Architecture News

The prolific Bee Breeder competitions encourage innovative and conceptual responses to charged architectural situations. The latest competition asked participants to consider the expansive material applications (and implications) of one of the world's most prominent building materials; concrete. Described by Bee Breeders as a "poetic manifestation" of its constituent parts, concrete was then to form the basis for the Rome Concrete Poetry Hall.

The presence of the new, multi-purpose building in Rome required an awareness of the historic influences bordering the site. A further requirement was the excavation of the ground, a reference to Rome's archeological past. According to Bee Breeders, the judges favored those projects which thoroughly addressed the "spatial, material, structural, conceptual, and cultural agency of this ever expanding building science."

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Videos

Update: We've added a video, presented by PLANE-SITE, about the exhibition, featuring quotes from Carla Bechelli.

Carla Bechelli Arquitectos has created an exhibition of its multiple-residence project, Las Piedras Villas & Houses, a 2015 recipient of an International Property Award, which is currently on display at the 2016 Venice Biennale, at Palazzo Bembo.

Located in the suburbs of Buenos Aires in Argentina, the project consists of a series of small-scale buildings around a central lake intended to create a dialogue with the single-family housing in the surrounding neighborhood.

In its recent issues, The Architectural Review has been on a mission, highlighting a phenomenon that they have named "Notopia." Characterized by a "loss of identity and cultural vibrancy" and "a global pandemic of generic buildings," Notopia is - in overly simplistic terms - a consequence of the cold logic of market forces combined with a disinterested populace. The AR's campaign therefore aims to analyze this "thing of terror" and push back by raising public awareness and by proposing alternatives. And they need your help.

Students and architects from over 30 countries have constructed a “village” of 14 wooden structures at Hello Wood’s Project Village 2016. Founded in 2010 as an art camp for students in architecture, art and design disciplines, Hello Wood has since grown into an award-winning interior summer school program focused on creating design through collaborative methods and bringing together the principles of architecture, art, innovation and social impact. The Project Village, conceived just last year, pushes these ideals to their limit by challenging students, teachers and designers to work together to create a new architecture of community at Hello Wood’s rural campus in Csoromfolde, Hungary.

Continue reading to see all 14 projects with descriptions from the designers.

Following the success of last year’s virtual tour of Selgascano’s 2015 Serpentine Pavilion, Photographer Nikhilesh Haval of nikreations has shared with us his virtual tour of BIG’s 2016 Pavilion entry. Hosted this year on Google Street View, the tour allows you to move through and around the “unzipped wall” design, giving you the ability to perceive how sunlight interacts with the structure. Check out how visitors are using the pavilion as an escape from the sunny park or sipping on drinks ordered at the pavilion bar – and don’t forget to look up, where it’s easy to get lost in the sea of interlocking fiberglass bricks.

The recent trend in timber-framed architecture may just be beginning.

SOM’s Timber Tower Research Project has passed a major milestone as the structural system has successfully completed strength testing that validate initial calculations. Launched in 2013, The Timber Tower Research project was established with the goal of developing a new structural system for skyscrapers that uses timber as its primary material. Using these techniques, the research team estimates that the embodied carbon footprint of buildings can be reduced by 60 to 75 percent when compared to a benchmark concrete building.

The past ten years have seen a new twist in tall building design: buildings that rotate as they rise, either for engineering or purely aesthetic purposes. Inspired by this recent trend, the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH) has produced a new graphic entitled Tall Buildings in Numbers “Twisting Tall Buildings” to analyze the “recent proliferation of twisting towers creating a new generation of iconic buildings throughout the world.”

The infographic compares the buildings by height, along with the tightness and total degrees of their rotation. Continue after the break for the full graphic and links to the projects on ArchDaily.

When it comes to skyscraper architects, the first name that comes to mind is often Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. No firm has completed more supertall buildings than SOM, and to this day, they remain a leader in the field, designing both the western hemisphere’s and the world’s tallest buildings in One World Trade Center and the Burj Khalifa. Yet, arguably, the height of their powers came in the 1970s, directly following a lull in skyscraper construction that allowed the Empire State Building to retain the status of world’s tallest building for nearly 40 years.

