In any city, cultural centers can play a significant role in preserving and celebrating the community’s heritage and history, officing space for a vast array of activities and initiatives to encourage social interaction and the sharing of ideas and memories. They are also institutions that promote education and learning, often offering classes, workshops, and lectures on various topics related to culture, history, and the arts. By fulfilling these crucial roles within a given community, they can also become attractive centers for tourists eager to learn about local identities, cultures, and traditions.
This week’s curated selection of Best Unbuilt Architecture highlights designs submitted by the ArchDaily community dedicated to cultural institutions. From a multifunctional cultural center in Buenos Aires to a cultural storage facility in South Korea or a timber-clad library in Vietnam, this selection features projects that aim to encourage communities to come together to celebrate their shared cultures and histories. The article includes projects from offices such as LOOP Architects, Eddea, Salon Alper Derinboğaz, and Boozhgan Architecture Studio.
Read on to discover 8 cultural projects submitted by the ArchDaily community, along with descriptions from the architects.
Multifunctional Cultural Center in Buenos Aires, Argentina
The Multifunctional Cultural Center is designed as a labyrinthine structure, which plays a key role so that neither the guests nor the staff members meet. Externally, the building looks like a closed structure of blank blocks, but inside, due to the labyrinth spatial organization and the transformational potential of the pavilions, an element of quest and adventure is created.
Chariz
Considering the position of women in the current social conditions of Iran and through the revival of Iranian identity, carpet art, and carpet weaving, were chosen as the starting point of the project. The carpet was a feme art that contains Iranian identity. All over the world, the Iranian carpet is known as a piece of art. This piece of art is the result of the efforts of the past women's community in Iran. Another thing that was important besides the femininity of the carpet is the ability to combine and represent multiple narratives, which was one of the client's requests.
Borgring Viking Experience Centre
Denmark has a total of five preserved Viking ringforts. The story of one of them, the spectacular ringfort that stands out in the landscape at Køge, Zealand, is now to be communicated via a sensitive experience center inspired by the legendary Viking halls. The winning proposal designed by LOOP Architects together with LYTT Architecture and engineer VIGGO MADSEN was chosen after an invited competition.
Kinmen Library and Art Museum Competition Entry
Eddea / Luis Ybarra + Leching Chiang
At the geometric center of Kinmen Island stands the hill where the Special Art and Culture Zone Base, formerly Runan Second Camp District, is located, with its military infrastructure preserved as a historical heritage. The three key elements of the site are the military trench, the wetland, and the protected trees. The building interacts with these by reconstructing the edge of the wetland, leaving 100% of protected trees untouched and providing a new interpretation of the trench as a landscape element.
Kuori Museum
Kuori, the Finnish word for bark, gives its name to our proposal for the Sara Hilden Art Museum of the City of Tampere in Finland. The museum is conceived as a Bark that protects the collection, enables its growth, and catalyzes the public life in and around the art—responding to the industrial and natural heritage of its context. It forms new connections, a living threshold between the city and nature, and activates public spaces that integrate nature and art.
Tehran Science Museum
Tehran, the capital of Iran, once was a city with a pleasant climate, but recently has been swallowed by the vast number of buildings. The site of the project is a green land located in a crucial urban intersection. The main challenging question was: to design an iconic building or think differently? To answer the question, we decided to minimize the intervention on the site. In fact, respecting the natural shape of the land is the main key concept of the project.
Seoul Cultural Resource Center
While architectural endeavors remain concentrated toward cultural buildings, the new spatial realities of storage continue to be overlooked. Most cultural artifacts are now stored offsite in nondescript and inaccessible storage facilities, all concealed from the general public. The Atelier’s proposal speculates on the architectural possibilities of the tectonics of storage—of vast protective enclosures, automated storage and retrieval systems, random assemblages of objects, high-tech security, and carefully calibrated atmospheres—to amplify its public experience as an oversized cabinet of curiosities.
The Limpid Library - Library of Songdo International Library
TarberAK Architectural Studio; TL Bureau
The architecture of a temple, as well as the traditional Korean house, their use of structure, light, and shadow, were highly influential allusions to the concept of the library. As the softly bent and changing shadows cast by the graceful, well-associated curves of the roof, the curving walls of the reading rooms in the proposed design combine to produce complex, dynamic shadows and find their end-points on the façade of the Library. These curved walls and their shadows on the façade are among the main protagonists of the Library’s architecture.
Municipal Art Society
UYANG ARCHITECTURE / Yang Zhao
The Municipal Art Society is a nonprofit, membership-based organization in New York City that encourages thoughtful planning and urban design across the city to preserve history, culture, and neighborhoods. Through various strategies, all the different programs were able to be arranged from the most public café at the half underground to the most private office on the fourth floor, creating several public spaces that seamlessly connect to the site and are fully open to the citizens of New York City. The team members working on the project include Yang Zhao, Jingyuan Yang, Lang Dong, and Yeceng Wang.
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.
