10 projects, 10 functions. Featuring a multitude of different programs, this week’s curated selection of Best Unbuilt Architecture highlights diverse and innovative conceptual approaches. Submitted by our readers, this variety of proposals includes sports, religious, cultural, educational, and social purposes.
Compiling projects from all over the world, this article puts together a Buddhist temple in Bangkok, Thailand, a ring-shaped experience center and eco-tourism catalyst for Latvia, a cemetery in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the biggest extreme sports park in Russia. Moreover, unconventional office spaces are underlined with an innovation start-up center in Vietnam, headquarters in Shenzhen, and Tirana’s new municipality building.
Read on to discover 10 selected projects highlighting diverse functions with their descriptions from the architects.
The Kurgi Experience Center
SODO-SOPA, CO-SY, and FOLD
This Ring-shaped experience center and eco-tourism catalyst proposed in’s North Vidzeme Biosphere Reserve is located in Latvia’s North Vidzeme Biosphere Reserve, a large nature conservation area at the Estonian border that accounts for nearly 6% of Latvia’s total land area. The vision for the site is to integrate the experience center with a suite of complementary eco-tourism attractions in the region whilst meeting the owner’s primary focus of horse breeding. The team envisions the building to be a catalyst for the activation of the wider context and more.
Fan Zen’s Art Museum
WVA
The building adopts the round sky and the square place and the brush strokes of Mr. Fan Zeng's mountains and stones as the design inspirations and takes the stone as the base to hold up the universe and everything, and finally, everything evolves. The external form emphasizes the architectural language form of national style, and the internal environment serves the works itself, ensuring the audience's appreciation and experience of the work. The museum experience is not only about the exhibition itself, but also about architecture and space. The exhibition experience can make people temporarily separated from the reality of life and also make them enter into a spiritual field through design.
Ho Chi Minh City Innovation Start-up Center
ICU.jsc
The project is the first and head office of the Innovation Start-up Centers network in Ho Chi Minh City, the most dynamic city in Vietnam. This building reflects the attempt of the government to promote young Vietnamese entrepreneurs with their products and services to the world. And also, the design of this building is an ambitious effort of our young architects to realize Vietnamese’s new generation architecture which is formed by their background of international education and traditional approaches.
Tianfu Conference Center
Tianfu Conference Center is in the north of Chengdu Tianfu Airport City and is considered as one of the most important developing elements in the area. Unlike the Conference center in other cities, our design is located on a picturesque lake in a scenic area outside the city. This building is a place for future exchanges and interactions in the fields of finance, commerce, trade, scientific research, manufacturing, and logistics, and so on. This architecture with its geometric shape and futuristic atmosphere is actually inspired by the ancient Chinese architecture of the sloping roof and landscaped courtyard.
Zovik Chapel and Cemetery
A broad surface, not threatened by anything, is a motif and inspiration for an appropriate and proportional architectural intervention that at the start respects the value of open natural surroundings, their micro-location, views, and landscape scenes in all directions. The pinnacle of the north-western corner of the land lot is the dominant mass of the farewell chapel with its accompanying facilities (the morgue and the sanitary area) and an open-access terrace. The distribution of grave alleys is rationally spread across the mild slope in the east-west direction with rows of graves on both sides.
Tirana New Municipality Building
For the design of this concept for a municipal building for Tirana, the team at GAD moved away from the accepted architectural typology of austere government buildings focusing instead on the geometries afforded by the site on the main avenue of the capital city of Albania. GAD concentrated on generating a dynamic, lithe configuration that not only took into account the interior spaces but the exterior and site perimeter to create a sustainable, zero-carbon ecologically sensitive design.
Everbright Kindergarten
GEEDESIGN
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Due to the boundary restrictions of the residential areas and the control of the multi-layer retreat boundary in the intersection zone, creating this building was extremely difficult. How to create a humanized, natural, and childlike educational space under many limited conditions has become a fundamental problem faced by architects. A community supporting kindergarten, at the intersection of the new and the old city, the project accommodates 12 classes, a super-sized music-event room, and two activity areas. The occupied area is only 5,400 square meters.
Bangkok Grand Buddhist Temple
HAS Design and Research
The origin of the Bangkok Grand Buddhist Temple comes from the substantial influence and inspiration of Chinese Mahayana Buddhism on Thailand. Believers and monks initiated the project in 2018, hoping to complete with the public donation of land, funds, and construction, and HAS (Hung And Songkittipakdee) has contributed to the design and planning. The design does not emphasize the magnificent and prevailing architecture; on the contrary, focuses on how to bring forth the unique "emptiness" of the site to the architecture itself.
Shenzhen Meilin Dongguan Science and Technology Building
Shenzhen Yijing Architectural Design Co., Ltd
Shenzhen Meilin Dongguan Sci-Tech Building is the future headquarter of Dongguan Group. Located southwest where Meilin Road and Kaifeng Road meet, the tower building is 200 meters tall with 41 floors. When completed, it will become an iconic super high-rise urban service center in Meicai area of Shenzhen that combines business, finance, living, culture, sports and leisure. Faced with the increasing scarcity of urban land resources and high floor area ratio, we hope to create more outdoor terracesto meet people’s diverse space demands, enable people to work in a “vertical forest” and achieve an excellent integration of work, life and nature.
URAM
KOSMOS Architects in Collaboration with Legato Sports Architecture
“Uram”, the biggest extreme park in Russia is going to open soon in the city of Kazan. It will become a new center of youth culture. The new building will become part of the Master plan of development of the Kazanka river embankment and the continuation of the outdoor extreme park. The top part of the building is a huge minimalist rectangular volume, which functions as a landmark of urban scale. Hills, on which this volume lies, transform the facade of the building into an interactive infrastructure for BMX and skateboard. Growing from the surrounding park, the hills blur the border between the landscape and the building.
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