American owner/architect (read more…)
White Cave / Takao Shiotsuka Atelier
The house is built on a hill looking down at a town area. The site’s shape has an irregular form. There is a height difference of 2m in the site. The north side is adjacent to a neighbor with this height difference. In the west and the south sides trees grow thick right next to the neighbors. And to the East, you can see the town area. Walking to the site through a path that goes side by side (read more…)
AD Round Up: Lake Houses Part I
You just bought a nice site by the lake and need a nice house to built? To finish this week of Round Up, here you can see five examples of nice lake houses on different parts of the world.
Pirihueico House / Alejandro Aravena
We were asked to design a summer/winter house in a remote landscape in the most southern part of Chile. More than a design, the client wanted, first of all, an equation that included every possible aspect that one could consider to be included; the design then had to be just the resolution of that equation. A volcanic site, 4.000 mm of rain every year, strong winds from the north and east, views towards the lake (read more…)
CO2 Saver House / Peter Kuczia
This sustainable house – like a chameleon – blends with its surrounding area on Laka Lake in south of Poland. Colourful planks within the timber façade reflect the tones of the rural landscape. The window reveals with fibre cement cladding, frame images of the countryside. Analogical to the most creatures, the building is outside symmetrical, although the internal zones are arranged asymmetrically (read more…)
House on Lake Rupanco / Alejandro Beals, Christian Beals
The house is located on the edge of lake Rupanco, in the south of Chile. The 160 x 30 meters site has a 36 meters slope and south-facing views of the lake. The house programme was meant to include a lounge and an office where books, photos and fishing tackle could be kept. The dining room, kitchen and terrace were to have visual continuity, participating at once together and separately in the one space (read more…)
House II in Aroeira / ARX
This is the second project for the urbanization of the Aroeira’s golf course, a field of lawns, sand zones and lakes, and in this case, also a pine tree area. The terrain is narrow and long, slightly triangulated and with a soft inclination alongside the lot. It is also densely occupied by large pines, which end suddenly at north by the immediate vicinity of the golf course. The house consists on three continuous bodies (read more…)
Villa Roling / Paul de Ruiter
The clients of villa Röling are passionate art collectors. They love to be surrounded by works of art. Therefore their main wish regarding their new dwelling was that it would do greatest justice to their collection of paintings and sculptures. However, the location of their house, at the edge of the lake Westeinderplas, is so spendid that it was no option to make a closed volume (read more…)
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…)
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…)
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…)
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…)
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…)
AD Round Up: Beach Houses Part II
Summer is here. There’s nothing better than enjoy the sun and relax in your beach house. You don’t have one? So look at the second part of Beach Houses Round Up and imagine how relaxing it would be!
TDA House / Cadaval & Solà-Morales
A Fresh house for extreme weather that surpasses the standard limits of comfort of the city-dweller; a low-cost house requiring minimum maintenance; a house for any number of habitants, flexible in its uses and configuration; a house that can open up completely to the exterior or close in on itself; a beach house that can be built in a distant corner of the world (read more…)
House in Matinhal / ARX
Land is being split in generic parcels of typical resorts, claiming for a superficial architectural idea of a “Portuguese house”, to please and sell to foreign tourists. The house was developed along the precise regulations, defined in the urbanistic project, from distances to borders, access and total amount of construction area and volume. The highest and longest volume is located in the north (read more…)
Metamorfosis 1 / Jose Ulloa Davet + Delphine Ding
The project is organized according to a new helical path which, through the extension of an existing deck and the overhang of the new room, allows the user to go up to two new panoramic terraces on the house. The skin on the project is designed as an autonomous unit, through modulated square openings with measures based on a 30 cms. module and a skin with a changing rhythm (read more…)
Lefevre House / Longhi Architects
Conceived as the place where the arid Peruvian desert meets the Pacific Ocean, this beach house located at Punta Misterio 117 km. south of Lima, is an intervention where the integration of architecture and landscape was an important concern. Sand garden roofs act as the extension of the desert; lap and recreation pools connect the ocean with the house, while a glass box hangs from the structure (read more…)
Guarujá House / Bernardes Jacobsen
The whole idea of the project was created when Thiago was visiting the site. There, in front of the client, he sketched what later would be the transverse section of what was being proposed: a vacation house, for a couple and their two kids. A place where they could invite friends over frequently. Designed to be a pavilion supported by only five pillars, with en-suites bedrooms, living room(s) (read more…)
AD Round Up: Office Buildings Part II
Many days, we get to spend more time at the office than in the comfort of our home. Depending on the office, that may not be a bad thing after all. To start this week we bring you our second part of previously featured office buildings.
