A few weeks ago, Richard Meier’s four-block-long mixed-use development was approved by Newark’s planning board. The project is a drastic shift for Meier; a break from his New York Five era and the decades of working with exclusive clientele on neo-Corbusian residences and museums. The development brings Meier back to his Newark roots and speaks to the recurring trend of architects designing for the people.
NYU prides itself on providing its students with a real feel for city life by having them traverse to different parts of the campus, which is sprawled across Greenwich Village. And yet, the campus will become even more scattered as a 20 year development plan sees NYU as owning parts of Downtown Brooklyn, SoHo and even a satellite campus on Goverrnors Island. The plan, termed “NYU 2031: NYU in NYC “, will add over 6 million square feet of classrooms, labs, and dorms, increasing the building space by approximately 40%.
More images and more about the expansion after the break.
In the year 1940, Armour Institute and Lewis Institute merged in Chicago to create the Illinois Institute of Technology. The merging of these two schools called for a new master plan for the university, and Mies van der Rohe was commissioned for the job. Mies’ plan for the IIT campus was one of the largest projects he ever conceived and he developed it for twenty years. Today the campus contains 20 of his works, including the famous Crown Hall, which add up to be “the greatest concentration of Mies-designed buildings in the world.”
More on the IIT Campus and Buildings after the break.
Architects: N+B Architectes
Location: Carros, France
Directors in Charge: Elodie Nourrigat & Jacques Brion
Associate Architect: François Privat
Client: Communauté des Communes des Coteaux d’azur
Project Area: 4,299 sqm
Budget: 3,700,000 €
Project Year: 2008-2010
Photographs: Paul Kozlowski
Expected to be completed in 2013, Herzog & de Meuron’s new redevelopment project in Porta Volta, Milan will include the headquarters for the Fondazione Giangiacomo Feltrinelli. The Feltrinelli Group considers the site as an ideal environment for the foundation’s multiple activities and the overall masterplan for Porta Volta will consist of the Fondazione, two new office buildings, and a generous green area. “This undertaking by the Feltrinelli Group has an important urban dimension in that it strengthens and reinforces the city.”
Our friends from CHA:COL shared with us their urban strategy, PARENTHESIS, with us. When the New School of Planning and Architecture decide to relocate an institution, CHA:COL imagined this new school as an interconnected whole where the plan connects disparate structures with the natural environment. Set in India, the country already has a rich history of education that synthesizes the exterior with the interior, so CHA:COL’s strategy enforces this pedagogical mentality.
Dewan Architects & Engineers have won the first prize for The Competition of Developing the Area Sorrounding the Holy Shrines in Kadhimiya, Baghdad, Iraq.
Dewan was shortlisted among ten other international and Iraqi firms to participate in this competition. The project contains the Historical area with the Holy Shrines in the centre and the its surroundings with a radius of 500 m. an area full of historical markets, traditional houses and cultural and religious activities.
More images and architect’s description after the break. read more »
California-based Studio Shift completed their concept phase of a new Aquatic Center in the Sichuan Province of China. Expected to be completed in the spring of 2013, the center will connect adjacent public infrastructures, such as a riverfront promenade, as a circulation system which will become “the connective tissue linking the disparate program elements and site edges, ultimately, delineating the overall programmatic organization of the structure.”
More images and more about the Center after the break. read more »
Currently, Amsterdam is expanding at an exponential rate with space becoming limited and streets becoming even more congested. Zwarts + Jansma have addressed the need for Amsterdam to develop a way to accommodate the growing society by taking a concept by Dutch engineering company Strukton and pushing it to new levels. AMFORA (Alternative MultiFunctionele Ondergrondse Ruimte Amsterdam – Alternative Multifunctional Underground Space Amsterdam) is a network of almost 50 km of tunnels that will be built underneath the canals in the town center to provide space for parking, and sports and leisure facilities.
The task that the studio posed themselves was to make Singapore safe from rising sea levels while shrinking the ecological footprint of the country to the size of the island. The projects are testing new cross-programmed infrastructure, urban and architectural typologies to address the pressing issues of water, food and energy security. Proposals include residential power plants, multilevel factory / agri-villages, and resort dykes.
