Architecture News

Sir David Adjaye has been selected as design architect for the new Princeton University Art Museum. Working in collaboration with executive architect Cooper Robertson, Adjaye will engage with the design of a “cultural gateway” located on the museum’s current site at the center of Princeton’s campus.

The new museum will present “dramatically enlarged space” to exhibit and showcase the institution’s extensive collections, as well as classrooms and office space for 100 staff.

As part of the London Design Festival 2018, the Zaha Hadid Gallery is presenting the new RE/Form carpet collection designed by Zaha Hadid Architects for Royal Thai. Consisting of 22 designs across four themes, the pieces showcase fluid patterns heavily reminiscent of Hadid’s architectural works.

The four themes consist of striated lines, ribbonlike projections, pixelated landscapes, and organic cellular shapes. Each pattern captures “Hadid’s signature use of interweaving, layering and play with light and shadow.”

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The Walt Disney Concert Hall is set to be transformed through digital art projections by media artist Refik Anadol and Google Arts & Culture. Created for the Los Angeles Philharmonic's centennial, the light show will be made through deep neural network connections projected as light. Designed for WDCH Dreams, the digital projections draw together the L.A.Philharmonic orchestra’s digital archives and translate them into data points.

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Videos

Opening its doors last fall, Princeton University's Lewis Arts Complex by Steven Holl Architects and BNIM created a new campus gateway and state-of-the-art facilities for the arts. Expanding performance, rehearsal and teaching spaces, the complex has now been featured in a video directed by Spirit of Space. The footage shows how the building was designed to shape campus space while maximizing porosity and movement. Welcoming its second year of students, the complex is made to take the arts at Princeton to even greater heights.

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BIG’s “unzipped wall,” which served as the 2016 Serpentine Pavilion in London, has been opened to the public in Toronto under the new title “Unzipped.” Having been transported to the city and rebuilt in collaboration with Westbank, new photographs by Derek Shapton show the completed pavilion standing as a temporary place of showcase and events in downtown Toronto.

“Unzipped” is the first Serpentine Pavilion to embark on a multi-city tour of this kind, before ultimately landing in a permanent home on the Vancouver waterfront.

Following the Grenfell Tower fire in June 2017, which claimed 72 lives, the RIBA has launched a consultation for a new “Plan of Work for Fire Safety.”

Having consistently called for changes to building regulations in the wake of the tragedy, the organization has produced the document in response to Dame Judith Hackitt’s Independent Review of Building Regulations and Fire Safety, and her call for “greater transparency, accountability, and collaboration” from the industry.

The Viennese architecture office Querkraft has been selected to design the Austrian Pavilion for Expo 2020 Dubai. The design combines traditional building materials with modern techniques to present Austria as a center of innovation. Former Federal Minister Beatrix Karl was appointed honorary commissioner for the world expo and will represent Austria externally. The Expo in Dubai will be the first world exhibition in an Arab country in the 170-­year Expo history. The Austrian Pavilion will center on questions of how resources can be used more thoughtfully and respectfully in the future.

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Henning Larsen have created a new proposal for The Springs, an urban oasis designed for Shanghai. Inspired by shan shui, a traditional form of Chinese landscape painting, the project is developed for Tishman-Speyer to evoke the mountain landscapes found throughout rural China. The project will mirror the mountain landscape with tall, terraced towers around a green public square. Made to create workspaces for creative industries, the three buildings will provide wide provide flexible workspace and common areas in the city center.

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The 2018 London Design Festival is now underway, having returned for its 16th year. Running from 15th to 23rd September, and spread across the city, the Festival features works such as Snøhetta’s rotating book pavilion and a series of installations at the V&A celebrating the venue’s 10th year as the Festival’s official hub.

Below, we have compiled a list of collaborations to look out for throughout the week, including investigations into issues such as climate change and plastic pollution, and artistic themes such as Cubism and classical music.

