Now in its fifth year, the World Architecture Festival moves from Spain to Singapore (October 3rd-5th). And for this year, we are happy to announce ArchDaily as a media partner, and as part of the jury!
The architecturally intense event includes the awards and a festival gallery, with more than 700 entries from around the world in 30 categories, accompanied by live presentations from the finalists, a seminar and keynotes with renowned international architects. In these, and other activities (full summary), you will be able to exchange ideas with over 2000 architects representing more than 65 countries, broaden your horizons and your contacts book.
In my latest Editorial, I made the case that the future Silicon Valleys of the world will be in our cities. I have to admit, though, that I never thought about them being on our seas.
This is the idea behind Blueseed, a floating startup incubator located 12 miles off-shore of the Valley, in international waters. Although meant to cater to an international crowd (so they can skirt the tricky Visa process), a Blueseed survey suggests that the venture is actually most attractive for its potential to be an “awesome startup- and technology- oriented space.” Visa or not.
So, its seems that if Blueseed is to set sail by 2014, the design will be critical. Check out the renderings of the concept vessels below and let us know: do you think they’re “awesome” enough to tempt the 133 companies who have shown interest so far?
Ground will be broken on Wednesday, May 9, 2012 for Skidmore Owing & Merrill LLP (SOM)’s newest building at Beijing’s China World Trade Center (CWTC) complex. The 58-story Phase 3B Tower features sleek horizontal bands of canted glass that wrap the building’s square floor plates. The 918-feet (280-meters) tall icon will be located immediately northeast of the 74-story, SOM-designed China World Trade Center Tower 3, completed in 2010—which is the tallest building in the Chinese capital. More images and complete press release after the break.
Urban Intervention challenged designers to conceive a fresh vision of environmental, social and economic opportunities on and beyond a nine-acre site at the heart of Seattle Center. 107 multidisciplinary teams from 24 countries entered designs. Each proposal harnessed Seattle’s history of innovation and civic engagement to inspire the next generation of great public spaces. Now, the three remaining finalists will present their ideas in a free, public lecture this Friday, May 11.
Continue after the break to learn more about the lecture and the top three proposals.
Attracting more than 1.4 million visitors since opening in June, the Riverside Museum, designed by Zaha Hadid Architects, recently won the European Museum Academy Micheletti Award 2012. Named the most innovative museum in the fields of technology, labor and social history, Riverside competed against museums in 12 other European countries to win the 17th annual award. More information on the award after the break.
As we announced back in February, Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron and their Chinese collaborator Ai Weiwei will design this year’s Serpentine Gallery Pavilion at Hyde Park in London, a special edition that will be part of the London 2012 Festival, the culmination of the Cultural Olympiad. This will be the trio’s first collaborative built structure in the UK.
Back then, it was announced that their design will explore the hidden history of the previous installations (see all the previous pavilions in our infographic), with eleven columns under the lawn of the Serpentine, representing the past pavilions and a twelfth column supporting a floating platform roof 1.4 metres above ground, which looks like a reflecting water-like surface in the renderings. The plan of the pavilion is based on a mix of the 11 previous pavilions’ layouts, pavilions that are represented as excavated foundations from which a new cork cladded landscape appears, as an archeological operation.
Yesterday, Marina Abramović and OMA announced the creation of the Marina Abramović Institute for the Preservation of Performance Art (MAI) under the performance dome at MoMA’s PS 1 in Long Island City. Abramović will team with the architects to create an art, education and performance venue that will not only focus on Abramović’s performance methods, but, interestingly, on educating the public with regards to viewing and appreciating long duration performances.
Perhaps, Abramović’s name sounds familiar, and rightly so. She has wildly been hailed as one of the most progressive and devoted long-duration performers; one of her most recent New York performances took place at the MoMA where she sat completely silent, just starring at visitors for the museum’s entire opening hours. And, now, with this Institute, Abramović will be able to teach her ways to aspiring performers, and more viewers will be able to experience and appreciate her performance methods. Abramović commented, “The Institute’s aim is to protect and preserve the intellectual and spiritual legacy of performance art from the 1970′s into the future, and will serve as an homage to time-based and immaterial art.”
In ArchDaily we have mentioned films, whether because of its content closely related with Architecture, or because of the space, photography, atmosphere, or any other relevant feature to our practice that could mean a certain value through an Architect’s eyes.
From this week and on, we will propose a film for you to watch – enjoy – and comment if you want to share your thoughts about the movie with us. We have already a starting list which still open for your recommendations.
The first movie to introduce is a classic from the ’80, “The Belly of an Architect” by the British director Peter Greenaway.
Danish firm, CEBRA, was recently awarded first prize for their new education center in Odense. The building explores how curved forms can penetrate and define the rectilinear confines of the 134,550 sqf school building. Soft curving levels open to floors below and provide a mixing of visual and auditory experiences in a dynamically changing environment. Moreover, such levels provide a flexible learning environment, with “the human-being placed at the center.”
More about the project after the break, including CEBRA’s awesome hand renderings.
The new city, designed by Mekano Studio, will be a smart data city, a city driven with data, a city that can help each person to choose and decide, a City respects the human mind and gives him the option to take part in his own life as it must have to be. The data city is a city that administrates everything with a real time data, in order to evaluate and respect the time factor as well and to increase the productivity with a well organized community. More images and architects’ description after the break.
Architects and designers everywhere know the amount of time it takes to get accurate floor plan measurements with a measuring tape, a pencil, and some graph paper, but now there’s an app that gives you the convenience of measuring right in the palm of your hand in a matter of minutes. The Magic Plan app, conveniently named, simply asks for certain areas of a specific room and is able to assemble a floor plan for you. The app also includes tutorials on how to use it effectively and get fully adjusted to it. Above is a video to give you an idea of how this magic app works and some images can be viewed after the break.