The output is manifold: With partners NUS, obilia and Black Design, WOHA created a 5 minute newscast from the year 2050, a complete (“commemorative”) paper-print issue of a newspaper of the same day and a whole series of memorabilia of the new world (t-shirts, calendars, postcards, etc). An exhibition in WOHA’s gallery complements the congress contribution and presents the studio projects from NUS architecture students.
The Chicago and Shanghai offices of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (SOM) won the international design competition to expand the Beijing Central Business District (CBD). This project was also awarded an AIA Honor Award.
Basically, their plan proposes the creation of 3 new districts anchored by parks and green boulevards as you can see on the renderings. But the an important aspects of this project is on the small scale, a network of walkable blocks to offer pedestrian (and bike) friendly scale for development. Because sustainable doesn´t have to mean just “green”, but also to offer an environment on which people can actually establish social relations on a neighborhood scale.
The plan also proposes an express commuter rail service between the Beijing Capital International Airport, the CBD, and high speed rail service at Beijing South Station. A new streetcar system is proposed to conveniently link all areas of the CBD.
Sometimes, a good transportation system and focusing on the pedestrian scale sound obvious, but they are the foundations to establish neighborhoods that can bring life to parts of the city 24/7, instead of business districts that die at night with dormitory cities with a lack of services.
City as Living Factory of Ecology, winning entry by ARUP, Sauerbruch Hutton, Experientia and Galley Eco Capital.
In my opinion, the best sustainable projects have been in small scales. Urban scale projects have been more difficult to get going, due to the their inherent complexity.
But I am confident that recent initiatives are about to make the step forward, specially the ones that are being produced on countries that have the have their governments focused on this.
On of this examples is the recently awarded Low2No design competition, organized by Sitra (Finnish Innovation Fund) and the City of Helsinki, to find a on design a large building complex on a reclaimed harbour at the western edge of Helsinki’s central business district.
Given that the repertoire of sustainable urban development models is still in its infancy, the question of “who & how” is our question of first order. WHO: We believe that identifying the best team and approach is the key factor impacting the robustness of the final solution. HOW: Our competition is designed to seek approaches for four central objectives applied at the scale of a city block:
low- and one day no- carbon emissions
energy efficiency
high architectural, spatial and social value
sustainable materials and methods
The finalists included top practices and consultants such as ARUP, Sauerbrunch Hutton, Space Syntax, Transsolar, ARO, REX, Front, BIG, among others. The award went to C_Life by ARUP, Sauerbruch Hutton, Experientia and Galley Eco Capital.
Videos and boards for the winning and finalists entries after the break.
Rio de Janeiro just won the bid for the 2016 Olympic Games. If we add this to fact that Brazil is hosting the 2014 FIFA World Cup, expect a major dose of architectural projects for these events. This will be another opportunity for the architectural brazilian scene to show the world the high level of their works (see all the brazilian works in AD).
For this games, Rio will use a total of 33 venues, from which 8 correspond to facilities already built for the Pan-American games that will be renovated, such as the National Shooting Center by BCMF. There will be 11 new buildings (judo, wrestling, fencing, basketball, taekwondo, tennis, handball, modern pentathlon, swimming and synchronized swimming, canoe and kayak slaloms, and BMX cycling) and 11 temporal structures. A good opportunity for the local (or international?) architects.
The masterplan shown on the video shows that 4 clusters will concentrate this venues inside the city, connected by new transport systems.
Another aspect that is relevant for architecture, is that the city needs to build accommodations for 25,000 beds for the event. The government said that they can offer 8,500 beds in cruise ships.
The new facilities being built for London 2012 and the projects we saw in Beijing 2008 are good examples of architecture for this events.
As for the FIFA World Cup, I think that more then new stadiums we will see improvements on existant ones (such as the Maracana)… but maybe I´m wrong.
