UC Davis Art Museum Proposal / WORKac
Last year the University of California, Davis invited three invited three architects to compete for the chance to design their new $30 million art museum, slated to open in 2016. The competition was a design-build affair, with each entrant being asked to pair up with a contractor and submit a holistic design. For those who missed it, SO – IL were announced yesterday as the winners of the competition.
Here we present one of two runner-up submissions from WORKac. The concept revolves around creating a distinctive beacon, which would be a center point for an overlap between art, higher-education, and everyday-life. The parallelogram form is intended to create a dynamic space which creates opportunities for interplay with the proposed landscape and surrounding area. Inside a collection of formal and informal, open and intimate are arranged along two axes, pinned together with a bright common space.
Read the architects description after the break…
WorkAC, SO – IL, and Henning Larsen Architects To Compete For UC Davis Art Museum
The University of California Davis (UCD) has selected three pairings of architects and contractors to compete to design a $30-million art museum, expected to be completed in 2016. The university has decided against a traditional competition in favor of a design-build competition, requesting that each of the prospective architects - WorkAC, SO-IL (working with Bohlin Cywinski Jackson, of Apple store fame), and Henning Larsen Architects - work with specific contractors in order to develop holistically conceived museum schemes. More information after the break.
National Mall Finalists Exhibit Designs
The ten finalists competing in the final phase of the National Mall Design Competition are dreaming big. Proposals to restore the National Mall include flourishing lakeside gardens, contemporary cafés hovering over water, grassy new amphitheaters and underground pavilions exposed at the foot of the Washington Monument. Since the announcement of the finalists, the teams have been refining there proposals behind closed doors.
Now, the Trust for the National Mall has released the highly anticipated proposals to the public. From now until Sunday, at the Smithsonian Castle and the National Museum of American History, you can view each proposal in its entirety. If you don’t live in the D.C. area, no need to worry. Continue after the break to catch a glimpse of each submission and learn how you can help the jury decided who will revamp America’s “front yard”.
Nature-City / WORKac / MoMA
Last September, we attended MoMA’s PS 1 Open Studio event to catch a glimpse of the collaborative projects of five multidisciplinary teams focusing on how to re-think, re-organize and re-energize the concept of an American suburb in the wake of the foreclosure crisis. When we visited, the teams were in the final stages of their designs and preparing to send their visions to the Museum of Modern Art for the exhibition “Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream. One of the team’s we talked with was WORK Architecture Company about their Nature-City proposal, an extension of the suburb whichhas been designed in an abstracted way to serve as a plug in model to create cities elsewhere.
More about Nature-City after the break.
Video: Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream / WORKac
Earlier we brought to you WORKac‘s preliminary scheme for the transformation of Salem-Keizer, Oregon. We would now like to present the final scheme presented by Amale Andraos and Dan Wood. The project integrates elements of the city and nature across an existing 200 acre big box retail site. WORKac is one of five interdisciplinary teams participating in “MoMA’s Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream.” Each team is challenged to re-imagine struggling American cities and suburbs, seeing the current economic crisis as an opportunity to evolve.
The video is provided by The Museum of Modern Art.
Video: Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream / WORKac
Sam Dufaux presents WORKac’s vision for the transformation of Salem-Keizer, Oregon. The project integrates elements of the city and nature across an existing 200 acre big box retail site. WORKac is one of five interdisciplinary teams participating in “MoMA’s Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream.” Each team is challenged to re-imagine struggling American cities and suburbs, seeing the current economic crisis as an opportunity to evolve.
The video is provided by The Museum of Modern Art and was filmed by J6 Media Works.
