This week’s curated selection of Best Unbuilt Architecture highlights competition-winning projects submitted by the ArchDaily Community. From large scale urban developments to interventions in the landscape, from housing projects to educational spaces and commercial buildings, this article showcases a variety of design approaches, programs and scales. The proposals featured are the results of local and international competitions, either creative concepts or projects currently in progress.
The competition-winning entries include a range of different projects, designed by both new practices and established firms. are a few of this week's highlights. A "city within a city" urban development in Ukraine, an EV station design in Canada that reinterprets the traditional typology of highway rest areas, a sustainable housing block in Finland and a clubhouse in the landscape of New Zealand are some of this week's highlights.
Read on to discover 9 curated projects highlighting competition-winning designs, along with their project descriptions from the architects.
Lucky Land
Lucky Land is a city within a city. Six blocks have 23 residential buildings with various architectural solutions and height capability, corresponding to the general concept. The project also includes underground and surface car parks, active mixed-use ground floors, a medical centre, a school, and a park. The height of the houses ranges from 9 to 26 floors, with apartments from 1 to 4 rooms each and panoramic penthouses. While conceiving a new urban centre, we tried to re-discover and rethink local architectural and urban planning traditions.
The Circle
The Circle as a vibrant and sustainable meeting point for EV owners welcomes visitors to a place where they can experience various functions under one roof in a compact scheme. The proposal aims to transform the traditional typology of highway rest areas into a flexible and resizable spatial system that can be adapted for multiple locations and different capacities. The proposed version with a diameter of 60 meters aims to simulate a prototype of the next-generation green EV stations.
Elementary school in Komořany
The new school of Komořany is located on a northern sloping plot adjacent to the forest at the edge of Prague. We perceive the plot as a connecting transition between the forest and the new public infrastructure - a transition between the wild and the cultivated. The new building responds to the morphology of the plot. Three volumes with the same footprint are set on top of each other, cascading towards the forest and therefore creating the residential roofs.
Piiri wooden housing block
Tommila Architects, Kaleidoscope Nordic
Piiri is the winning proposal for a sustainable social housing block in Kerava in the Finnish metropolitan region. It spearheads a wood building in the city and will be the landmark of a housing fair in 2024. Two mirrored slim buildings frame a plot creating a large, light, and sheltered yard that encourages commonality together with shared spaces. Piiri minimizes energy consumption with well-lit apartments, district heating from forestry waste, and photovoltaics. The cross-laminated timber structure keeps the carbon footprint small.
Kautokeino School
"Naturen lærer oss" (Nature Teaches Us) is Ola Roald Arkitektur winning proposal for a new school and supplementary swimming pool in Kautokeino, far North in Norway. The aim is for the facilities to become a distinct social nucleus in the local community, as well as encourage Sapmi identity and cultural practice. The intention is that the school together with the outdoor areas will motivate and educate the Sapmi culture in inspirational ways.
Muriwai Downs Clubhouse
The valleys, ravines and gullies that characterise Muriwai Downs prompted a design that reconceives the clubhouse as a bridge, one that employs a dome structure to span the wetland below. Drawing from the legacy of programmed infrastructure projects, the clubhouse-as-bridge typology seeks to expand the repertoire of bridges as social, ecological, and contextual structures. The sandstone cladding is quarried on-site and treated in a variety of horizontally raked and smooth finishes to emphasize the curving and carved form.
Brick Veil
Sited in a prominent location in the outskirts of Preston, our proposal for a new iconic Mosque envisions an architectural language that is timeless in its materiality and honest in its tectonic approach. Conceived as an elliptical extrusion at the south-western end of the site, our design features an abstract and legible massing that is not only iconic and memorable but also highly kinetic. Inspired by the veil-like qualities of traditional Mashrabiyas, the facade’s pleating form has inherent structural stiffness that allows it to exist as an independent system whilst endowing the building with a rich tectonic language.
K30 – Office Complex Kruppstraße
The design by AllesWirdGut delivers on the promise of a future of flexible work by creating an office building as an open-shelf system that offers multiple green spaces: Expanded work areas on balconies, terraces, or a garden house provide for a perfect setting for collective activity; the office complex also makes a contribution to the local micro-climate and biodiversity. Guiding ideas such as resource-saving construction, climate-friendly operation, and foresighted life-cycle planning are the backbone of a design with an attitude.
ECOPOLIS. Concept For A New City In The Sakhalin Region
Together with Wowhaus, Nomura Research Institute, and the Scientific Research Institute of Ecology and Sustainable Management of Natural Resources, TSPA developed a concept for a new city model that ensures a transformation of economic growth, green energy integration and qualitative living. We propose a compact city that minimises soil consumption and maximises the spaces dedicated to nature, including productive forests, recreational parks and agriculture fields.We propose three main urban centres – Science, Culture and Business centres – located where the street network intensifies. Each of them presents unique urban typologies, architectures and functions.
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.