After the jump, the videos with the installations proposed in the Chicago, Madrid and Tokyo bids. read more »
Yesterday, after a very long flight, we arrived to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, one of the most important cities in the region. Why? We are attending the opening of the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, an international, graduate-level research institution. The mission if this academic institution is to dedicated to advancing science and technology of regional and global impact, with a fellowship program that provides full tuition to graduate students pursuing the M.S., M.S. to Ph.D., or Ph.D. degrees (more info here).
The University is located on a new campus designed by HOK, 80km north of Jeddah (aerial view of the site). The campus is part of a larger master plan, also designed by HOK: A new town of 10,000 to 12,000 people, surrounding and supporting the University, living in over 6.5 million sqf on a 3,200 acre site along the Red Sea.
The project started in fall 2006, and it was finished in just 3 years. To achieve this, the HOK Planning Group accelerated the process with a “Racing the Sun” design charrette in which planners from 10 offices across multiple time zones contributed to the plan over one 24-hour period. Each HOK office had a two-hour window to create its ideas and post them on a server. In the end, each contributed an idea that ultimately found its way into the final plan.
We’ve featured several master plans where countries implement eco-friendly community measures in their newest developments. The desire for a well planned, green city now belongs to South Korea, who announced not one, but two master plans (Foster + Partners’ plan soon to be featured on AD). For the Songdo International Business District, Kohn Pedersen Fox has created a functioning network of over 120 green buildings placed amidst acres of landscaped open spaces. Located on 1,500 acres on the waterfront of Incheon, the $300 billion plan will provide housing for 75,000 residents and handle 300,000 commuters.
More about the sustainable community after the break. read more »
Hamburg-Harburg Harbor, Germany, is on the cusp of it’s first nearly entirely sustainable creative-industrial complex. The development ECO CITY, designed by tec architecture with the help of ARUP, aims to attract industry, entertainment and pedestrian life back to the neighborhood. ECO CITY’s ten major structures, ranging in size from studios to large warehouses, offer a variety of “different spaces for different purposes, bringing both large-scale industry and creative start-ups together in one, cooperative, and eco friendly business community.”
DeStefano and Partnershave created a new commercial center for Ninbgo, China. Extending the existing canal system, the Yinzhou Fantasy Island master plan fuses the current wetlands and parks with the commercial aspects of the city as a way to balance the ecological with the cultural. The plan will not only include retail areas, but also entertainment, business, leisure and cultural facilities placed strategically along pedestrian boulevards in close proximity to mass transit systems.
Design Studio 4of7 in conjunction with the University of Belgrade’s Graduate Program has spent a year exploring alternatives for the Port of Belgrade, a 110 hectare site on the river Danube bank in Southeast Europe. The port belongs to the central zone of the city and currently, the former industrial riverfront has attracted developers, city authorities, architects and planners to design its future potential. Over the last two academic terms, the Graduate Program has had the opportunity to work with the actual redevelopment of the site and exchange ideas with Daniel Libeskind Studio and Gehl Architects who are both working on the master plan.
Visiondivison shared their entry for the Koivusaari Idea Competition to create a new city district on an island just outside Helsinki, Finland. The competition asked participants to organize a master plan for the island that would provide the framework for further planning. Visiondivison’s proposal, Urban Fade, is comprised of a highly efficient city grid that allows users the option of moving around the district to interact with the different areas.
More about the proposal after the break. read more »
Five North American Architects brings together five architectural practices that, while all distinct, share a particular sensibility for the impact of craftsmanship and climate on the generation of form, as well as a concern for the expressive tactility of material…
It is such a great pleasure for ArchDaily to promote David Stark Wilson’s photographic exploration Structures of Utility. We have feature Wilson’s firm WA Design… on ArchDaily, but this book offer something uniquely different. Wilson traveled the back roads
The monograph 2G presents a new way of approaching Chilean architecture. In the wake of the interesting publications of Mathias Klotz (2G 26, 2003), Smiljan Radic (2G 44, 2007) and Cecilia Puga (2G 53, 2010), now comes that of Pezo von …
