National Art Museum of China / 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. (more…)
Portal to the Point proposal / wHY Design
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.
Acoustic Composition / Nicolas Dorval-Bory + Raphaël 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. (more…)
“Close The Gap” Competition Winners
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. (more…)
d3 Natural Systems International Architectural Design Competition Winners
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. (more…)
PLANT Receives Honorable Mention for NPS Roof Garden
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. (more…)
International Competition Winner of Government Building in Sejong City / Tomoon Architects & Engineers
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.
North American winners of Holcim Awards competition announced
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. (more…)
Pylon Design Competition Winner
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.
New Taipei City Museum of Art Competition Winners
Recently announced were the winners of the New Taipei City Museum of Art competition. The main objective of this competition was to build a world-class museum of art through a conceptual design. It was to be creative and its visionary schemes are sought in order to give the New Taipei City Museum of Art a fresh look and versatile art exhibition space. The design teams from all over the world were invited to challenge their imagination, pursue new possibilities for modern art museums and help New Taipei City create an artistic icon for the new century! The team of Peter Boronski and Jean-Loup Baldacci was named the first prize winners while Kengo Kuma & Associatesand Federico Soriano Pelaez followed with the second and third place awards. More information on the award winning designs after the break. (more…)
Update: Meridian First Light House Places 3rd / Solar Decathlon
In keeping with our coverage of the Solar Decathlon, we are happy to share Victoria University’s Meridian First Light House third place finish. Finishing a few point shy of the University of Maryland’s 951 points, the New Zealand university received 919 points with high standings in several categories, including winning the Engineering contest, gaining first equal in Hot Water and Energy Balance, second for Architecture and third for Market Appeal. Plus, over the course of the competition, the house managed to produce more energy than it consumed – achieving net zero energy consumption, despite 10 days of undesirable weather. Team member Nick Officer exclaimed, “While we may not have won overall we are incredibly proud to have represented New Zealand on the world stage. We had such and amazing response from the US public here along with supporters back home.” Be sure to check out our previous coverage of the house to learn more about the traditional Kiwi bach – a New Zealand holiday home – inspired residence.
More photos of the residence after the break. (more…)
2011 Zerofootprint Re-Skinning Award Winners Revealed at Greenbuild
The 2011 Zerofootprint Re-Skinning Award Winners were highlighted last week during the U.S. Green Building Council’s Greenbuild International Conference and Expo held in Toronto. The annual competition aims to ‘jump-start the discussion on how we might retrofit entire cities to fight climate change’. Recognized as the Best Overall Project 2011, the Palms residence in Venice, California designed by Daly Genik Architects, “is an outstanding example of an architecture project that can transform our cities to fight climate change,” says Ron Dembo founder and CEO of Zerofootprint. “The design is energy and water efficient, replicable, and beautiful. This project demonstrates that retrofitting existing buildings to reduce their environmental impact does not have to mean limiting the quality of materials, the use of smart technologies, or the aesthetics of the final product.”
A complete list of the 2011 Zerofootprint Re-Skinning Awards winners and finalists following the break, including the King and King Headquarters in Syracuse, New York by King and King Architects and the Orange Cube in Lyon, France by Jakob + MacFarlane.
Farshid Moussavi Architecture wins French Residential Complex
Farshid Moussavi Architecture has just shared their winning residential proposal for the La Défense financial district to the west of Paris with us. The new 11,000 + square meter building is part of the larger urban renewal project, La Parvis Jardin de l’Arché, which links La Défense and les Terrasses de Nanterre. The design’s slender volume – which contains 7,500 sqm of residential units, 2,930 sqm of student accommodation and 1,000 sqm of retail space – is comprised of slightly rotated floor plates that produce oblique balconies and loggias. The shifting form builds upon the site’s visual connection to La Grande Axe, providing uninterrupted views down the historic boulevard. The winning project marks Moussavi’s first built work in France, as well as FMA’s first major project since the dissolution of her previous firm Foreign Office Architects with co-founder Alejandro Zaera-Polo.
More images of the winning design after the break. (more…)
Cityscape Architectural Awards in Emerging Markets 2011
Winners of the Cityscape Awards for Architecture in Emerging Markets were recently announced at a glamorous gala dinner held at the Madinat Jumeirah in Dubai.
