Schmidt Hammer Lassen architects has recently won the international architectural competition to design a 188 meter office tower in the financial district of central Warsaw, Poland. The 60,000 m2 high-rise building is to replace the existing ‘Ilmet’ building and will stand out as a modern landmark clearly identifiable in the Warsaw skyline by its unique elegant shape and appearance. The Jury was impressed by the high quality and innovation evident in the urban, architectural and technical concepts of the winning design. The future building will offer a number of attractive public areas and serve to complement the project’s prominent setting, as well as the entire neighborhood.

Sustainability was an important issue as the building is designed to reduce energy consumption with the goal of qualifying for the highest levels of sustainability certifications as BREEAM Excellent or LEED Gold status. More images and project description after the break.

Joao Pereira de Sousa, Architect & founder of BRAVDESIGN, recently shared with us an interview he did with Architect/Illustrator Philipp Schaerer.

As an ETH-trained Architect, Philipp Schaerer (1972) currently works as a freelance image designer. He is specialised in digital montage techniques and CGI (Computer Generated Imagery). After graduating from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) as an architect in 2000, Philipp Schaerer worked as an Architect, knowledge manager and image creator in the field of digital image editing for Herzog & de Meuron in Basel during six years (2000-2006). He created many well known architectural visualisations for this office and has substantially influenced the visual language of today’s established architectural visualizations. During his four years working as a research assistant at the chair of Computer Aided Architectural Design (CAAD) at the Faculty of Architecture (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich) under Prof. Dr. Ludger Hovestadt, he was able to continuously develop his knowledge in the area of digital image techniques. He gives lectures and conducts workshops at several universities in Switzerland.

Floating Baths, designed by Ondrej Lipensky and Andrea Kubna, on the Vltava River in Prague is conceived as a closed rounded space, floating on the water surface. Since the waterfront of the river is a problematic issue here in the city, the architects thought about a function that would get local people into the center again. The floating object is accessible by boat and is not connected to the banks of the river. It is an island and in close distance to Strelecky and Slovansky Island, many small harbors with boats and treadles, but also streets overloaded with cars, is a place to take a rest during the busy day for meeting friends. More images and architects’ description after the break.

Piran Days of Architecture (PDA) is an international architectural conference with one of the oldest traditions in the world. First presented in 1983 it is held every year at the end of November in the charming, medieval Slovene town Piran. The aim of the conference is to asses current trends in architecture and to present the most progressive and innovative ideas of architectural and spatial production. The conference is traditionally accompanied by several architectural exhibitions. The most important is the international architectural exhibition of recent works by Central European architects which compete for the distinguished international Piranesi Award, which went to Marte.Marte Architekten this year. More images and information on the winners after the break.

Architects: Ren Tian, Gu Lik Hang, Patchara Wongboonsin Location: Cambridge, MA, USA Project Area: 144 sqf Project Year: 2011 Photographs: Ren Tian, Patchara Wongboonsin

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Navy Pier officials listed the five design teams selected to compete in the final phase of the Navy Pier competition. Each international design team, consisting of architects, urban designers, landscape architects and many other design professionals, is required to submit design proposals for the Chicago Pierscape and undergo an oral interview with officials. The schematic designs will be exhibited to the public in early February and the winning proposal will be announced later that month.

The five teams selected are lead by AECOM, Aedas Architects, James Corner Field Operations, !melk and the Xavier Vendrell Studio – the only team lead by a Chicagoan. Continue reading after the break for the complete list of the teams.

As the SCI-Arc students finalize their thesis projects each September, they join the faculty in an annual ritual of constructing a temporary pavilion that will host that year’s graduation ceremony. Produced by Them Too Productions, this video documents the development and fabrication of Netscape, the 2011 SCI-Arc Graduation Pavilion by Oyler Wu Collaborative and the students of SCI-Arc. View ArchDaily’s detailed coverage of the 2011 pavilion HERE.

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The Asia Pacific winners of the Holcim Awards for sustainable construction were recently announced in Singapore. The Holcim Awards is an international competition that recognizes innovative projects and future-oriented concepts on regional and global levels. The competition is designed to encourage architects, planners, engineers and project owners to go beyond conventional notions of sustainable construction in their work and to harmonize ecological, social and economic concerns. Projects and concepts in the fields of architecture, landscape architecture, urban design, civil engineering, mechanical engineering and related fields are eligible for entry in the competition. More images and information on the winning competition proposals after the break.

Our friends from Weiss/Manfredi have shared their Portal to the Point Design Ideas Exploration proposal, a project exploring the connection between city and the environment for Point State Park in the City of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Currently, Point State Park, which is located at the geographic epicenter of Pittsburgh, does not take advantage of its potential to bridge the city, which is built on industrial accomplishments, with the river banks of the Allegheny and the Monogahela, both of which have granted Pittsburgh a prosperous ecological history. Weiss/Manfredi’s proposal attempts to stitch the city and its river banks together with a new brigde typology, a Mobius Pathway that is “not about the singular act of connecting two disparate parts, but about the comprehensive connectivity of a larger network.”

More about the Mobius Pathway after the break.

AWP, a Paris-based architecture firm, was named in July the general contractor for the landscaping of the public spaces and follies situated at the foot of the Grande Arche. The site, located near the future Arena 92 in the Jardins de l’Arche neighborhood, serves as a space for genuine interchange between La Défense and Seine-Arche. The urbanists at AWP are equally responsible for a guide plan for Defacto that will enhance the urban space of La Défense’s business district. More images and architects’ description after the break.

