Nelson-Atkins Museum / Steven Holl Architects

Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts, the leading cultural institution of the region, has recently selected Steven Holl Architects to design a new museum building to support its collections, exhibitions, and various educational programs.  After a comprehensive international competition, MFAH asked Steven Holl, Snøhetta, and Morphosis to develop site-specific concepts for the planned expansion.  The jury unanimously chose Holl as his strong portfolio of built museums, such as the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art and the recently finished Cité de l’Océan et du Surf, display a sense of elegance and clarity much desired by the MFAH.

 More about the museum after the break. read more »

Sarah Crowley - Winning Proposal

Tesseract Collective‘s shared with us the results of their recent competition “Almost Home”, which asked designers to consider how it is possible to rehabilitate homeless people. They hold regular design competitions around humanitarian topics, with the intention of opening discussion over how architecture can be used powerfully to alleviate suffering and social deprivation around the world. “Almost Home” was the second homeless themed competition they have held. The brief called for a holistic and thoughtful strategy, which would integrate well with the urban environment and have a more long-term approach than immediate survival and comfort. More images and information on the winning entries after the break. read more »

Weiss/Manfredi + OLIN

As we have shared previously on AD, Washington DC’s National Mall – America’s most visited national park with over 25 million visitors a year- is undergoing a total restoration.  The $700 million project will be the first major renovation in over 35 years, and will focus on three sites of the Mall: Union Square, Sylvan Theater on the Washington Monument Grounds, and the Constitution Gardens.  During an intensive three part competition, the jury first evaluated scores of portfolios to select up to eight designers per site; conducted team interviews to narrow the site designers to five; and finally, during Phase Three, the jury will hold a design competition for each site.  We have just been notified by Weiss/Manfredi and OLIN that their team has been chosen to develop two of the three sites; no small feat for a competition that began with over 1,2000 designers.   The multidisciplinary team of architecture, landscape and planning designers will develop proposals for both the Monument Grounds and the Constitution Gardens.  We are excited to see what the team will develop, and we will keep you updated on the other Phase Three finalists and their proposals as we hear more.

© CEBRA

Our friends from CEBRA have shared their new Information Center for Rebild Hills and Rold Forest, a winning competition entry in collaboration with HP Byg, Viggo Madsen and exhibition architect Elisabeth Topsøe.  Situated in the amazing nature reserves of Denmark’s Rebild Hills and Rold Forest in northern Jutland, the project was conceptualized as an open and accommodating buiding that serves as a gathering place to inform, guide and inspire the 400,000+ visitors who are guided through the forests each year.  “We have created an information portal, which is both building and nature, with a distinctive expression and character deriving directly from Nature’s own formal language and elements, which makes the building stand out from its surroundings and blend in with nature’s scenery at one and the same time,” explained CEBRA.

More about the project, including lots of CEBRA’s awesome hand drawings, after the break. read more »

Courtesy of CTBUH

The Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat is announcing its second annual student competition for “Reimagining Tall”.  The competition will be held in conjunction with CTBUH 9th World Congress Shanghai 2012.  Competition chair William Pedersen of Kohn Pedersen Fox noted that the competition hopes to give new meaning to “the tall building” and move it “away from just an instrument of financial exploitation and toward a development highly concerned with its impact on the city, the environment, and the urban habitat”.  The competition is seeking proposals that address the building’s relationship with the urban fabric, integrate existing street life and reflect their environment in a productive way. This should be an interesting competition considering we are entering the era of the megatall.

More details on the competition after the break. read more »

'Overlap the City' by David Chen

The second year of the AIM Competition invited participants to implement Green Transformation to the Shougang Group, the yin of dialectics of Beijing’s urban development. The design was to play an equally as significant role as the CBD (Central Business District) in making Beijing a healthy, balanced, and attractive city. It shall become a “Central Recreation District”, differentiated from the Central Business District. Due to the vast area of the Shougang Group site, this year’s focus was on the redevelopment of Er-Tong. Because green transformation spans the multidisciplinary layers of architecture, landscape and urban design, this year’s AIM competition recognized five different awards for outstanding performance. More images and information on the awarded projects after the break. read more »

Images provided by the competition brief.

