For this week's edition of The Urbanist, Monocle's weekly "guide to making better cities," the team discuss urbanism projects that were planned and never realised, what 'paper architecture' really is, and the importance of the architectural competition.
In The Urbanist, Andrew Tuck explores how a terrace of old town houses in central London (152-158 The Strand, near Somerset House) have been recently saved from demolition by the efforts of campaigning journalists and a sympathetic public. In Brazil, the yet to be seen high-speed train link between Rio di Janeiro and São Paulo meets scrutiny while in Toronto, five unsuccessful architectural bids are examined. Finally, ArchDaily Editor James Taylor-Foster visits their London studio to talk about the architectural competition, from Brunelleschi to Guggenheim and Den Bosch.
https://www.archdaily.com/771480/monocle-24-explore-architectural-competitions-and-failed-bidsAD Editorial Team
One of the first and most successful examples of urban renewal, Detroit's 78-acre Lafayette Park is known for being the world's largest collection of works by Mies van der Rohe. Now, the mid-century modern "masterpiece" is the first urban renewal project to be declared a National Historic Landmark. This is partially due to the fact that, as Ruth Mills, architectural historian for Quinn Evans Architects told the Detroit Free Press, "Lafayette Park was one of the few urban renewal projects that's done it successfully." It is now Michigan's 41st landmark.
Rotating a full 90 degrees along nine pentagonal sections, Santiago Calatrava's "Turning Torso" was deemed the world's first twisting skyscraper upon its completion in 2005. Still Scandinavia's tallest tower, the 190-meter Malmö skyscraper has been awarded a 10 Year Award by the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH) for its continued valued to the surrounding area and successful performance across a number of categories, including environmental, engineering performance, vertical transport, iconography, and others.
“The Twisting Torso is one of those superb examples that went beyond the creation of a signature tower and helped shape an entirely new and invigorating urban fabric,” said Timothy Johnson, Vice Chairman, CTBUH Board of Trustees and Partner, NBBJ.
World Photo Day, to be celebrated on August 19th, is fast approaching. Last year we celebrated the occasion with a day of posts dedicated to the photographers who make ArchDaily - and indeed the architecture industry as we know it - possible, and this year we'd like to do something equally special with the help of our ArchDaily readers.
Using data from our My ArchDaily platform, we want to find out which photos are most popular among our readers, and then learn more about these images from the photographers who took them. To do this, we will take a selection of the images that have been bookmarked the most and then reach out to their photographers, asking them to share the story of how each image came together. So make sure to cast your "vote" for your favorite architectural image by bookmarking it in My ArchDaily!
Don't know how to bookmark photos in My ArchDaily? Find out after the break!
https://www.archdaily.com/771467/help-us-celebrate-world-photo-day-2015-using-my-archdailyAD Editorial Team
For decades, one of the most pressing questions surrounding architecture and urban planning has been "who gets to decide what is built?" Various systems have been tried, but one of the most popular strategies to emerge in recent years has been "The Public Vote." Thanks to the new possibilities afforded by the internet, it's becoming increasingly common to display all the entries to competitions to the public, as in the Guggenheim Helsinki competition, and even to have the public vote for their favorite, as in the recent competition to design Den Bosch's city centre theatre, or even Karim Rashid's informal poll of his Facebook followers to choose a facade for one of his designs. In some ways these approaches seem like the perfect response to years of complaints that decisions are made behind closed doors, away from the people who they affect.
Out of 138 entries, 10 finalists were selected, three of which went on to win first, second, and third prizes, reflecting the best displays of the jury’s qualifications: communication efficiency, technical quality, aesthetic quality, functionality, and relation to context. See the three winning designs, after the break.
ArchDaily is looking for motivated architecture geeks to join our team of interns for Fall 2015 (September - December)! An ArchDaily internship is a great opportunity to learn about our site and get exposed to some of the latest and most interesting ideas shaping architecture today. Read on to find out what it takes to work for the world’s most visited architecture website!
https://www.archdaily.com/770898/call-for-archdaily-interns-fall-2015AD Editorial Team
The United States Department of State has commissioned WEISS/MANFREDI to re-envision the Edward Durell Stone-designed embassy compound in New Delhi, India. Fifty years after its opening, the masterplan hopes to "restore the early modernist Chancery Building and recast the Embassy Compound as a multi-functional 28-acre campus setting." The masterplan's first phase will see the addition of a new office annex and restore the complex's landscape.
