Browsing: Skyscrapers

Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates, the international architecture firm headquartered in New York,  announced it has completed the conceptual design for Lotte Super Tower 123 in Seoul, South Korea. The 555-meter (1,821 feet), 123-story tower, when completed in 2014, will be the tallest building in Asia and the world’s second tallest after the Burj Dubai.

Kohn Pedersen Fox (KPF) was selected earlier this year after an international design competition by owner/developer Lotte Group, one of South Korea’s largest conglomerates. This long anticipated project has now earned all major zoning approvals, and excavation is nearly complete. The building will serve as Lotte’s new corporate headquarters and will be built by Lotte Construction, a subsidiary of the group. Architect’s description after the break. read more »

Controversy is surrounding the latest design of the 400 meter tower for Gazprom, a Russian energy company.  Designed by RMJM, the tower, known as Okhta Center, will dominate the skyline, towering over the spire of St. Peter and Paul Cathedral.  The new design may actually become the tallest building in Europe, which begs the question that even though we have the capability of building taller and larger, should that be our priority?

More about the tower after the break. read more »

Renzo Piano’s latest project, the Shard, has recently moved to the construction phase.  The 1,016 ft high skyscraper will be the tallest building in Western Europe and will provide amazing views of London.  The mixed use tower, complete with offices, apartments, a hotel and spa, retail areas, restaurants and a 15-storey public viewing gallery, will sit adjacent to London Bridge station as part of a new development called London Bridge Quarter.  Replacing the 1970’s Southwark Tower on Bridge Street, the Shard is a welcomed addition to the London skyline, and its central location near major transportation nodes will play a key role in allowing London to expand.

More about the tower after the break. read more »

© OMA/Ole Scheeren 2009

Ole Scheeren, a partner for  Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) and project leader of the recently completed Beijing’s CCTV Tower, considered among the world’s most imaginative contemporary architectural feats.  With the tower complete, Scheeren has moved to design his first skyscraper, entitled MahaNakhon, “a dazzling, pixelated 77-storey tower,” that will rise to be the tallest building in Bangkok.  With approximately 150,000 square meters, MahaNakhon will include a lush urban oasis with public gardens and a major transportation hub, luxury retail, residences, a new public square, and a five-star hotel created by New York’s Ian Schrager.

More images and more about the skyscrapper after the break. read more »

Ateliers Jean Nouvel

With the countless number of ridiculously tall skyscrapers planned for around the world, it is remarkable the controversy an 82-story skyscraper for Midtown Manhattan can create.  Three years ago, MoMa completed an $858 million expansion, yet the museum is still in need of additional room to house its growing collections.  The Modern sold their Midtown lot to Hines, an international real estate developer, for$125 million.  Hines, in turn, asked Pritzker Prize Laureate French architect Jean Nouvel to design two possible solutions for the site.   “A decade ago anyone who was about to invest hundreds of millions on a building would inevitably have chosen the more conservative of the two. But times have changed. Architecture is a form of marketing now, and Hines made the bolder choice,” reported Nicolai Ouroussoff for The New York Times.

“Bolder” is certainly fitting to describe Nouvel’s Torre de Verre which is planned for 53 West 53rd Street. The 1,250 foot tower will offer approximately 40,000 sq feet of new gallery space for the MoMa, in addition to 150 residential apartments and 100 hotels rooms.  The tower’s unique silhouette will dominate the Midtown block, rising  higher than the iconic Chrysler Building.  Its irregular structural pattern has been called “out of scale” on numerous occasions by opponents of the project.   Some complain that the tower will “violate the area’s integrity” noting that its height will obscure views and light.   Shadow studies show that the building may plunge apartments in the area and the ice-skating rink at Central Park into darkness.

The aesthetic is definitely foreign to Midtown and, yet, while most are quick to reject change, the tower will sit in an area surrounded by  highly revolutionary buildings. Its new neighbors include Philip Johnson’s “Lipstick Building” at Third Avenue; Hugh Stubbins’ Citicorp Building at Lexington Avenue, Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building and SOM’s Lever House at Park Avenue.  At some point in time, each of those buildings exemplified a change in style, and yet now, they are staples in the area’s heritage.

© Axis Mundi 2009

With controversy still surrounding Nouvel’s design as it moves through the city’s review process (ULURP),  John Beckmann and his firm, Axis Mundi decided to do something about it.  A few short days ago, Axis Mundi unveiled a conceptual alternative design for 53 West 53rd Street.    The alternative features a 600 foot, 50 story mixed use building that ”rethinks the tall buildings that have become synonymous with New York City’s identity.”  Beckmann explained,  ”Historically, the skyscraper was a unitary, homogeneous form that reflected the generic, flexible office space it contained…The Vertical Neighborhood is more organic and more flexible–an assemblage of disparate architectural languages. It reflects an emerging reality for tall buildings as collections of domestic elements: dwellings, neighborhoods, streets.”

