The Design Museum in London has announced the 2014 "Design of the Year" nominees. Spanning the industries of architecture to fashion and furniture design, featuring NLE's floating school in Nigeria, Toyota's affordable environmental car, and a mobile phone made from detachable blocks, just one of 76 nominated works will be crowned this year's most innovative design. Of the nominees, 14 are some of the world's most renowned structures. Catch a glimpse of the architecture being considered, after the break.
Child Chemo House, Osaka / Tezuka Architects, Takaharu & Yui Tezuka
A place where children undergoing chemotherapy treatment can live with their families, Child Chemo House aims to facilitate an ordinary lifestyle in a beautiful, calm space.
Facade for Paul Smith, Albemarle Street, Mayfair, London / 6a Architects
The cast iron used for this facade references London street furniture and creates a sharp contrast to the neighboring Georgian townhouses. A sinuous pattern of interlocking circles puts an abstract spin on a classic Regency shape, while curved windows nod to the glass in nearby arcades
Frac Centre - Les Turbulences, Orleans / Jakob + MacFarlane
Conceived by the architects as both a landscape and a topographic surface, this faceted pavilion of concrete and aluminum conveys a perpetual flow of digital information. Volume, light and image fuse together to create a dynamic form of architecture that communicates, reveals, provokes, stimulates and informs.
Frac Nord-Pas de Calais, Dunkerque / Anne Lacaton & Jean Philippe Vassal
A contemporary art centre located in an old boat warehouse. The architects maintained the original structure and attached a double hall of the same dimensions, creating an open, industrial space.
Heydar Aliyev Center, Baku, Azerbaijan / Zaha Hadid and Patrik Schumacher
Elaborate undulations, bifurcations, folds and inflections modify this plaza surface into an architectural landscape that performs a multitude of functions. The building blurs the conventional distinctions between architectural object and urban landscape, building envelope and urban plaza, interior and exterior.
La Tallera Siqueiros, Cuernavaca, Morelos, Mexico / Frida Escobedo
Originally conceived as a muralist workshop, the home and studio of Mexican artist David Alfaro Siqueiros is transformed into a new museum and cultural centre. Siqueiros’s huge murals are repositioned to create an open courtyard, and a geometric concrete grid composed of triangles clads parts of the museum, blurring the boundaries between interior and exterior space.
Makoko Floating School, Nigeria / NLÉ, Makoko Community Building Team
A prototype floating structure, built for the historic water community of Makoko, Nigeria. The school takes an innovative, cheap and sustainable approach to address the community’s specific social and physical needs.
Mont de Marsan Mediatheque / archi5
Standing in an austere military quadrangle drill yard, the Media Library is an uplifting cultural symbol. Designed as a covered cultural square, its transparent planes generously open to the view of the public.
Museo Jumex, Mexico City / David Chipperfield
Making full use of a difficult triangular site this elegant new museum is clad in locally-mined travertine stone, and features a distinctive saw-tooth roof which floods the top floor gallery with natural light.
Newhall Be, Harlow, Essex / Alison Brooks Architects
This 84-unit scheme in Harlow, Essex integrates a mix of new and familiar house typologies, prefabricated timber construction and a highly efficient masterplan to maximise living space and flexibility for individual homes. The scheme challenges the presupposition by housebuilders that we want very traditional looking houses
Praca das Artes Performing Arts Centre, Sao Paulo / Brasil Arquitetura
A new complex, in an area that has suffered from economic decline for decades, Praça das Artes incorporates historic buildings alongside new volumes built in exposed concrete and coloured with red pigments. Sheer walls guarantee flexibility of the internal spaces and unobstructed external spaces, while outside there are generous open spaces and new public passageways.
St. Moritz Church, Augsburg, Germany (Interior Renovation) / John Pawson
Taking in aesthetic, functional and liturgical perspectives, the renovation saw the painstaking paring away of selected elements to achieve a clearer visual field, drawing the eye to the apse ‘the threshold to transcendence’ which is designed as a room of light.
The New Crematorium at the Woodland Cemetery, Stockholm / Johan Celsing
Built on an undulating terrain in a wild wood section of the Woodland Cemetery, the New Crematorium features exposed white concrete and white glazed bricks in a building which is at once robust and sensitive.
Wa Shan Guesthouse, Hangzhou, China / Wang Shu
Pritzker Prize-winner Wang Shu’s guesthouse and reception centre draws on the traditions of the China Academy of Art and the city of Hangzhou itself. The new building is one of 22 designed by the architect on the Academy’s Xiangshan Campus.
Also nominated is the Silk Pavilion designed by Mediated Matter Group at the MIT Media Lab, under the "product" category, and Serpentine Galleries Identity created by Marina Willer and Brian Boylan, under the "graphics" category. View all the nominated designs here on the Design Museum's official announcement.
All 76 nominations will go on view at the Design Museum from March 26 to August 25. A winner will be announced later this year.
Project descriptions and news via the Design Museum.
