When I joined BIG–Bjarke Ingels Group in 2008, we had one office, one partner, and 45 employees. Eight years later we have 12 partners and more than 400 employees in Copenhagen, New York, and London. As we continue to expand our reach, projects, and staff I have awarded myself the luxury of looking back and distilling what has made a difference so far. These are my top eight lessons for having secured the successful growth of BIG over the past eight years.
Masdar Institure. Image Courtesy of Foster + Partners
The Norman Foster Foundation has announced plans for its new Madrid-based headquarters to be opened in June this year, whose inauguration will be marked by the first session of the global forum Future is Now, addressing future social, economic and design concerns architecture will face. With the intersection of art, technology, and design, the Foundation facilitates multifaceted thinking and discourse among architects and designers. The opening of its new headquarters is a vital step in “establishing a world-class archive and inaugurating an international program of research, education, and interdisciplinary projects.”
According to the Foundation, “the decision to establish the Foundation as an independent entity, separate from the architectural practice of Foster + Partners, grew out of the perceived need for a permanent physical space that could house the Archive and study center, receive students and graduates, and present programs and projects."
https://www.archdaily.com/868821/norman-foster-foundations-madrid-headquarters-to-inaugurate-with-global-forum-in-juneOsman Bari
Houses of Parliament – Then and Now. Image Courtesy of Expedia
Go on a virtual stroll through century-old London, with this new interactive map produced by Expedia. Named “Historic London,” the app takes you through 14 notable sites throughout the British capital, from Buckingham Palace to a view of St. Paul’s Cathedral from Fleet Street. Archival images of the sites from the late 1800s and early 1900s are overlayed onto the streetview of today, so you can easily compare what has and hasn’t changed over the last 100 years.
Telluride Arts has announced the three finalist firms that will compete for the adaptive reuse and transformation of the historic Telluride Transfer Warehouse in the arts district of Telluride, Colorado. Selected from an initial list of 30 firms from across the country, Gluckman-Tang, LTL and NADAAA were chosen as finalists based on “their sensitivity to the Telluride Arts and Telluride Historic Landmark Districts, their experience with historic restoration, and their previous design experience with public spaces for the arts.”
The three firms will now develop conceptual designs for the building, with the vision of “[creating] an architectural and cultural landmark in the heart of Telluride that provides contemporary, public art space that deepens and expands the cultural life of Telluride.”
Mapacad is a website that offers downloads of .dwgs of dozens of cities. With 200 metropolises in their database, the founders have shared a set of their most-downloaded cities.
The files contain closed polyline layers for buildings, streets, highways, city limits, and geographical data--all ready for use in CAD programs like Autocad, Rhino, BricsCad and SketchUp.
Drawing on a touchscreen or trackpad can be a huge pain – but when you’re on the go, sometimes that may be your only option to quickly convey an image. To the rescue, Google has unveiled its latest AI experiment, AutoDraw, which uses machine learning to pair your wobbly doodle with a corresponding artist-drawn image – like autocorrect for sketching.
https://www.archdaily.com/869005/googles-new-autodraw-feature-will-complete-your-drawings-for-youAD Editorial Team
The Moscow government has just launched the biggest demolition program in the city’s history. Its goal is to get rid of 8,000 5-story residential buildings constructed in the Soviet era—it is probably the biggest program of erasure of modernist architectural heritage in world history. The main assumptions of the plan, as well as the press comments following it, show that we have forgotten what modernism was about, and what the real values of this architecture are.
A few years ago I published an essay titled Belyayevo Forever, dedicated to the preservation of generic modernist architecture. I focused on Moscow’s microrayons—vast, state-funded housing estates built in the Soviet era. In the essay, I explained the spatial and cultural values these prefabricated landscapes had. I also speculated about how one would go about preserving architecture that completely lacks uniqueness. The essay ended with a provocative statement: we should put Belyayevo—the most generic of all Soviet estates—on the UNESCO heritage list.
Plans have been announced by Tishman Speyer for "The Wheeler", a glassy new addition above downtown Brooklyn’s iconic Macy’s store on Fulton Street. The design is a collaboration between Shimoda Design Group and Perkins Eastman, and incorporates 10 stories of dynamic office and mixed-use space that will sit atop the existing department store.
Paying homage to the renowned 19th century Brooklyn developer Andrew Wheeler, the new offices will come complete with 16 foot ceiling heights, an acre of combined outdoor terrace gardens and decks, an amenity floor, and 360,000 square feet of rentable space, all while capturing the surrounding views of Lower Manhattan, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty and New York harbour from its vantage point above the existing architecture.
