With Valentines Day barely a week away, the Times Square Alliance is eschewing flowers and candy yet again. Instead, they’re sending New Yorkers a giant designer valentine for the second year in a row, as Moorhead & Moorhead will stage an installation adjacent the TKTS Booth beginning today.
We continue featuring the proposals for this years P.S.1 summer installation competition (awarded to SO-IL, read our full coverage of the PS1 competitions here).
This time we introduce you EASTON+COMBS, a practice ran by partners Rona Easton and Lonn Combs.
The firm has a focus on material innovation, which could be seen at LUX NOVA, their proposal for the P.S.1, which includes “Strong Light”, a 100 percent recyclable and exceptionally strong featherweight building component.
The initial system is developed as a permeable featherlight structural skin that engages an environmental play of translucent and polychromatic effect. The system offers an 80% weight reduction over an equivalent glass system with no compromise in strength and stability at a significantly lower cost.
More about LUX NOVA after the break:
This video clearly explains the concept for SO-IL‘s winning proposal for the P.S.1 summer installation we presented you yesterday. Now it is easier to understand the concept proposed by Pole Dance, encouraging people to move the structure to create a dynamic space.
The Metropol Parasol in Sevilla, Spain, is the result of a competition in 2004, awarded to Jürgen Mayer Architects.
The sinuous structure is proposed to be a landmark in the middle of the old city fabric, while serving as an observation deck to discover the upper level of the compact urban context, a new view of the city. The project has been criticized by the citizens because of the contrast with the existing constructions, as you can see on the renderings.
Architecture photographer Pedro Pegenaute shared with us some photos of the current status of this impressive structure, from which we can see a preview of what the observation deck will be:
Chris Lee and Kapil Gupta from Serie Architects have converted a disused building from Mumbai’s colonial past into a banquet hall, restaurant and bar called ‘The Tote’. The site was covered with mature rain trees whose wide spread leaves shaded most of the spaces throughout the year, permitting almost the entire new program to occur outdoors.
More images and more about the project after the break.
We recently published the project Railway Footbridge at Roche-sur-Yon, now our friends from HDA_Paris share with us the Turin Footbridge, that was constructed for the 2006 Winter Olympics.
About the competition, we know that the city of Turin hosted the 2006 winter Olympic games and had embarked on an extensive programme of construction of various venues and infrastructure for the games. The city took advantage of the infrastructure programme to incite urban renewal in the southern part of the city that has been affected by the economic downturn in the car industry. The Olympic village, situated in the disused Mercati Generali in the Lingotto district adjacent to the main railway lines entering the city from the south, is part of this new infrastructure and will contain housing and a logistics centre.
The MODULE ARK, by Sponge Architects, is a design for an autarkic (=self-sufficient) ark to live and/or work on. The design is modern, modular and sustainable. Surrounding the ark with glass facades ensures a maximal openness. Despite of these big glass surfaces, the MODULE ARK stays sustainable because of the low energy consumption, realized by means of a simple mechanical principle consisting of individual façade parts that can be closed and opened separately. These parts are utilized in extreme weather conditions against overheating and hypothermia. More after the break.
After our UN Studio’s Burnham Pavilion gallery, many of you wondered how it was built. This photo reveals the woodenstructure for this pavilion, which was later finished with a plastic-like material.
When the Jurmala City Council asked Substance to build a sports venue for the popular Latvian sea resort, the firm designed a structure that could be open all year long in any weather. Inspired by the amber – crystallised resin of pine typically washed up on the Baltic coast, the venue’s form incorporates translucent polycarbonate cladding inside a structural framework to accentuate the building’s varying height.
More about the sports venue after the break.
The Steel Structures Education Foundation organized a competition designed for students to fuse their conceptual ideas with the reality of physical structure. With the program and scale left to the discretion of the designer, the proposal had to emphasize the “essential relationship” between the exploration of form and material, with regards to surfaces, members and connections. As an academic project, students also had to use their details to communicate with the steel fabrication industry as a way to expose ”the opportunities and restraints inherent in realizing conceptual design.” “It is important for students of architecture to grasp the fact that structural design lies not just in the realm of the engineer, but can be a means for architects of arriving at a meaningful realization of architectural ideas,” explained the SSEF. The winner, student Matt Schmid from the University of Waterloo, designed a bird sanctuary in Niagara Gorge in Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada.
More about the winning entry after the break.
Last week, we featured the Quingpu Pedestrian Bridge designed by CA-DESIGN. The project received many good reviews from you, so they sent more images of the bridge, taken by Nacasa & Partners. See all the fantastic images of the project by day and night after the break.