San Paolo Bank / Baltasarh & Parasite Studio
The new office is located on the Unirii Boulevard, line connecting the new center with the south entrance of the city and featuring newly built buildings, as well as currently under construction ones. The area has no unitary structure due to the lack of an existing consistent building body, on one hand and, on the other hand due to the failure to observe unitary regulations for the already built constructions (read more…)
NRGi’s Headquarters / SHL Architects
NRGi’s new corporate headquarters is situated in an area marked by a number of freestanding buildings. NRGi stands out from its neighbours in the surrounding area in virtue of its visually light, metallically gleaming built volume. Distinguished by an angular and distinctive façade, the building forms a crisp contrast to the mellow, scenic context (read more…)
Vital Building / Mozas Aguirre arquitectos
This is the headquarters for the local savings bank. The building reproduces the scale of the surrounding small woods, a park of the Natura 2000 networking programme. The floor plan has a chromosome shape with four arms. The structural concept is based on pairs of exterior metal supports, clad in stainless steel composite panels. One of the arms has been conceived as a 26 meter cantilever (read more…)
Consorcio Building Concepcion / Enrique Browne
The rainy city of Concepción, is located in the mouth of the Bío-Bío River, 520 Km south of Santiago. It has aprox. 220.000 inhabitants, but its threshold spans reaches some 630.000 people. The highlights of its economy are the elaboration of steel and the wood industry, both on wide exporting booms. We were asked to design a branch of the ‘Consorcio Nacional de Seguros’ (read more…)
Vanhaerents office building / BURO II
Vanhaerents is a developer who consistently chooses for projects that can stand the test of time. These projects may vary from residential and office buildings, over schools, hospitals and even sports infrastructure. Managing director Joost Vanhaerents continuously seeks out new frames of thought and opted to work with BURO II for the new office building (read more…)
AD Round Up: Sports Architecture Part II
An impressive stadium may be well known around the world. The latest example is the Bird’s Nest in Beijing. So to finish this week’s Round Up, we bring you our second part of previously featured Sports Architecture.
Sports and Leisure Centre / ACXT
The project has been developed within a plan to transform and regenerate the coal-mining area of Asturias, following a deep crisis in a sector that until now had been its main source of wealth: its coal mines. We understood that within this context, the building should have a symbolic, turn-of-the-century appeal, marking a turning point in the life of the coalfields of Asturias (read more…)
La Peña Multi-Sport Pavillion / Coll-Barreu Arquitectos
The sports complex is an uneven volume that complies with multiple conditions that coexist in the lot. A semitransparent fencing of black concrete and glass tries to respond to the different situations generated between the transforming residential city and natural hillside profoundly affected by industrialization. The building generates small exterior spaces and empty interior ones (read more…)
Sports & Culture Centre / Dorte Mandrup + b&k brandlhuber & co
The building´s structure is composed of steel and timber covered with opalescent polycarbonate panels with a low U-value. This translucent cover offers excellent daylight conditions and at night the structure appears as a glowing crystal. The building will be used for a variety of daily sport and cultural activities such as concerts and theatre performances. The dynamic landscape inside allows for various activities (read more…)
Higueritas Sport Center / GBGV Arquitectos
Located on a dense metropolitan area between the Santa Cruz and La Laguna districts, this building incorporates sports facilities to fill the lack of equipment. The required program is quite complex, in order to organize services to practice several sports, mostly the usual sports for covered courts such as basketball, volleyball, handball, tennis and a space for gymnasium and fitness (read more…)
Council Sport Complex / Vora Arquitectura
The Council Sport Complex is a building situated in a zone with a number of important developments in recent years with others pending. The complex is important for the revitalisation of the neighbourhood, which is historically a run-down area and also has to contribute to the integration of all social strata to the area through wellbeing and its use of sporting activities (read more…)