Urban Intervention is challenging you, the innovative designer, to create a multidisciplinary design team able to conceive the new vision for Seattle’s public space in the coming century. “Design ideas should harness Seattle’s history of innovation and civic engagement to inspire the next generation of great public spaces, connecting interaction and innovation to meet the challenges of the future”.

The 9-acre site is located within the 74-acre Seattle Center campus, neighboring the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Experience Music Project, Space Needle and other cultural assets. The top three finalists will receive $30,000, allowing them to further develop their ideas into the second phase. The grand prize winner will receive an additional $30,000 cash award.

Continue reading for more important dates and information. read more »

FIVE-HOLE by Gehry Partners

Warming Huts v.2012, an arts and architecture competition on ice in Winnipeg, Canada, recently announced the winners which demonstrate a collection of varying interpretations of shelter.

Frank Gehry will design a hut made from large blocks of ice entitled, FIVE-HOLE. The blocks are slated to be shipped from Montreal especially for Gehry’s project. Three huts were chosen from over 40 other entries in the open design competition. The winning designs, WIND CATCHER, Ice Pillows, and ROPE Pavilion represent Norway, Czech Republic and New York respectively. The fifth and final hut, entitled HOTHUT, came from a call to University of Manitoba Architecture students who competed in teams for the final coveted spot. More images and information on the winning proposals after the break. read more »

© JDS

JDS has just been awarded first prize for their Hangzhou Waves scheme – a competition entry that called for the design of not one, but two buildings for the financial district of Hangzhou Xintiandi of Hangzhou, China.    The two sloping volumes offer different exterior expressions and hold different programmatic entities (a hotel and an office building); yet, the forms are guided by similar attitudes regarding sunlight, green roofs, an active ground plane, etc, which immediately creates a strong relationship between the pair.

More about the winning competition entry after the break. read more »

© Fernando Guerra

In the beginning of December, we shared the news of Steven Holl‘s 2012 AIA Gold Medal award; a prestigious honor given to those who continually push the field forward with their “humanist approach to formal experimentation.”   A few short weeks later, Holl’s Cité de l’Océan et du Surf  (translated to Museum of Ocean and Surf) has received a 2011 Annual Design Review Award.  This new museum in Biarritz, France is a collaborative effort with Solange Fabião and has attracted international attention for its spatial duality of crafting an atmosphere “under the sky” and “under the sea”.

More about the award after the break.  read more »

Photo by Samantha Modell via TransportationNation

Tired of scurrying under makeshift unpleasant scaffolding hovering over the streets of Manhattan? Back in 2009, Bloomberg launched an urban design intervention initiative calling for designers to provide a “fresh new sidewalk shed” to replace its dingy predecessors. Entitled urbanSHED, the international design competition challenged participants to develop a sustainable and economic prototype to be used for New York’s 1,000,000+ linear feet of sidewalks. Such a prototype must meet or exceed the City’s current safety requirements and regulations, and improve technical and structural performance. The winning shed was designed by Young-Hwan Choi, a student from the University of Pennsylvania. The shed is the first design to be approved under the City’s Buildings Bulletin 2011 and will be installted in Lower Manhattan soon!

More about the design after the break.  read more »

© UNStudio.

For their latest museum design in Beijing, Ben van Berkel and UNStudio have designed a formal expression which takes ques from Chinese culture to create an architecture that offers dynamically varied spaces for the NAMOC collections.  Based on uniting dualities – past and future, day and night, inside and outside, calm and dynamic, large and small, individual and collective – the two volumes reference ancient Chinese ‘stone drums’ and function in a contemporary way as a media facade with illuminated art projections.

More about the design after the break.  read more »

Portal to the Point is a design project initiated to honor the completion of renovations to Pittsburgh’s most visible National Historic Landmark, Point State Park. wHY Architecture is one of five finalists selected to redefine the space beneath the Portal Bridge that leads into 36-acre park.