Plans have been unveiled for Kengo Kuma's first public commission in the US. The Portland Japanese Garden has commissioned Kuma to design a new "Cultural Village" to accommodate the garden's growing popularity.
Based off the Japanese tradition of monzenmachi (gate-front towns), where activity exists just outside the gates of shrines and cultural sites, the village will provide a "free-flowing" courtyard space for events and educational activities, as well as multi-purpose classrooms, galleries, a library, tea cafe, and more. In addition to this, a new visitor entrance will be built on an existing site at the bottom of the hillside site on Kingston Avenue, just on the outskirts of downtown Portland.
"The Portland Japanese Garden's careful growth is a very important cultural effort, not only for Portland but also for the US and Japan," said Kuma in a press release.
Since 1982, The Architectural League of New York'sEmerging Voices awards have helped to launch hundreds of careers and consistently picked out the best and brightest in architecture. To highlight the release of a new anthology of the work of Emerging Voices' luminaries, Metropolis Magazine spoke with the League’s director, Rosalie Genevro, and the program director, Anne Rieselbach, about the mission of the Emerging Voices awards. The interview covers the changing criteria and contexts of the awards, adapting to a new form of voice in the information age and some of the award's most successful alumni. Read the full interview, including inside information on how the selection process works, over at Metropolis Magazine here.
Exterior of WeWork Hollywood in LA. Image Courtesy of WeWork
"Buildings shouldn't just be a place where you go to do stuff. How can we enable the buildings themselves to be a positive contributor to the activities that happen within them?"
This is how David Fano, co-founder of New York consultancy CASE, explained the logic behind their acquisition by WeWork, the company that provides flexible coworking spaces for entrepreneurs and small businesses. Announced today, the merger could potentially mark a new chapter in the field of office design, as CASE proposes to bring their trademark attitude to Building Information Modeling (BIM) and other cutting edge technology to every space developed by WeWork.
Find out how this acquisition could change the face of Office design after the break.
When it comes to the confluence of music and architecture, maybe the first thing that comes to mind is Goethe's claim that "music is liquid architecture." Goethe, however, was writing before the advent of MTV: music videos have become miniature films, attempting to capture all the tone, undercurrents and context of a particular song and translate them visually. Even better, the way music videos use architecture isn't the same as any documentary or film location; the camera attempts to mimic the way people listen to music by cutting and weaving around, designed for listeners as much as they are designed for viewers. Hence we see protagonists turning to the side, important elements placed away from the center and shots that both explore and disguise spaces in an attempt to fit the songs' acoustics to the setting.
What this means for us is that music videos can relate to architecture and capture its underlying tones in a way that a film might struggle to. For an architect wondering how the public truly understand and interact with a piece of architecture or remember a style, music videos are an untapped goldmine, since every setting location and filming choice show off how our wider culture relates to a building. Read on after the break for seven music videos that tell us a surprising amount about the architecture they feature.
Finalist: Lakefront Kiosk / TRU Architekten. Image Courtesy of The Chicago Architecture Biennial
The Chicago Architecture Biennial, in partnership with the Chicago Park District and BP, has announced the winner of its Lakefront Kiosk Competition, which sought out designs for an innovative lakefront kiosk to be inaugurated on October 3 for the opening of the Biennial.
In addition to the winner of the competition, the Biennial is also partnering with local schools—the Illinois Institute of Technology, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and the University of Illinois at Chicago—in order to build three more kiosks to be featured at the Biennial. View the grand prize design, as well as three competition finalists, honorable mentions, and the three architecture school designs after the break.
Sri Lanka’s Board of Investment has officially agreed to invest $330 million USD to construct the “1996 Iconic Tower,” a tribute to Arjuna Ranatunga’s Cricket team, which won the World Cup in 1996.
The tower, which will become the country’s tallest with 96 floors at about 363 meters in height, was designed by ARK Studio West | Architect Reza Kabul. The construction will be a mixed-use development, with 376 residential apartments, 92 penthouses, and amenities like a pool, gymnasium, spa, and outdoor sky decks.