A new housing complex in the form of 500 terraced units has been proposed by London practice Architects of Invention for the city of Birmingham, in response to its growing multicultural population. Drawing inspiration from the ancient Hanging Gardens of Babylon, Garden Hill’s formal composition is that of two staggered 25-storey towers, with private and communal gardens on each level of terraces.
With the project's swooping mass, the residences aim to offer panoramic views of Birmingham, given its central location in the Digbeth area, a 10-minute walk from the city center. Additionally, the staggered towers capture ample daylighting over the course of the day, with the south end benefitting from the morning sun and the north end in the evening.
Architectural projects are only as successful as an architecture firm’s ability to work together. Experience means nothing if projects aren’t rooted in creative collaboration.
For more than 30 years, residential architects Stuart Cohen and Julie Hacker have produced a series of exquisitely designed and crafted homes in Chicago’s northern suburbs. Although known for their distinctly different personalities, this husband and wife duo has effectively created an environment where clients can be heard and understood. They know how to design together from start to finish, and that’s what makes their project results so remarkable.
First Place: Mashambas Skyscraper / Pawel Lipiński, Mateusz Frankowski. Image Courtesy of eVolo
eVolo Magazine has announced the winners of its 2017 Skyscraper Competition. Now in its 12th year, the annual award was established to recognize “visionary ideas for building [high-rise] projects that through [the] novel use of technology, materials, programs, aesthetics, and spatial organizations, challenge the way we understand vertical architecture and its relationship with the natural and built environments.”
This year, 3 winners and 22 honorable mentions were selected from a pool of 444 entries. Among this year’s winners are a modular educational center and marketplace for sub-Saharan Africa, a vertical stack of factory and recreational space, villages embedded in mountains and even a skyscraper built within a giant sequoia.
Now, a new pool at Houston’s Market Square Tower is upping the ante even further with a transparent plexiglass wading pool that projects out 10 feet past the end of the building – and 500 feet above the busy street below.
https://www.archdaily.com/868968/this-glass-bottomed-sky-pool-is-suspended-500-feet-from-the-groundAD Editorial Team
It's no secret that Copenhagen continues to invest massively in bicycle infrastructure like no other city on the planet. The network is already comprehensive and effective but the City continues to add important links, especially over the harbor and the canals. One of the more recent additions is the Inner Harbor Bridge—Inderhavnsbroen in Danish—that spans Copenhagen Harbor at a key, strategic and iconic point. It links the city center at the end of the postcard picture perfect Nyhavn with the Christianshavn neighborhood and the southern neighborhoods beyond. It is one of a series of 17 new bridges or underpasses for bicycle traffic that have been added to the City's transport network in the past few years.
The Inner Harbour Bridge was riddled with problems and was extremely delayed, as you can read here. Now, however, it's been open since July 2016. Let me be clear: I'm thrilled that we have a new, modern link over the harbor to accommodate bicycle traffic and pedestrians. I am over the moon that the number of cyclists crossing daily exceeds all projected numbers. The City estimated that between 3,000–7,000 cyclists would use the bridge but the latest numbers are 16,000. It's a massive success. But sometimes you can see the forest for the trees. I'm sorry, but Inderhavnsbro is a stupid, stupid bridge.
Despite being aimed toward a common goal, the different perspectives of the architect and the client can sometimes lead to a tense working relationship. But where there is conflict, there is humor – in these strips, Tristan Comics manages to address the topic in a truthful yet humorous way. They say laughter is the best medicine, and through comics, Tristan manages to shed light on those pertinent issues that all those in the world of architecture can relate to.
Every company wants to establish a brand on a local, regional, national or even international level. A company strives for an image that is recognizable by potential customers no matter where they are in the world. In fact, the first face-to-face interaction with a customer might be at a company’s own location. This initial impression can make or break the customer’s willingness to spend their money. Maintaining a well-loved and respected brand appearance is imperative to a company’s success.
Today, app developer Morpholio has unveiled the newest addition to its collection of architectural aids. Ava, short for Automated Visual Assembly, aims to streamline the interior design process by allowing the user to navigate seamlessly between visually-appealing presentation boards and detailed, editable data spreadsheets.
Ava seeks to reform the status quo for interior design projects, which often involves the separate creation of visual presentation boards for clients, cut sheets and specs for drawing sets, and product lists for purchasing. Ava has been invented to package images and information more intelligently, optimizing beauty, clarity, and ease, and allowing designers to navigate neatly from process, to presentation, to project delivery.