Seattle-based landscape architects Gustafson Guthrie Nichol (GGN) and New York-based architects Davis Brody Bond (DBB) were recently selected as the winners of the National Mall Design Competition for Union Square. Organized by the Trust for the National Mall, a jury of eight esteemed professionals selected a design team for each of the three re-design sites of the National Mall through a three-stage process. The winning design was judged on flexibility, sustainability, and creativity of their design and how well it reflects the established vision and design influences of this historic setting. More images and architects’ description after the break.
The exhibition dedicated to Bas Princen‘s work will be open at the Architectural Association in London until May 26. The photographer based in Rotterdam, who was previously trained as an architect, is particularly focused on the dialogues between architecture and the landscape, from dramatic contrasts to blurred merging typologies.
“The award-winning Dutch photographer’s work has become increasingly familiar: images that blur the artificial and natural, where the real and imagined are hard to separate. Less known – and never previously exhibited – are the A5 booklets Princen makes, consisting of a series of reference images. The booklets are between 24 and 32 pages long and contain images downloaded by Princen from the internet of famous or completely unknown or already long-forgotten scenes and objects involving landscape and architecture, their low resolution disallowing reproduction any larger than 6 x 9 cm.
Tomorrow, Amazon representatives are scheduled to present their design for a three-block proposal that will introduce three new towers to the Seattle skyline and add 3.3 million square feet of office space to the downtown area. Quite possibly the largest development ever proposed downtown, the complex will consume five acres in the Denny Triangle Urban Village that is currently being used for parking, the Sixth Avenue Inn and the King Cat Theater.
Continue reading for more information on the Denny Triangle project.
A mix of twenty local and internationally renowned firms have been invited to participate in a design competition seeking “creative and practical design concepts” on thirteen acres of prime waterfront real estate at the historic Fort Mason Center in San Francisco. Although mostly comprised of parking lots and former military buildings, the site attracts nearly one million annual visitors with its stellar views, cultural events, historic background and well-respected restaurant.
São Paulo native Márcio Kogan has become an internationally recognized Brazilian architect known for his minimal designs that are often contrasted by intricate materiality. His work has been highly praised by our readers, and he is in the top 5 of individual architects searches at our site. His houses and institutional projects respect the modern principles of Brazilian architecture, with a special care on the design of interior spaces and their details, resulting in a mix of tradition and contemporary design. My favorite? Paraty House (and its section!)
The old red-brick building sporting a “BEER” sign may not look impressive, but what is going on inside certainly is. “The Plant” is an indoor vertical farm that triples as a food-business incubator and research/education space located inside an 87-year old meat packing factory in the Union Stockyards of Chicago, Illinois. The project was partly funded by the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity with a $1.5 million grant. Browse through the Plant Chicago’s Flickr Photostream and you can watch the space steadily transform into an urban farm that will grow fresh produce, farm fresh fish, brew beer and produce kombucha all while recycling the waste of the facility to make it a Net-Zero Energy System.
How does it work? Follow us after the break to learn more.
The winning proposal for the conference and exhibition center in Leon, Spain by Dominique Perrault Architecture stands on the grounds of the old Sugar Santa Elvira and involves the transformation of the main building of the former sugar in Congress Hall (Grand Palais) and the creation of an Exhibition center located to the east side of the Palace of Congress. More images and architects’ description after the break.
HP, Apple, Google – they all found their success amongst the peach groves and Suburban houses of California. But why? What is it about Silicon Valley that makes it the site of technological innovation the world over?
It’s tempting to assume that the Valley’s success must be, at least in part, due to its design. But how does innovation prosper? What kind of environment does it require? In a recent interview with The Atlantic Cities, Jonah Lehrer, author of Imagine: How Creativity Works, suggests that creativity is sparked from casual exchanges, the mingling of diversity, the constant interaction with the strange and new. In short, and as a recent study corroborates, innovation flourishes in dense metropolises.
Seemingly then, Silicon Valley, a sprawl of highways and office parks, has become a hotspot of creativity in spite of its design. But let’s not write off design just yet.
As technology makes location more and more irrelevant, many are looking to distill the magic of Silicon Valley and transplant it elsewhere. The key will be to design environments that can recreate the Valley’s culture of collaboration. The future Valleys of the world will be microsystems of creativity that imitate and utilize the structure of the city.
Danish architects CEBRA, along with developers Pihl & Søn and engineers Hundsbæk & Henriksen recenlty won the competition for a new Adult Education Centre of in downtown Odense, Denmarks’s third largest city. The 12.500 m2 / 134.550 ft2 educational institution aims at creating a flexible and diverse learning environment that gives room for individual needs in a collective building. According to the plans, the centre will open at the beginning of 2014. More images and architects’ description after the break.
gmp Architekten shared with us their first prize winning proposal for the Trianel GmgH Corporate Centre in Aachen, Germany. The new building is located along a major road next to the Tivoli stadium. From 2013 on it is to be built in two phases, the first of which comprises 9,600 square metres of gross floor area and will accommodate 400 members of staff. In the second, optional phase the building can be extended by 4,800 square metres to accommodate a further 200 employees. The building’s sustainability concept merits a silver DGNB certificate. More images and architects’ description after the break.
Open to students and professionals in architecture and design fields, the Adream 2012 competition, a European competition in architecture and design realization in eco and agro materials, the aim of the competition is to support the sustainable management of natural resources by modern designs, as the potential of sustainable and organic materials on their current use extends. Jointly organized by the Free State of Thuringia and the Picardy region organized a European project to promote new developments, hope that with their research, companies and universities in the area of these materials will increase steadily to their use in their construction and product culture. The deadline for submissions is July 31. For more information, please visit their website here.