Update: Foreclose: Rehousing the American Dream / MoMA
This weekend, we had the opportunity to attend the Open Studio event at MoMA’s PS1. As we mentioned earlier, this project posed the daunting question of how to re-think, re-organize and re-energize the concept of an American suburb in the wake of the foreclosure crisis. As MoMA’s Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design, Barry Bergdoll explains, “Projects will aim to challenge cultural assumptions concerning home ownership and associated settlement patterns, such as suburban sprawl, and assist the public in contemplating a potentially different future for housing and cities. The workshop and exhibition are premised on reframing the current crisis as an opportunity, an approach that is in keeping with the fundamental American ethos where challenging circumstances engender innovation and out-of-the-box thinking. It is our hope that new paradigms of architecture and regional and transportation planning become the silver lining in the crisis of home ownership.” The five multidisciplinary teams chose five different American suburbs to explore, and this Saturday, we jumped from Oregon to Florida, to Illinois, to California and New Jersey, to observe their five quite different solutions.
Check out our preview of the teams’ work-in-progress projects which will be exhibited at the MoMA this February.
Video: New Holland Island by WORKac
As we reported last week, WORKac provided the winning entry for the invitation-only competition New Ideas for New Holland. The proposed city within a city concept is an exciting redevelopment and design of New Holland Island in St. Petersburg, Russia which takes shape in this video by Eric Lane with music by Darkstar.
WORKac to Redesign St. Petersburg’s New Holland Island
Within St. Petersburg lies a triangle shaped island that has been home to a naval prison, lumberyard, a radio station, and military barracks. Off limits to the public for 300 years New Holland Island, with its unique identity of canals and existing warehouse structures, will be part of a $12 billion dollar redevelopment project. Identifying the island as one of St. Petersburg’s most significant historical sites The Architecture Foundation held an international invitation-only competition New Ideas for New Holland, which included entires from David Chipperfield Architects, MVRDV, Russia’s Studio 44, and winning proposal from WORK Architecture Company (WORKac).
Amale Andraos and Dan Wood, principals of WORKac shared, “We are very excited at the opportunity to work with the Iris Foundation and NHD on this critically important project for one of the world’s most beautiful cities. Our master plan balances preservation with innovation, respecting St Petersburg’s past while paving the way for its continued artistic development and future.”
A few years ago we had a chance to visit WORKac at their studio in New York and spoke with principals Amale Andraos and Dan Wood (be sure to take a look at our interview with them!) More on this winning proposal by WORKac along with renderings and drawings following the break.
Children’s Museum of the Arts / WORKac
With the small Chinatown site proving to be too confining for the growing Children’s Museum of the Arts, the institution secured a new space in Hudson Square, New York. Now that the new space is three times the size of the Chinatown site, WORKac has designed a museum where the activities are connected in a natural manner and are organized around a central colorful gallery. This dramatic increase in square footage will allow the museum to reinterpret the best parts of their current museum and add the new programs they had long desired.
More about the project after the break.
Interchange Tower / WORKac
For WORKac’s skyscraper design for the Shenzhen Metro Tower, the architects created a new a new kind of mixed density to promote a sustainable and a diverse stacked city. This vertical city holds places places of intense urban interchange that combine infrastructure, mixed uses, and public space. Located at an intersection with a horizontal crossroads of major boulevards, this vertical interchange between the underground metro, ground-level bus station, shopping podium and the offices and hotel above will essentially be linking the metro with the sky. ”We call this tower the Interchange – a vertical city that twists together natural green space with ecological systems, structural and functional efficiency with dramatic new forms and technology, while linking the underground to the sky,” added the architects.
More about the project after the break.
Kew Gardens Hills Library / WORKac
Check out WORKac’s latest expansion project, which includes replacing an existing library with a better functioning structure. The library’s perimeter becomes an activated strip with different rooms for adults, teens, children and staff. Above, a continuous “loop of green” runs across the roof introducing greenery into the dense neighborhood.
More images and more about the project after the break.
White Street Loft / WORKac
The 6,000 sqf White Street Loft apartment encompasses a full ground floor, half a basement and one third of a sub-basement. The client, a family of four, love to entertain, and for more than four years WORKac collaborated with the family to create a new space for urban living that embraces diversity of materials and spaces, kinetic interventions to transform spaces and a highly developed sense of whimsy and the unexpected.
Architects: WORKac
Location: New York City, New York, USA
Project Area: 6,000 sqf
Project Year: 2011
Photographs: Elizabeth Felicella
