Exploring unbuilt projects can offer insights into the design process and leading strategies employed by contemporary architecture practices, revealing unexpected solutions, experimental approaches and innovative design concepts. This week’s curated selection of Best Unbuilt Architecture highlights designs submitted by established architecture practices. From a fjord-side regeneration project and oceanography research center to a headquarters building shaped to reflect company’s main focus or a restaurant adapted to extreme conditions, the compilation of unbuilt projects presents the variety of concepts, design philosophies and programs put forward by prominent global architecture studios.
Featuring internationally recognized offices like CRA-Carlo Ratti Associati, Herzog & de Meuron, OODA, KCAP, and Aedas, this selection showcases worldwide interventions that illustrate architectural and civic interventions across diverse scales and programs. Whether tackling the restoration of monuments, interventions in public spaces or the transformation of a city’s waterfront, each of these projects aspires to deliver a fitting response to the spatial, functional, social and ecological requisite of its context.
Read on to discover the 10 unbuilt projects and their descriptions from the architects.
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CRA-Carlo Ratti Associati, Italo Rota
CRA breathes new life into a crumbling monastery within a UNESCO World Heritage Site in Northern Italy. The project employs 3D scanners to convert the decaying ruin into a digital point-cloud. Then prefab timber skin is fitted into the old structure, preserving the trees and ivies that have grown amid the bricks. The design proposes a new framework for restoration, bridging the natural and artificial worlds.
Fornebu Brygge
Haptic Architects and Oslo Works
Designs by Haptic and Oslo Works have been unveiled for the first time for the regeneration of Fornebu Brygge, a fjord-side location just outside central Oslo that will transform a disused parking lot into a global center for pioneering a sustainable ocean economy. The scheme has been designed for developer Selvaag and technology investor We Are Human, who collaborated on the initial concept, property development and detailed planning proposals through their dedicated development company, Fornebu Brygge AS.
Klan TV Headquarters in Tirana
Located in an area that is currently experiencing exponential growth, the design draws inspiration from a set of film reels, local art, and architectural features, vernacular and timeless. Standing next to the highway, the project aims to meet Klan TV’s expectations of becoming a free-standing icon in Tirana. With different shapes that vary according to the way people move around it, the proposal offers 360⁰ views of the surrounding area, from the mountains to the city. The freely sliding floors create a more dynamic façade providing balconies for the users who can enjoy it.
Vectura CampusF
Schmidt Hammer Lassen Architects
CampusF will become a melting pot for innovation, co-working, culture, food, and social activities. The urban campus is to become a creative hub, where scientists and students live and work and where small start-ups come to exchange and create new knowledge together with well-established companies working within the life science field. Generous outdoor spaces and a community room, “the Orangery”,”accessible to the public, will create a welcoming and dynamic house – a new destination in the city for everyone to enjoy.
570 Bridge Porto
A new bridge for Porto. Amid great historical bridges and works of architecture. Imitating and contextual? No: Abstract and sharp like a blade. Cutting and reflecting the sky of the city. A minimal gesture. Offering openness for various perceptions and inviting all not only to walk from one side to the other but also to hang out, to spend time, to inhabit the bridge like a piece of city.
Quarter of the Dancing Couples
With the ‘Quarter of the Dancing Couples’ KCAP (urban design and architecture), Studio Vulkan (landscape) and Raumanzug (sustainability) win the competition for a new residential neighborhood with 279 apartments in the vicinity of Zurich. Wangen-Brüttisellen is a fast-growing municipality which is planning to densify. One of the plots designated for redevelopment is the Erni-Areal, a former industrial estate located close to the railway station. The aim was to create a dense and livable neighborhood in a contrasting, almost cacophonous context.
DESMAN (Hangzhou) Headquarters Project
The DESMAN (Hangzhou) Headquarters is located in the Binjiang IoT (Internet of Things) Town, a cradle for high-tech industries in Zhejiang, Hangzhou. Covered with advanced transport networks and infrastructure, top-notch enterprises have also set up their headquarters in the area to enjoy the collaborative environment and aggregation of talents. Our design breaks the conventional closed layout, optimizing the natural topography to create a smart commercial space that integrates the multi-dimensional urban context and inherits the corporate spirit.
Mývatn Windows Restaurant in Mývatn, Ireland
United Architektur from Berlin recently won an honorable mention in an international design competition for a greenhouse restaurant in Iceland. The competition’s idea is derived from Iceland’s growing greenhouse revolution. It seeks to use its local renewable resources to support food production and suggest iconic solutions for the farm-to-table concept.
Holocaust Museum and Education Center
Schwartz/Silver Architects Inc.
Holocaust Legacy Foundation, which preserves and perpetuates the memory and lessons of the Holocaust for future generations, today filed architectural renderings of the future Holocaust Museum and Education Center with Boston’s Planning and Development Agency (BPDA). The renderings, which provide a first look at the proposed design for the six-story, 33,000 square-foot building that will be located on the Freedom Trail, show a dramatic, inspiring, and hopeful building, constructed with durable, timeless materials. The main feature of the exterior is a gently undulating stainless-steel woven metal fabric that wraps the building’s mid-level floors. The metal fabric evokes the curtains that remained drawn in Jewish households at the time of the Nazi rise to power, and the fences that surrounded the death camps and kept Jewish prisoners enslaved.
Bally's Chicago Casino
Gensler, SCB, Site Design Group
The riverfront location is being hailed as a springboard for the next generation of entertainment as the first ground-up mixed-use gaming complex and resort located in the center of a major metropolitan city. The new casino resort development harnesses the urban riverfront site to create inclusive, dynamic spaces, including a casino, food hall and restaurants, a theater and event space, a museum and exhibition area, and VIP areas, as well as a 500-key hotel. The more than 10 acres of outdoor space includes a park for the community, which will allow for various programming such as art fairs and farmers markets.
HOW TO SUBMIT AN UNBUILT PROJECT
We highly appreciate the input from our readers and are always happy to see more projects designed by them. If you have an Unbuilt project to submit, click here and follow the guidelines. Our curators will review your submission and get back to you in case it is selected for a feature.
