Today, the Chicago Tribune has reportedJames Corner Field Operations Team has been selected to redesign the 3,000 foot-long Chicago landmark, Navy Pier. Blair Kamin stated that the pier’s governing board approved the recommendation from the pier’s strategic planning committee to hire the JFCO team as they favored the team’s practical, yet still creative approach over the other, somewhat grandiose, schemes. It has been a big week for JCFO, as James Corner and Rich Scofidio’s latest ideas for the third section of the High Line were released on Tuesday. Continue reading for more information on the latest news regarding the winners of the international Navy Pier redesign competition.
Jan Schevers and Heleen Herrenberg met with Peter Märkli in Zürich, Switzerland to discuss his personal perspective on education, research and practice in architecture, considering what the art of building means to society and the individual today. Enjoy the video and join the discussion after the break.
Located in rolling hills of Durbanville wine valley on the outskirts of Cape Town, Vissershok Primary School is a rural school dedicated to the children of farm workers and underprivileged communities living in Du Noon – a poverty-stricken township several kilometers away. Sponsored by three South African companies – Woolworths, Safmarine and AfriSam – the Vissershok Container Classroom is a 12 meter recycled container that was converted into an independent classroom for 25 Grade R (age 5-6) students. Continue reading for more.
Studio BANG shared with us their design proposal for the competition for Ny Våler Kirke, a new church in Norway. Through creating a perceivable tribute to the old wooden church, their concept results in an upward focus that transports light into the holy space. More images and a brief architects’ description after the break.
With the Simon Family Tower addition still under construction at the Riley Hospital for Children, the installation for hospital is complete, after over a year in the making. Designed by PROJECTiONE, ‘Riley Sunrise’ was designed with the hope that the super-graphics can serve as a pleasant distraction for visitors of the hospital and lead to discussions that can re-focus a conversation towards something positive and uplifting. More images and architects’ description after the break.
Taken by Clement Guillaume, the photographs in this post include projects by the 2012 Pritzker Prize winner, Wang Shu, Chinese architect and founder of Amateur Architecture Studio. The projects featured here include Campus Hangzhou, CIPA Nanjing, Five Squared Houses, Ningbo, Zhongshan Lu, and Vertical Houses. Shu’s projects present a contemporary and progressive approach that acknowledges the rich tradition of Chinese architecture and as one of the jury members for the Pritzker Prize stated, ‘produces an architecture that is timeless and deeply rooted in its context and yet universal.’ A gallery of images can be viewed after the break.
The project proposal for the Student’s Residence on U.L.E Campus by MACA Estudio + VIRAI Arquitectos is designed as a system rather than a building. Unable to design a solution based on the conditions associated with a given plot, the project offers an independent and isotropic system, with its own “domestic” rules, which does not depend on where it is located and responds the same way to the different physical conditions that can be found. More images and architects’ description after the break.
In order to compete in an increasingly competitive global market and address long-term development needs, the University of Cambridge is undertaking an ambitious new urban extension in North West Cambridge. The master plan for the development, prepared by Aecom, lays out the framework for a new district centered on a mixed academic and urban community. With aspirations of achieving place that is well balanced, long-lasting and sustainable, the University is focused on creating a high quality of life for its residents that will enhance both the City and the University.
The University is now looking to appoint a number of architecture and landscape firms to design and deliver each proposed lot as part of the first phase of the extension. The shortlist consists of internationally renowned architects, including Bjarke Ingels Group and David Chipperfield Architects. Continue reading to learn more information on the extension and review the complete shortlist.
Our favorite sketchbook has gone digital! Moleskine presents The Hand of the Architect – an iPadapp featuring 378 sketches and drawings from 110 internationally renowned architects, such as Assadi, Botta, Fuksas, Graves, Gregotti, Hadid, Foster and Piano, “showing that every project always begins by hand”. All the works were collected by FAI (Italian National Trust) with the aim of raising funds to restore Piero Portaluppi’s Villa Necchi, known as a 1930s masterpiece of Italian rationalism in Milan. Sketches and drawings are accompanied by essays, captions and the biographies of the architects. You can purchase the app for $18.99 here on iTunes.
Together, Skylar Tibbits and Arthur Olson presented a large-scale installation at the 2012 TED Conference in Long Beach, CA entitled The Self-Assembly Line – a large-scale version of a self-assembly virus module, demonstrated as an interactive and performative structure. A discrete set of modules are activated by stochastic rotation from a larger container/structure that forces the interaction between units. The unit geometry and attraction mechanisms (magnetics) ensure the units will come into contact with one another and auto-align into locally-correct configurations. Overtime, as more units come into contact, break away, and reconnect, larger, furniture scale elements emerge. Given different sets of unit geometries and attraction polarities various structures could be achieved. By changing the external conditions, the geometry of the unit, the attraction of the units and the number of units supplied, the desired global configuration can be programmed. Continue reading for more.
The MIT Media Lab’s Mediated Matter group is perhaps not the first choice of exploration for architects and architecture students. What does “mediated matter” have to do with the design of urban and suburban space and structures? Quite a lot, as it turns out. Because the goal of this group is to develop “novel processes that enable and support the design of physical matter,” using computer design combined with “biologically inspired fabrication.”
Below, I look at three projects developed and directed by Neri Oxman, an assistant professor of media arts and sciences at the MIT Media Lab. Professor Oxman also received her PhD in design computation from MIT.
We begin with a project that combines local and global-based knowledge as they relate to construction. The Rapid Craft project basically mines local construction designs and techniques and combines them with the latest design technologies.