The Awards rewarded excellence in architecture and design from the emerging regions of the Gulf States, the Middle East, Africa, Latin America and Asia (excluding Japan, New Zealand and Australia) and recognized architects and their projects that have shown outstanding designs, performance, vision and achievement in key areas of architecture. More information on the winners after the break. (more…)
Update: WaterShed Wins Architecture / Solar Decathlon
Yesterday, we shared the news of Empowerhouse’s win in the affordability contest - the first of ten contests comprising the Solar Decathlon. The second contest, and one of the most prestigious of the competition, judges the projects’ architecture…and this year’s winner is the University of Maryland’s WaterShed. Totaling 96 points, Maryland’s WaterShed surpassed New Zealand with 95 points and Appalachian State with 94 points. Thus far, Maryland has had a strong showing at the competition as the residence has placed first overall for 4 out of the 5 competition days. “WaterShed achieves an elegant mix of inspiration, function, and simplicity. It takes our current greatest challenges in the built environment—energy and water—and transforms them into opportunities for spatial beauty and poetry while maintaining livability in every square inch,” said Architecture Contest Juror Michelle Kaufmann.
More about Maryland’s design after the break. (more…)
Update: Empowerhouse Wins Affordability / Solar Decathlon
Continuing our coverage of the Solar Decathlon, the results of the competition’s newest category of affordability are in! And, this year’s winner is Empowerhouse, a collaborative effort among students from Parsons The New School for Design, Milano School of International Affairs, Management and Urban Policy at The New School, and Stevens Institute of Technology. Of the 19 participating teams, only Empowerhouse and Purdue University’s residence stayed under $250,000; yet, Empowerhouse achieved the lowest construction costs of all at $229,890 – roughly $20,000 less than Purdue. The project was conceived as a prototype for affordable, net-zero housing as a way to make green technologies available for everyone. Working closely with Habitat for Humanity of Washington, DC, and the DC Department of Housing and Community Development, the students have developed a scheme that can, and will be replicated, after the Decathlon.
More about the residence, including a video, after the break. (more…)
Ball State University, College of Architecture and Planning 2011 Gresham Smith Design Competition Winners
Through the Gresham Smith Competition (an annual program sponsored by Gresham Smith and Partners), the Ball State University, College of Architecture and Planning, Department of Architecture, with support from the College of Architecture and Planning, Indianapolis Center (CAP: IC) has offered to assist the Julia Carson Legacy of Love Foundation in consolidating the objectives of its mission to realize the Julia Carson Community Center by facilitating community participatory engagement through a programmatic and conceptual design competition. More about the project and competition winners after the break.
European Winners of Holcim Awards Competition Announced in Milan
The Holcim Award winners for Europe were recently announced in Milan for sustainable place making and materials innovation. The Holcim Awards Gold 2011 for Europe and USD 100,000 was awarded to German architects realities united for a project on the UNESCO World Heritage site of Museuminsel in the heart of Berlin. The Flussbad urban plan will remediate an area rich in cultural heritage by transforming an under-utilized arm of the River Spree into a natural 745m-long “swimming pool”. The project will form a swimming zone equivalent to 17 Olympic-sized pools – and directly improve the quality of urban life and the ecology of the waterway. More information on the awards after the break. (more…)
BAM!’s Venice CITYVISION Concrete Island Spectacular!
Bottega di Archiettura Metropolitana aka BAM! recently won a Bjarke Ingalls-judged urban design competition for proposing to deal with the Venice, Italy’s rising water problem… with giant concrete bowl islands!
Sure, the scheme neither addresses how the existing city should retrofit itself nor does it work out some key technical concerns–how does one move from one bowl to another? what happens when the bowls fill with water?–but with renderings so incredibly beautiful why besmirch oneself with such trivialities?
Read more at FastCo. Design
Holcim Awards Winners for Africa Middle East
The winners of the 3rd International Holcim Awards competition for sustainable construction projects and visions from Africa Middle East have been announced at a ceremony in Casablanca. A total of USD 300,000 was presented to ten outstanding projects submitted by architects, planners, engineers and project owners. The winning projects illustrate the broad scope of applying sustainable approaches in construction including school infrastructure, community renewal, urban redevelopment, and energy-efficient design. More information on the awards after the break. (more…)
LOFT London Farm Tower Competition Awards
AWR recently announced the winners of the LOFT London Farm Tower Competition. Population growth and urban centralization lead to increased demand for real estate market and for food. One possible solution is vertical farming. AWR therefore proposed the design of a new kind of skyscraper on the Thames waterfront, inserted into the new city skyline.
The goals to achieve were to meet the requirements of the World Green Building Council, determine which materials are best suited for the construction of a vertical farm, identify resistant, light, transparent and long-term materials and experiment with innovative materials. Information on the competition winners after the break. (more…)