Continue reading for more project information and renderings.

read more »

© Dorval-Bory + Bétillon

Nicolas Dorval-Bory & Raphaël Bétillon have recently been awarded second prize for their design of a hotel in Jurmala, Latvia.  The duo may sound familiar, as last year, we featured their artificial landscape of clouds which created an experiential journey along the banks of the Garonne in Toulouse.  For their latest project, Dorval-Bory and Bétillon have studied the relationship between the city and music and sound, to experiment with a gradation from the most structured musical composition to nature’s acoustic chaos by way of an architectural point of view.

More about the hotel design after the break. read more »

© 2011 d3

d3 and Transportation Alternatives are pleased to announce the winners of the “Close The Gap” design competition, which invited architects, landscape architects, urban designers, engineers and students worldwide to envision the completion of the East River Greenway. Submissions from pla.net Architects and the design team of James and Madeline Stokoe were selected by the jurors for their outstanding work. The competition called for proposals that fundamentally transform how people move through Manhattan by filling in a 22-block gap along the East River. More information on the competition awards after the break. read more »

1st prize - Entropic Industries/Jared Winchester, USA

d3 is pleased to announce the winners of the Natural Systems competition for 2011. The program, developed by co-directors Gregory Marinic and Ji Young Kim, promotes investigation of natural systems from microscopic to universal toward determining new architectonic strategies. The competition invites architects, designers, engineers, and students to collectively explore the potential for analyzing, documenting, and deploying nature-based, sustainable influences in urbanism, architecture, interiors, and designed objects.

The competition awarded three top prizes and seven special mentions, with the first prize captured by Entropic Industries/Jared Winchester from the United States. More information on the remaining winners after the break. read more »

© Steven Evans

PLANT Architecture has recently been recognized with an Honorable Mention in the City of Toronto’s Urban Design Awards. Held every other year, the awards acknowledge the contributions design has on the local milieu. PLANT’s revitalization of the Nathan Phillips Podium Square (part of Toronto’s iconic City Hall by Viljo Revell) introduces a greenscape to the podium previously occupied solely with a vast hardscaped plaza. read more »

main view rendering

The 3-1 Zone of Government Building in Sejong City is a symbolic gate of the central administration town. The Urban Gate, where nature and citizen are together, and the Urban Plaza, which anybody can freely use, are planned for here. It is designed as a comfortable and cozy resting place shaped after nature. It will be used for various events including festivals and various culture and art activities. In terms of urban scale, the linear shape of existing master plan had been maintained.

read more »

Gold 2011 - Regional food-gathering nodes and logistics network, Iqaluit, NU, Canada

The Holcim Awards Gold 2011 for North America and USD 100,000 was awarded to the Arctic Food Network (AFN) regional food-gathering nodes and logistics infrastructure for the scattered Inuit communities in Northern Canada. The project by Lateral Office / InfraNet Lab based in Toronto and Princeton, New Jersey, enables a better distribution of local foods, serves as a series of bases for the reinforcement of traditional hunting, and also establishes new foundations for a sustainable, more independent economy.

Holcim Awards Silver went to a two-level zero energy certified school building design to be constructed on multiple campuses throughout Los Angeles. The project led by architects Swift Lee Office of Los Angeles uses “off-the shelf” components and modular panels to create a pre-fabricated system that features a double-layered façade for solar, acoustic, and environmental control and achieves a climate-responsive solution for each site.

Holcim Awards Bronze was presented to Julie Snow Architects of Minneapolis, for a border control station on the US frontier to Canada at Van Buren, Maine. The approach meets a range of stringent regulations for safety, operation and durability, sets zero net energy and water saving targets, and yet is a highly aesthetic structure marking the national frontier.

You can see more info and images on the winners after the break. For a complete list of the winners including the acknowlodgement prizes and “next generation” prizes please click here. read more »

© DECCgovuk

Bystrup’s innovative T-Pylon design has been unanimously agreed by the judging panel as the winner of the Pylon Design competition run by the Department of Energy & Climate Change, National Grid, and the Royal Institute of British Architects.

Following a very high quality field with 250 entries and 6 excellent finalists, which were featured at the London Design Festival, the judges were overwhelmed by the huge public interest in the competition. As a result of this contest National Grid will now work with Bystrup to develop their T-Pylon design further. National Grid have also said they want to do further work with Ian Ritchie Associates on their Silhouette design, and New Town Studio’s Totem design For more information on the competition, please visit here.