Burnt down in 2009, the beautiful Vaaler church from 1805 has been designed as a new church by WE Architecture. Meant to provide symbolic landmark to succeed the old building, the new Vaaler church is placed further east from the placement of the old church, marking the historic axis with its tower. The new building is designed as a simple box where one corner is lifted up in order to point out the church room and the tower. More images and architects’ description after the break.
Denmark's third largest city, Odense, has a major transformative plan for their city center by 2020. In the 1960s, the Thomas B Thriges Gade allowed Odense to accomodate the demands of growing vehicular traffic, but since then, the city has been hard pressed to break from this defining infrastructure. Utopian City Scape and Entasis have teamed to create a multi-stage development plan for the city center as a way to restore the cohesiveness of a city that has been fragmented by the Thomas B Thriges. The plan sees the introduction of a massive amount of building (more than 55,000 sqm!) that will provide over 300 housing opportunities and 1000 work places. By filling in the street, the smaller networks of secondary streets will be strengthened to create pedestrian passageways and prominades, creating intimate moments that become defined by the edges of the buildings. While we enjoy the light rail system that works its way around the city center, the idea of including a parking lot that accommodates nearly 1000 vehicles seems a bit contradictory. Perhaps, without it, citizens would rely move heavily upon the public infrastructure and the new "connected" feeling of the city to circulate. The absence of cars would further strengthen Odense's move away from a city defined by the vehicle and would allow the master plan to implement its sustainability theme on a macro level.
Seeking to improve their outdated and overcrowded department library, the intention for the design of the Law school library aims at housing their growing book collection and creating a central focus for the school. After numerous studies and surveys indicated that students and faculties in Tsinghua hunger for open and easy-communication space, Zhubo based their concept on a people-oriented idea instead of a formalistic one. At the same time, they hoped for an eye-catching library that enlivens the campus, creating a destination that attracts both students and teachers. More images and architects’ description after the break.
The Hong Kong Alternative Car Park Tower, designed by Chris Y. H. Chan + Stephanie M. L. Tan, is an alternative building typology that could fit for a city with very limited land resources. At the same time, they are critiquing the current developments of most metropolitan cities: growing rapidly without vision and preparation for our human future. More images and architects’ description after the break.
Mjölk Architects shared with us their winning entry, titled ‘Polar Hen’, to an international arts and architecture competition in Winnipeg, MB, Canada. Their design consists of a pump with a sprinkler connected to a compressor and a generator creating a very fearsome creature which lays ‘ice eggs’. The Warming Huts v.2012 was an open competition endorsed by the Manitoba Association of Architects. More images and brief architects’ description after the break.
One of the greatest Mediterranean Ports is about to be transformed. Work has begun on the Old Port of Marseille as part of a series of regeneration projects to be completed in time for the city’s inauguration as European Capital of Culture in 2013. Based on French landscape architect Michel Desvigne’s and London-based architects Foster + Partners’ competition-winning master plan, the project will reclaim the quaysides as a civic space, creating new informal venues for performances and events, while traffic is relocating traffic to a safe, semi-pedestrianised public realm.
Lord Foster stated, “I know the harbor at Marseille well and it is a truly grand space. This project is a great opportunity to enhance it using very simple means, to improve it with small, discreet pavilions for events, for markets, for special occasions. Our approach has been to work with the climate, to create shade, but at the same time to respect the space of the harbor – just making it better.”
Beijing-born architect Ma Yansong has become an important, emerging voice to a new generation of architects. Shortly after establishing MAD architectsin 2004, his practice earned worldwide attention (2006) by winning an international competition to design a residential tower near Toronto, expected to be completed in the summer of 2012. In this interview with Studio Banana TV, Yansong discusses a few of his latest works, including MAD’s first museum completed last year in Ordos, Inner Mongolia. Continue reading for more information.
“this open, ‘collaborative’ environment, where worker drones so nicely sit in poise out in the open while click-clacking on their computers, creates an atmosphere where people become desensitized to being on display. Sitting and thinking is actually frowned upon as being a waste of productivity. Why are you just sitting there? Why are you not talking, or typing, or writing, or drawing, or multitasking?”
Consider the contemporary office. White floors, minimalist style, no pesky walls getting in the way – just pure, unadulterated openness.
From our assembly-line past has emerged an increasingly consumer-oriented world, in which collaboration and gregariousness are valuable commodities. As a result, offices that resemble art galleries – with the employees on display – have become the norm, and while this sociable environment is energizing for the extrovert, for the introvert, it’s crippling.
In my last article, “In Defense of Introverts,” I posited that learning modalities, which better incorporate our introverted brethren, could revolutionize classroom design. In this one, I expand the concept to that of working modalities: an answer for office design that would engender an office culture sensitive to introverted rhythms and – at last – expand the way we conceive of creativity and innovation as a purely extroverted enterprise.
Considered one of Paul Rudolph’s greatest achievements, the 1970’s Orange County Government Center is an icon of the late modernist era. Poor maintenance has lead to deterioration and in September a large flood caused extensive damage to the structure, forcing county officials to close the center. Since then, the county government has been calling for the building to be demolished. Last week, Orange County Executive Ed Diana proposed to replace the cultural icon with a $75 million, 175,000 square-foot mediocre building, offering only 22,000 square-feet of space more than the existing building. With renovation estimates around $67.2 million, or $40.9 million for a “less extensive upgrade”, the architectural and preservationist communities are outraged. Continue reading for more.
They say great architecture has meaning. That buildings, when well designed, can speak to us. But, what are they trying to say? What if we could really hear them?