It was then that Falzur Khan, a SOM architect and structural engineer, came up with the structural innovation that revolutionized the skyscraper industry, leaving lasting impacts on the construction methods of supertall buildings today.

Drawing from a recent story published by Mental Floss on the designer, we’ve come up with a list of facts about his life and role in the world of architecture.

Continue reading for the 8 things you should know about Falzur Khan.

The Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) has announced the winners of the Timber in the City: Urban Habitats Competition, a student competition exploring wood as an innovative building material. Out of more than 850 architectural student entries, three winners have been selected, along with two honorable mentions, with prizes totaling $40,000.

The competition focused on a site in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, and asked for designs for inhabitation, repose, recreation, and local small-scale commercial exchange, all while embracing the possibilities of wood and a variety of wood technologies.

Today, timber is being used in new, innovative ways to help address the economic and environmental challenges of the build environment,” said Cees de Jager, executive director of BSLC. “This competition brought to life the way the design community is recognizing the benefits of wood–from reduced economic and environmental impact to enhanced aesthetic value and structural performance–to design buildings and communities of the future.

The winners of the Timber in the City: Urban Habitats Competition are:

The appointment of Chilean architect Alejandro Aravena as the curator of the 2016 Venice Biennale (La Biennale di Venezia) has seen the exhibition take a more vested interest in social responsibility. In harmony with this theme, German architect Werner Sobek has presented a large cube with a sobering social and environmental message. Entitled "Beyond Form," Sobek's intention mirrors Aravena's; it forces the viewer to look beyond the formal elements of architecture to the unavoidable issues facing it in the near future.

The International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) has named Schmidt Hammer Lassen's Dokk1 Library in Aarhus, Denmark as the winner of the Public Library of the Year Award 2016.

By beating out the SOM-designed Chinatown branch of the Chicago Public Libary; the Geelong Library & Heritage Centre in Geelong, Australia, designed by ARM architecture; and the Success Public Library by Bollig Design Group; Dokk1 became the first Danish library to win the award.

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In anticipation of the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Bauhaus school in 2019, Harvard Art Museums has released an online catalogue of their 32,000-piece Bauhaus Collection, containing rarely seen drawings and photographs from attendees and instructors of the revolutionary German design school.

The collection features work from the likes of Mies van der Rohe, Bertrand Goldberg, Marcel Breuer, and Bauhaus-founder Walter Gropius himself, and can be navigated through a search bar and an easy-to-use set of filters, allowing you to categorize work by topic, medium, date or artist.

Janet Echelman has completed her most recent aerial net sculpture in downtown Greensboro, North Carolina. Made up of over 35 miles of technical twine woven into 242,800 knots, the sculptures adds a new ephemeral presence to the sky above the city’s new LeBauer Park. Entitled “Where We Met,” the sculpture’s form and composition were inspired by Greensboro’s history as a railroad and textile hub.

The Royal Institute of British Architects’ (RIBA) Competitions division and Islington Council have announced that Pollard Thomas Edwards Architects has been selected as the winners of a design competition for the new Finsbury Leisure Centre at St Luke's Area in South Islington, London. The winning proposal, chosen from a shortlist featuring 5 top architects including Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners and Grimshaw Architects, will reinvigorate the site with new council homes, improved public space and a new civic building that will house recreation, childcare, healthcare and energy facilities all under one roof.

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In this video, Ben Uyeda of HomeMade Modern demonstrates how to build a sleek, contemporary spiral staircase using just a standard schedule steel post, plywood and a CNC router (along with a healthy amount of wood and construction glue). To build the staircase, Uyeda uses the CNC to cut out 12 shapes of incremental size from a plywood sheet, which he then stacks and fits around the post to secure into place.

HomeMade Modern has also made the CAD files available for free, so handy woodworking types can attempt the construction themselves.

nArchitects’ Library as Home has won first place in the 2016 International Young Architects Design Competition for the 110,000 square meter Shanghai Library East Hall in China. Hosted by the Shanghai Pudong New Area People’s Government, the competition sought out designs that enhance Shanghai’s distinct cultural influence and promote community life.

Library as Home reflects these goals in its design as “a large house for all, with a rich variety of environments that Shanghai’s citizens could appropriate as their own.”