More images and more about Axis Mundi’s alternative after the break.

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The Dutch firm Monolab has designed a tower to rise 450 meters out of Rotterdam’s Maas Harbour.  Noting the city’s existing buildings as being “primitive and of mediocre quality,” the firm seeks to introduce “an ambitious and pragmatic” structure to the city.

More about the project after the break. read more »

Meir Lobaton + Kristjan Donaldson recently shared their design for a 36 story residential tower in Mexico City, Mexico.   The project addressed the balance between the desire of living in a single-family residence with the cost of the land.

More images and more about the project after the break. read more »

Los Angeles based husband-wife studio, CHA:COL (Chinmaya+Apurva Collaborative), recently designed the Fairwood Building as part of a proposed Infrastructure City for hi-tech services in western India.  The towers, that aim to replicate interconnected figures, will benefit the growing commercial district with their programmatic elements.

Further project description and more images after the break. read more »

Amidst financial buildings and high-rise apartments, Belgian architect Vincent Callebaut has redefined the conventional skyscraper. His 132 story complex for the south edge of Roosevelt Island addresses the pressing need for environmental and ecological sustainability. This conceptual design focuses on creating a completely self-sustaining organism that not only utilizes solar, wind, and water energies, but also addresses the pending food shortage problem.

More after the break.
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Here’s Francois Blanciak Architects proposal for the TyssenKrupp Elevator Award to develop an iconic tall emblem structure for Zaabeel Park in Dubai.

This is one of the 926 proposals submitted for the competition.

Seen at designboom. More images and architect’s description after the break. read more »

Probably the most impressive thing for someone who visits for the first time cities like New York, Shanghai or Dubai is the ridiculous size of it’s buildings. So to finish this week of Round Up, we bring you previously featured skyscraper on ArchDaily.

Tour La Signal at La Defense, Paris / Ateliers Jean Nouve
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 renewal includes several high rise sustainable towers. One of this towers, the Tour Signal, entered an international closed competition for teams of architects/investors/developers, on which EPAD didn’t impose a site. The Tour Signal will thus endow the business district with a new landmark in 2013. The finalists for this project were (read more…)

Burj Dubai, tallest building in the world
The Burj Dubai (set to be the tallest tower in the world, while the tallest structure as of now), is almost finished. Located in Dubai, it´s the centerpise of a mixed-use development that will include 30,000 homes, 9 hotels, 3 ha of parks, 19 residential towers, a man and a 12ha artificial lake. I decided to Google about the Burj Dubai a little, and i found an interesting interview at Wired with SOM´s structural engineer Bill Baker, telling the story behind the design, the structure and construction (read more…)

56 Leonard Street, New York / Herzog & de Meuron
This 57-story residential in the Tribeca area will house 145 residences, each one with its own unique floor plan and private outdoor space. This typology makes the building look like a stack of houses, away from the traditional skyscraper form. I wonder how the concrete structure works on this building, which was done by consultant firm WSP Cantor Seinuk (who also worked on the Freedom Tower). With this height, it will surely impact the city skyline as you can see on the panoramic above (read more…)

Michael Schumacher World Champion Tower in Dubai / L-A-V-A
LAVA (Laboratory for Visionary Architecture) unveiled the design of the Michael Schumacher World Champion Tower in Dubai, the first project of a series of branded towers, a new concept by PNYG:COMPANY, a company focused on branding. I´ve heard about branded towers such at the Porsche Towers by OMA, but it´s the first time i hear about a building branded after a Formula 1 champion. The design of the 59 storey luxury tower is abstracted from the geometric laws of snowflakes and Formula 1 aerodynamics (read more…)

Jumeirah Gardens / SOM & Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture
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, retail, leisure, and recreation – a city within a city, with an estimated cost of US$95 billion. The three main towers were comissioned to Chicago based architects AS+GG (Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill), The most impressive one -and the third tallest tower in the UAE- is 1 Dubai (read more…)

Architecture: Morphosis Architects
Location: Puteaux, France
Project Principal (through Design Development): Tim Christ
Project Director: Charles Lamy
Project Manager: Matt Grady
Project Architect: David Rindlaub
Project Designer: Chandler Ahrens
Client: Unibail
Program: Commercial office tower with office space, employee restaurants, public café, trading floors, public amenities, and parking for 450 cars
Type: Commercial
Constructed Area: 185,494 sqm
Design Year: 2006-2009
Construction Year: 2010-2014
Images: © Morphosis Architects
Texts: Thom Mayne and Morphosis
More info: http://www.morphopedia.com/