Above is a video for the Research Centre of the University of Jussieu, the competition winning design by BIG and OFF architects. The new multidisciplinary research centre, Paris PARC, located between Jean Nouvel’s Institut du Monde Arabe and the open green park of the Jussieu Campus will become a significant addition to the campus, strengthening the international appeal and openness of the leading French University for Science and Medicine.

The building of the new metro in San Sebastian Donastia will connect the people and the different areas of the city in a new way. It will set a new standard for the future of the town and its way forward. It will offer donastiarras and visitors a new means of public transpiration, and be a part of the future pulse of San Sebastian Donastia. The entrance design by Snøhetta is based on a continuous movement from underground level to over ground, and vice versa. The design element goes from being a ceiling structure underground to create a roof structure over the stairs and up over ground. The structure describes the transition between the two states and connects the city life with the metro world. More images and architects’ description after the break.

We are sharing with you an interview of architect Tony Fretton of Tony Fretton Architects conducted by Hugo Oliveira, as seen in Jornal Arquitectos. Prior to founding his firm in 1982, Fretton was Principal Designer at Arup Associates. He is deeply committed to architectural education and has experience teaching worldwide, from the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London to Harvard University in Cambridge. He currently serves as a Professor of Architectural Design and Interiors at TU Delft in the Netherlands.

The complete interview following the break.

We recently received a monograph of Cebra’s work. This young firm is energetic, pushes the boundaries, goes after competitions, and has been successful in pushing many projects into reality. We are fan their work and have featured Cebra 16 separate times here on archdaily. Additionally, David Basulto, co-founder of ArchDaily, has become good friends with Mikkel Frost through an email correspondence interview that took place over the 4 months. The interview is prominently featured in the introduction of the book and makes for an interesting read.

Together with the local Natal organization Centro Sócio Pastoral Nossa Senhora da Conceiçao (Centro Sócio), Herzog & de Meuron released the design for a new gymnasium at the School of Dinarte Martiz. The gymnasium is the “pioneering architectural project” of a larger urban plan for the neighborhood of Mãe Luiza in Natal, Brazil.

Architects: Herzog & de Meuron Partner: Jacques Herzog, Pierre de Meuron, Ascan Mergenthaler, Markus Widmer Project Architects: Tomislav Dushanov (Associate), Mariana Vilela Client: Centro Sócio Pastoral Nossa Senhora de Conceição Location: Natal, Brazil Construction: 2012 - 2013

Continue reading for more information.

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One Millionth Tower

More after the break.

For the last 12 years, the MoMA and the P.S.1 have invited a group of emerging architects to compete for the opportunity to design and construct a summer installation within MoMA PS1’s courtyard as part of their Young Architects Program (you can check the 2012 short list here).

Along with Moszkva square, Móricz Zsigmond circus is a very busy public transportation junction, located in south Buda. With a round art relic in its middle – the Gomba (meaning mushroom because of its form) is a popular public space for people to meet, with several trams and buses intersecting, along with the Budapest Metro – subway line 4, presently under construction. The concept by Hetedik Műterem Ltd. was to treat the art relic of József Schall (from 1942) with proper respect but determined courage. At the same time, they redefined the currently closed space structure, to put forward and intensify the presence of the urban public space. More images and architects’ description after the break.

Just in time for the holidays, the Brooklyn Night Bazaar will return to a Williamsburg warehouse the 15th through 17th of December. The Bazaar will re-imagine the sights, sounds and smells of traditional markets and will be filled with independent vendors selling artwork, accessories, and furniture, along with great music and food. Our friends from Danish firm JDS will be designing the master plan for the Bazaar and different furniture pieces after the firm captured the attention of the Bazaar organizers with their innovative ski jump in Norway.

More about the bazaar after the break.

In consonance with the spirit of this competition, Triple O Studio’s design concept, titled, ‘A Learning Curve’, was to respond with a multi-pronged approach that assimilates, on the one hand, the local ethos of the city; and on the other, answers the design program with a solution that is literally a learning curve. Their design is a building that effectively portrays the face of a vibrant country and provides education on an aspect of modern life – disaster prevention – that many prone countries have still not addressed. More images and architects’ description after the break.

The urban concept strategy by Maxthreads Architectural Design for the NW Beijing technology and research center pursues the maximization of open public space on the ground level of the site, including a canal walk area, open spaces and car park area. The mass of the new building is therefore raised into the first floor level. This open space is important to activate the site and the new research center. It is also important as an appropriate take off point or point of termination) for the overall site area sustainable mechanics. They are proposing a generous, diagonal underpass that emerges from the site environment and grand connective gesture. More images and project description after the break.

The present proposal for the Accra Twin Towers by Frederico Valsassina Arquitectos occupies a central position in relation to the urban design of the city of Accra. It has a place in a regular small sized plot, located on Liberia Road, near the British Council. The scale of the urban mesh on which it is inserted stands from the density of the suburban construction that surrounds this central area of the city which underlines a privileged treatment of the spaces. In this sense, as a major action, with an ambitious program, it was understood that the planned object should take advantage of all these constraints in order to be able to assume an emblematic role in the urban and architectonic context of the city. More images and architects’ description after the break.

Nona Yehia