Creating a building that is adaptable, interactive, and accessible for everybody, Cosmos Architecture, an international architecture practice based in Milan, Madrid, and Shanghai, imagined the new congress center of Banja Luka, in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The project, an iconic lighthouse represents innovative architecture paradigms and urban identity, generating narratives within the city scheme.
Planned to be built in one of the most exquisite spots of Alanya, Turkey, the Vertical Villa Project is a complex geometric composition of glass, concrete, and landscape, with a great scenery of the green mountain range and distant coastline.
The architecture team developed the project based on an analysis of the social interaction and atmosphere found in the city of Alanya. The team combined different individual units, and applied the sloped roof system found in the city's typical residential architecture.
The Kurdish city of Kamyaran - which sits on the transit borders of Kurdistan and Iran - is a developing city that experienced a devastating earthquake a few years ago. The city is located in a district deprived of modern facilities, and the majority of the residents' income is acquired from the transit of products across the common border with Iraq and Turkey. Project developers in the area are faced with several challenges, one of which is the amount of projects needed to ameliorate the city's status.
Instead of designing two different projects on two separate sites, CAAT Studio proposed the Kamyaran City-School, a new concept which merges an elementary school and public space into one large facility that aims to improve the social and cultural life of its residents.
A two-stage international design competition recently concluded for the new headquarters of The Kuwait Foundation for the Advancement of Sciences (KFAS), the country’s leading organization for advancing science, technology, and innovation. KÂAT Architects and Yalin Architectural Design were shortlisted as finalists in the second stage of the competition for their collaborative entry, a concept which anchors the future within the past. Drawing inspiration from the local traditions, climate, and urban fabric, the group places their design firmly in the context of its location in Kuwait City.
A Green Spaceship appears to have landed in Villaverde, Madrid, in design firm 3GATTI’s proposal for the new municipal library. The design for the landmark building employs the public’s curiosity to draw visitors in and create an iconic presence in the city. The library is split between two floors, both architecturally and conceptually. The ground level is transparent and open, meant to house the noisy, public aspects of the program; the upper floor is the architectural showpiece, floating above the ground and containing the more private, quiet study spaces.
In the city of Milan, architecture firm LAD identified a busy roundabout with the potential to host a new public square typology. Sovraparco, literally “over park,” is a design by the Italian firm and Hypnos Studio to better utilize an existing area in the city, Piazzale Loreto, by infusing it with greenery and public space. The project intentionally does not impose on the surrounding buildings to revamp the area, but instead inserts itself into the central space and aims to rethink what belongs to the public sector.
Architects often find inspiration from the most unexpected places and objects. For Kalliope Kontozoglou, the C6th Cypriot Sphinx in the Louvre Museum and its tilted head were great influence behind her proposal for the International Architectural Competition for the New Cyprus Museum.
To honor the country’s rich historic archeology, and frame Nicosia’s topography, Kontozoglou proposed a multidimensional museum, which aims to weave the city’s topography, the exhibitions, and the public spaces all together in a sequence of ‘narrative landscapes’, promoting dialogue between the visitors, Cyprus’ landscape, and the country’s heritage.
Responding to the theme of Expo 2020 Dubai, “Beauty Unites People,” a team led by Dodi Moss imagined a multi-layered architectural experience evoking Italy’s history and identity. The design pulls apart the pieces that make up architectural space, separating the building into its structural volume and its tactile, material components. The proposal won third place in Invitalia’s competition to design the Italian Pavilion at the Expo, behind carlorattiassociati and Gianluca Peluffa & Partners.
To anyone enrolled in an architecture school, final year projects tend to be the perfect time to go all in. Whether you go for 3D visualizations or build remarkable models, your final presentation is the chance to display every conceptual and technical skill acquired throughout the years.
For his B.A. Final project, architect Mohammad Pirdavari of Ati-Naghsh Hamraz Consultants, presented his modernist stadium proposal in a series of freehand Airbrush drawings. His intricate graphics helped accentuate the stadiums’ raw material and detailed relationship between the main exposed structure, and the smaller covered one.
Ten years after a destructive earthquake rocked Italy's central Abruzzo region, many students still attend class in temporary modules similar to containers. Named winners of an international competition, SET Architects’ design for the new “Sassa School Complex” proposes reconstructing a place for students and the community to learn, gather, and grow. Inspired by the modularity and essential nature of climbing frame play structures, the architects describe the design as a metaphor for “freedom and social aggregation as a fundamental value for dynamic and innovative teaching.”
In the age of skyscrapers, the immediate solution to housing is to build up and duplicate single units in the plan. In contrast, the Zafereniah Tower designed by Challenge Studio, project laureate of the recent 2018 Architizer A+ Award, proposed a conceptual endeavor as a prototype for mid-rise, multi-unit housing.
The Tehran-based firm won both the Jury and Popular Choice Awards for their response to the prompt for a design that "champion[s] its potential for a positive impact on everyday life."
This article was originally published on August 15, 2016. To read the stories behind other celebrated architecture projects, visit our AD Classics section.
Le Corbusier made an indelible mark on Modernist architecture when he declared “une maison est une machine-à-habiter” (“a house is a machine for living”). His belief that architecture should be as efficient as machinery resulted in such proposals such as the Plan Voisin, a proposal to transform the Second Empire boulevards of Paris into a series of cruciform skyscrapers rising from a grid of freeways and open parks.[1] Not all of Le Corbusier’s concepts, however, were geared toward such radical urban transformation. His 1965 proposal for a hospital in Venice, Italy, was notable in its attempt at seeking aesthetic harmony with its unique surroundings: an attempt not to eradicate history, but to translate it.
Soon to become the tallest building in Quito, IQON is Bjarke Ingels Group's first project to be built in South America. Currently undergoing construction, the largely residential building is a curved tower with gradually protruding balconies. Encased between the dense city and the park, the self-dubbed "urban tree farm" aims not only to encompass the surrounding views of the volcanoes and nature beyond but also to integrate the landscape within the building itself.
‘Hololightkeeper,’ a conceptual model that is distinct in its use of holographic technologies, pays homage to an architectural structure that has quickly been transformed into a historic relic. The lighthouse, once a navigational aid to guide sailors towards land and warn traveling ships of dangerous conditions, has been replaced in its function by modern technologies. In this respect, Studio NAB’s ‘Hololightkeeper’ attempts to resurrect a building typology by dematerializing the lighthouse structure-type, while maintaining its historic symbolism.
Punctuated by four towers of varying size, Aedas’ new design for a mixed-use scheme in Zhuhai, China, uses a looping, layered path to connect the individual structures with a ‘three-dimensional, vertical landscape’. Hoping to become the centerpiece of the city, the Hengqin CRCC Plaza uses strategic positioning and form to both maximize economic output and create a strong community core, where generous open space serves the surrounding workspaces.
A beautifully delicate design by ingenhoven architects, in cooperation with architectus, has bested series of internationally acclaimed architects to design Sydney’s tallest residential tower at 505-523 George Street. The 79-storey skyscraper will reach 270m, and include several uses, ranging from high-quality living and retail to hotel and leisure. The designers hope the tower will be “a profoundly visible landmark standing for an economical, environmental and socially sustainable, future-oriented development”.
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