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Architects: Kann Finch, UAE
Location: Meydan city, Dubai UAE
Project Team: Jean-Sebastien Herr (associate/design architect), Damian Lambkin (Project architect), Claudio Nunez , Ulysses Lalu, Francis Contreras, Milica Vukasinovic, Clinton Bull, Jamie Madrazo, Mauricio Zulueta, Alaleh S
Interiors: Nicholas Tedford
Structure: E-construct
MEP: Jain Consultants
Building Envelope: MFT
Landscape: Kann Finch
Acoustics: WSP
Client: District development
Contractor: DCC, Dubai Contracting company
Project year: 2010
Construction area: 45,980 sqm

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Dorobanti tower, a new project  by Zaha Hadid Architects in Bucharest moves away from the works we  have been seen lately, with a very expressive structure. The 200m tall iconic tower will be located in the heart of the capital city of  Romania, at junction of Calea Dorobanti and St. Mihail Eminescu, with over 100,000 sqm for mixed-use development which include a 5-star hotel (with restaurants and convention centre), luxury apartments and retail space at street level.

The chamfered diamond like structure  tapers from the centre towards the top and the bottom. The meandering structural mesh expresses the change of programs across the tower.

A good move by Zaha in my opinion.

More on the structure, from Zaha Hadid Architects:

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Museum Plaza is -in my opinion- one of the most amazing mixed-use project of our time. It makes all the variables (economical regulations, community, local authorities) fit together, on an pure volume – with a Mies-ian look.

But REX, and the following video, explain it better:

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Architects:  Francis Isoz
Location: Rue du Grand Chêne 8, Lausanne, Switzerland
Project Year: 1898-1900
Client: Jean-Jacques Mercier

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A few months ago we featured an amazing skyscraper by Herzog & de Meuron, that will have a great impact in  the skyline of New York. I’m very intrigued by the final result of this project, as it develops a pixelated unit composition that many have propossed, but no one has built.

Now, a friend sent me this amazing video to market the building, done by Tronic Studios. The video reveals some portions of the structure of this building, such as beams that distribute the vertical charges of this particular typology.

We’ll see…

Some time ago we featured a mid rise building by OMA in New York, a cantilevered volume that brings a new concept for tall buildings. A similar approach can be found at a recent competition for the Rødovre Skyscraper won by MVRDV in association with ADEPT: A 116m tall mixed use tower, based on a 60sqm module arranged around the central core of the building.

It´s interesting to see the structural approach for this new typology, as you can see on another render below: the inner core -actually 3 cores to access the different program segments- is made out of concrete, with the units wrapping it around on a steel structure.

Something interesting in times like this, is that the building allows for different configurations responding to unstable markets, flexibility achieved by re-designating these 60sqm units.

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The Burj Dubai by SOM hasn´t been finished yet, but it´s currently the world´s tallest structure. Meanwhile, the Shanghai World Financial Centre by KPF has been opened a few weeks ago, which is (as for now) the tallest building in the world when it comes to roof height with 492m (1,614.2ft). The Taipei 101 in Taiwan is 509.2m (1,670.60ft) if you count the antenna, but its roof is only at 449.2 m (1,473.75 ft).

The building took almost 11 years to be completed, delayed by the Asian Financial Crisis of 97-98 and change on design, but it was finally opened to public on August 30, 2008. You can see an interesting tour of the building on the video posted above.

The observatory on the 100th floor is amazing, with a transparent floor.

Also, I found an interesting documentary by National Geographic on the construction of the World Financial Center, posted it below. Enjoy!

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UPDATE: We wrongly credited the whole project to AS+GG, but they were only comissioned to design the three main towers, on a master plan designed by SOM Chicago.

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, retail, leisure, and recreation – a city within a city, with an estimated cost of US$95 billion.

The three main towers were comissioned to Chicago based architects AS+GG (Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill), The most impressive one -and the third tallest tower in the UAE- is 1 Dubai, pictured above. The tri-partite skyscraper will be 3218 ft (981m) tall, and the towers will be connected by a series of glass suspension sky-bridges. This bridges are so big, they even grow palms on them as you can see on the further renderings. At the base of the buildings, grand arched entrances allow boats to travel underneath the building and into a central atrium space. The mixed-use development includes a hotel, residential, commercial retail and entertainment space totaling 800,000-900,000 square meters.

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