Florian W. Mueller's Singularity series is, in the photographer's own words, "just the building – reduced to the max." These deceptively simple shots of the summits of skyscrapers from around Europe and North America, each set against in infinite gradient of sky, are symbols of architecture's effort to reach ever higher in evermore unique ways. For Mueller, who is based in Cologne, they are an attempt at abstraction. In isolation—and especially when viewed together—they are remarkably revealing as studies of form and façade.
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) has released the newest renderings of their planned Atelier Peter Zumthor-led $600 million renovation, and one thing in particular stands out: the building is no longer black.
While the third major revision to the design sees the building retain the overall shape of its previous iteration, many aspects have changed, including how the floating mass touches the ground and the facade’s new sandy color.
Historical Future: Milan Reborn, Scalo Farini and Valtellina
In an presentation at Milan Design Week 2017, MAD Architects has revealed their proposal for the Scali Milano project, which invited five international firms (MAD, Stefano Boeri Architetti, Mecanoo, MIRALLES TAGLIABUE EMBT, and Cino Zucchi Architetti) to design a community-reactivation masterplan aimed at transforming a series of Milan's neglected railyards into "productive social landscapes that establish a harmony between Milan’s citizenry, the larger metropolitan region, and the natural environment."
Titled Historical Future: Milan Reborn, MAD's scheme proposes reorganizing the railyards into a series of interconnected micro-systems that follow five spatial concepts: “City of Connections,” “City of Green,” “City of Living,” “City of Culture,” and “City of Resources.”
If you're reading this, you likely work in the design world, and as a result you may have heard of Scrum. It’s a design method originally introduced by Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka in the 1980s to describe a process for product development, and later formalized for software development by Jeff Sutherland in 1995. It relies on the organization of a team and its tasks around the principles of focus and flexibility: focus on a singular task within a given time period, and flexibility in response to changing client demand, user feedback, and design challenges. Scrum keeps a project on schedule with the Sprint, where the entire team is working towards one important milestone within set dates, and continuously communicating potential impediments to hitting the deadline.
If we think about how the educational system worked in the past, we can quickly see that both the teaching style in schools as well as the school’s infrastructure were very different from the current system. The educational model of the twentieth century could be defined as being similar to the "spatial model of prisons, with no interest in stimulating a comprehensive, flexible and versatile education."
However, we are now at a time when social, economic and technological developments have created a more global society and where information and learning are becoming more affordable. This radical change has transformed the societies in which we live, leaving the current educational model based on a rigid and unidirectional teaching obsolete.
As such, there are schools that have not only broken the mold of traditional teaching but have formed new educational standards, exploring new paradigms and opening up new possibilities within the design of educational spaces. Since architecture and educational models often reflect the ideology of a society, how is the school of 21st century defined?
There is something unsettling about this trailer – something uncomfortable. On the surface it’s as optimistic as any other film about Bjarke Ingels, the architectural protege and principal of BIG, of which there have been many. He is incandescently youthful, remarkably young when tallied to the level of his repute and success, and perhaps the last of the world-building, world conquering 'media darlings' of the 20th and 21st Centuries. He is, many would argue, an unstoppable force.
https://www.archdaily.com/868779/watch-the-cryptic-trailer-for-new-bjarke-ingels-documentary-big-timeAD Editorial Team
The European Commission and Europa Nostra have unveiled the winners of the 2017 European Union Prize for Cultural Heritage / Europa Nostra Awards, which honor achievements in conservation, research, dedicated service, and education, training and awareness. Out of 202 applications from 39 countries, 29 winners have been selected.
With high hopes of contributing to the reformation of Russia’s secondary schooling system, construction has begun on Smart School, a planned 31,000 meters square educational complex in Irkutsk, Siberia, which combines multi-use educational facilities, outdoor learning spaces, and housing developments for adoptive families. Designed by Danish firm CEBRA, the project was the winning proposal for the school’sinternational competition back in 2015, beating 48 other firms, including MVRDV and Sou Fujimoto Architects.
“Based on the program and principles of Smart School, an architectural concept has been developed which integrates buildings, a plot of land and the surrounding urban community into a complete, diverse and activating learning environment, a ‘school park’, explain the architects. “There is school life not only in specialized premises but also in open areas inside and around buildings."
https://www.archdaily.com/868734/cebras-mixed-use-smart-school-proposes-a-rethink-of-russias-education-systemOsman Bari
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