In an article for DesignCurial, Shumi Bose visits OMA's new galleries in Milan and Moscow: the Fondazione Prada and the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art. Noting that "the mythologies [between OMA and Miuccia Prada] have become inextricably intertwined" over recent years, "the purpose of [the Fondazione Prada] was to produce a range of spaces for the creation, display of and engagement with art; what results is the built realisation of a particular ethos, affording the protean OMA a return to form. And it was always going to be stylish." Bose's flowing description of the building and its spaces, which she ultimately praises as "a place which will bear return," leads into an equally compelling description of Garage for which she recognises its clear "contribution [...] in supporting, indeed composing, the very narrative of Russian contemporary art."
https://www.archdaily.com/771373/examining-omas-two-latest-venues-for-contemporary-artAD Editorial Team
Maki and Associates has submitted plans for their first UK building. As the Architects' Journal reports, the Japanese firm has designed a nine story, 8,780-square-meter educational space for the Aga Khan Development Network (AKDN) - a group of non-denominational agencies focused on improving the welfare of people in developing areas in Africa, Asia and the Middle East.
The predominately limestone building pulls cues from its context; its facade is derived from the space within, which in turn responds to the surrounding Kings Cross site.
Videos
Work by Javier Galindo. Image Courtesy of Morpholio
Continuing their streak of new apps for architects and designers, today Morpholio has released their latest work – a digital notebook known as “Journal.” An improvement to existing digital sketchbooks, Journal seeks to capture the day-to-day recording of ideas, inspiration, thoughts and recollections of an analog notebook as faithfully as possible. Unlike most digital sketchbooks, Journal allows users to combine the amalgamation of photos, images, hand sketches and drawings that a real journal might encompass, lending new material to the debate between digital versus analog. But could such an app ever really replace the role that analog journals have in the life of an architect? To find out, we spoke to the people of Morpholio about Journal and the future of digital and analog media.
Heatherwick Studio has received planning permission to build a new Maggie's center on the St James' University Hospital grounds in Leeds. Aiming to harness the therapeutic effect of plants for the benefit of the center's cancer patients, the building was designed as a series of stepped "planters" that intertwine to form a unique and restorative layout of inside, outside, private and public space.
"The site is a small patch of green surrounded by the huge volumes of the existing hospital buildings. Instead of taking away the open space we wanted to make a whole building out of a garden," said Thomas Heatherwick in a press release.
Atkins has broke ground on a 460-meter skyscraper in Vietnam that is set to be country's tallest. The 81-story development, Vincom Landmark 81 will rise in Ho Chi Minh City's Vinhomes Central Park, near the Saigon River, as a cluster of 25 extruded cubes capped with roof gardens. It will be comprised of serviced apartments, a hotel and retail anchored by a large shopping center and landscaped corridor.
Almost two months ago we put a request out to all of our readers who were completing the academic year to send us any built work that they may have completed as part of their studies. Our hope was to display the fantastic diversity of ideas and styles that is emerging from institutions across the globe, and the response that we got was fantastic. With almost 100 submissions, we received projects from countries as far afield as Chile, the United States, Norway and Japan. We also received everything from pragmatic projects such as a chapel for a disadvantaged community in Mexico or a low-budget sidewalk parklet, to wondrously bizarre constructions such as a steel worm that connects spaces through sound and an inhabitable haystack.
With the help of our colleagues at ArchDaily Brasil andallofArchDailyen Español, we've compiled a selection of 26 of the most interesting, elegant or unusual projects from around the world - join us after the break to see what your international peers have been up to.
The British Library in London's St. Pancras is often hailed as the only major public building to be built in Great Britain in the twentieth century. "No other project, since the building of St. Paul’s Cathedral over 400 years ago, took so long to construct or was surrounded by so much controversy." Begun in 1962, completed in 1997, and opened to the public in 1998, the Brutalist building is a world-class a repository of artistic, scholarly and literary treasures. It has now, along with seven other post-war libraries, been given Grade I Listed status for "its soaring and stimulating spaces" which, according to Historic England, have become "much-loved and well-used by scholars and members of the public alike."
As a part of its EMBARQ Sustainable Urban Mobility initiative, the WRI Ross Center for Sustainable Cities has created a global reference guide called Cities Safer by Design “to help cities save lives from traffic fatalities through improved street design and smart urban development."
Causing over 1.24 million deaths annually, traffic fatalities are currently estimated to be the eighth leading cause of death worldwide, a ranking that is expected to rise to the fifth leading cause of death by 2030.
With these staggering numbers in mind, the Cities Safer by Design guide discusses ways to make cities less dangerous, particularly with its section entitled, “7 Proven Principles for Designing a Safer City.” Learn what the 7 concepts are, after the break.
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