Earlier this month, we published the results of DesignIntelligence’s annual ranking of U.S. architecture schools, listing the top Undergraduate and Graduate schools for 2019. Using feedback from architecture and interior design professionals, the full analysis delves deeper than a generic “Most Admired Architecture Schools” list, and instead breaks the rankings down into twelve categories, focusing on technology, design theory, and more.

Free and open to the public, the full list on DesignIntelligence’s website offers comprehensive top-10 listings at both Undergraduate and Graduate level across the twelve categories, attained from surveys from approximately 6000 professionals, 360 academics, and 5500 students. Below, we have summarized the findings in a top-5 format, with the full listings ready to be explored on the official website here.

In the quest for carbon neutrality, the City of Helsinki in Finland announced its action plans to minimize greenhouse gas emissions substantially by 2035. The city’s fully owned energy company, Helen Ltd, a producer of district heating, power, and district cooling, aims to augment this policy by converting its largely coal and natural gas energy production processes to climate-neutral energy production, thereby eliminating carbon dioxide emissions fully by 2050.

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Art Omi is a non-profit organization located in Ghent, New York that works to create a space for the artistic community. This organization is focused on providing architects a space to experiment and come into contact with other perspectives. Art Omi was born from the absence of residency programs for architects in the United States; a space designed by architects for architects.

The Art Omi architecture program is structured on four pillars: an architectural field of sixty acres where participants can deploy and experience pavilions and facilities designed by architects; the second is a curated series of indoor exhibitions at the Benenson Center; the third is an annual event outside the campus, in Manhattan, that seeks to link theory and practice; and finally, the most recent addition which is the residency program.

Project Design Group has released details of their KentPlus YALOVA Wellness SPA Resort in Armutlu, Turkey. Situated in an idyllic, hilly region with sweeping sea views, the masterplan seeks to “enable residents to re-establish contact with nature” through buildings “partially lost” in the landscape.

Combining residential, hotel, and social facilities, the 330,000-square-meter scheme contains 14 different apartment block typologies, with a total of 163 blocks and 1001 apartments.

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Architecture is art, but art vastly contaminated by many other things. Contaminated in the best sense of the word—fed, fertilized by many things.
– Renzo Piano

Italian architect Renzo Piano (born 14 September 1937) is known for his delicate and refined approach to building, deployed in museums and other buildings around the world. Awarded the Pritzker Prize in 1998, the Pritzker Jury compared him to Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Brunelleschi, highlighting "his intellectual curiosity and problem-solving techniques as broad and far ranging as those earlier masters of his native land."

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Bjarke Ingels Group has received approval for their King Street West condo community in Toronto. Originally proposed in 2016, the development was made as sets of pixels extruded upwards to create space for housing, retail and boutique offices. The concept was formed to avoid the footprints of heritage buildings that already exist on site. Alex Bozikovic, architecture critic of The Globe and Mail, reports that the development is about to start sales as King Street West pushes past its latest development hurdle.

Building Trust International has announced the winner of the organization’s 2018 Affordable Housing Design Challenge. Over 3,000 architects, designers, and engineers entered the competition and 400 design proposals were submitted. Each design sought to provide sustainable, safe, and secure affordable housing schemes that specifically target the needs of low income workers in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.

A jury composed of representatives from Building Trust International, The United Nations Development Program, and the Phnom Penh Special Economic Zone selected ‘atArchitecture’ as the challenge winner. Citing the feasibility of the architectural design and the scheme’s careful consideration of Cambodia’s natural environment, the jury saw the design as an optimal solution to a complex, local problem. With over 17,000 factory workers in the region, there are few options for high quality affordable homes. This forces many of these workers and their families to settle for short term rentals with less than adequate conditions and minimal security. These options are often shared spaces that only increase in demand as the number of workers continues to rise in the area.

As the recipient of the 1995 Pritzker Prize, Tadao Ando (born 13 September 1941) is highly regarded for his unparalleled work with concrete, sensitive treatment of natural light, and strong engagement with nature. Based in Osaka, Japan, Ando's ascetic yet rich version of modernism resonates with the traditional Japanese conception of architecture, and has caused him to be regularly referred to as a "critical regionalist."

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