This open ideas competition invites practicing architects, architecture students and designers to design an Academic Interchange for the University of Bremen, Germany. The Academic Interchange is envisioned as an incubator for interdisciplinary collaborations and international relations for academics at the university.
NEEDS-Architecture in Developing Countries, edited by Salvatore Spataro with GGAF (Young Architects of Florence). The book points out the real NEEDS of users, particularly the necessity to make structures which could satisfy them, facing up to lack of economic and technological resources. The sixteen works collected in this volume express a clear idea about the developing project of that belongs within the community within which it is situated. Each project is a reflection of architecture that does not impose organizing models extraneous to the local culture and does not flatten itself on the existent reality.
Scroll through images from the exhibition after the break!
Two young architecture firms have joined forces to create the non-profit association Adobe for Women. The goal of the association it to both recover and teach vernacular construction skills while simultaneously providing aide to women in need.
Inspired by the work of Mexican architect Juan José Santibañez, who twenty years ago helped twenty women in difficult living conditions to build their homes, two decades later blaanc borderless architecture and CaeiroCapurso have planned to construct twenty sustainable houses in the indigenous village of San Juan Mixtepec, in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca.
The construction of the first house began in March of this year, enthusiastically lifting the women’s hopes for this project. With their commitment and determination they have produced more than 40.000 adobe bricks using earth from the surrounding areas. The houses are energy efficient and built with local materials such as adobe and bamboo. Each house costs only 3 830,84€ (the price of half a square meter in Paris or Amsterdam or a square meter in the Baltic capitals). For these twenty women with limited financial resources, having a home represents the dream of a lifetime.
Released just this week, this video highlights the first ever high-performance district in the USA. Motivated by the Architecture 2030 challenge, Seattle 2030 District has applied these ideas to a larger area creating a collaborative model between public and private sectors. This ground breaking district in downtown Seattle is aiming to ‘develop realistic, measurable, and innovative strategies to assist district property owners, managers, and tenants in meeting aggressive goals that reduce environmental impacts of facility construction and operations’.
The Association for Computer Aided Design in Architecture (ACADIA), in collaboration with Brooklyn-based fabrication house FLATCUT_ recently announced the winners of this year’s ACADIA 2011 Design + Fabrication Competition. The competition challenged designers to create new forms in the categories of furniture, partition and lighting using innovative materials and digital fabrications applications. The winners brought not only ingenuity to their designs, but a sense of beauty and functionality that excited the jury. More images and information on the competition winners after the break.
Next week we will be taking our Architecture City Guide to Berlin and we need your help. To make the City Guides more engaging we are asking for your input on which designs should comprise our weekly list of 12-24. In order for this to work we will need you, our readers, to suggest a few of your favorite modern/contemporary buildings for the upcoming city guide in the comment section below. Along with your suggestions we ask that you provide a link to an image you took of the building that we can use, the address of the building, and the architect. (The image must be from a site that has a Creative Common License cache like Flickr or Wikimedia. We cannot use images that are copyrighted unless they are yours and you give us permission.) From that we will select the top 12 most recommended buildings. Hopefully this method will help bring to our attention smaller well done projects that only locals truly know. With that in mind we do not showcase private single-family residences for obvious reasons. Additionally, we try to only show completed projects.
The Xi’an Expo 2011 has officially opened and, as expected, the international horticultural event has attracted a staggering 200,000 in just the first weekend! We’ve been covering the Expo beginning with Plasma Studio + GroundLab’s conceptual design, and we have been featuring updates about the project over the course of the last few months. The Expo embodies the idea of transformation as the site was formerly a sandpit where the water was severely degraded during the 1980s. Efforts over the past two decades have restored the ecosystem and now the Expo is able to demonstrate what can be accomplished through the use of the most advanced technology, ideas, and materials. As we reported earlier, the 37 ha complex includes three buildings that are interconnected with a dynamic landscape of unfolding paths and networks of water, circulation and foliage.
More images after the break.
If you have enjoyed the Eskew+Dumez+Ripple (EDR) projects we have featured then this is the book for you. With stunning photography and informative text, this book examines not only an architect’s physical impact on the built landscape, but also her/his role as a community builder and shaper of human experience. The projects showcased throughout this book illustrate EDR’s commitment to the community in both small and large scale projects.
More after the break.
Elements that can also be composed into an “urban furniture” module with innovative functional and volumetric variations which will meet the needs and integrate the different possible functions required by citizens in their use of public space. True design objects, conceived for the cities of today and the foreseeable future.
The CITYVISION competition is an international ideas competition, which challenges architects, engineers, designers, students and creative individuals to develop visionary urban proposals with the intention of stimulating and supporting the contemporary city. Through innovative ideas and methodologies, which can improve the connection between the historical, present and future city, CITYVISION aims to foster a critical evolution of architectural historiography. The host city for this round of entries was Venice, Italy. Browse through the winning entries after the break.
This week, with the help of our readers, our Architecture City Guide is headed to Barcelona. We recently featured an engaging video where Wiel Arets half jokingly said Barcelona is fantastic but boring. He continued to say as soon as Sagrada Família is finished Barcelona is done; there is nothing left to do there (10:50). Arets can say what he wants about Barcelona supposedly being boring, but our city guide doesn’t reflect this. Barcelona is filled with fantastically expressive architecture that springs from its proud Catalan culture. It was impossible to feature all our readers suggestions in the first go around, and we did not even come close to including some of the most iconic building such as Casa Milà. Thus we are looking to add to our list of 24 in the near future. Further more there are so many fabulous buildings on the drawing board or under construction, i.e. the projects in the @22 district, we’ll most likely be updating this city guide for quite awhile, regardless of Sagrada Família’s completion.
Take a look at our list with the knowledge it is far complete and add to it in the comment section below.
The Architecture City Guide: Barcelona list and corresponding map after the break.
A unique concept the PAS House is imagined to be a place to both live and skateboard. The skateable surface of the home, interior to exterior, fluidly moves from the ground to the wall and then to the ceiling in a continuous surface forming a tube of a 10ft diameter. The PAS House will be constructed in Malibu, California for Pierre Andre Senizerques (PAS), a former World Champion and Pro Skater as well as Founder and Owner of Sole Technology, the design by Francois Perrin and Gil Lebon Delapointe divides the home into three separate spaces; including a living room, dining area, and kitchen, the second one includes a bedroom and bathroom and the third a skateboard practice area.
Architects: Francois Perrin and Gil Lebon Delapointe Location: Malibu, California (house); Exhibition Public Domaine/Skateboard Culture, La Gaite Lyrique, Paris, France (prototype) Client: Pierre Andre Senizergues Project Area: 2,200 sqf (house); 700 sqf (prototype) Project Year: 2011 Photographs: Mike Manzoori and Sam Mc Guire
Mid-2009 projects for our 8th selection of previously featured interior posts. Check them all after the break.
Eva’s bed / h20 architectes The arrival of a new child in the family pressed a young couple to think about a way to divide a room into two parts. The idea was to provide a personnal space to each child. The projet answers to this request of separation by adding a third space making the partition. The creation of a “multiple-use furniture” in the middle of the space allows to add some depth to the primary basic partition. It afford passages, secret storage, bed, office… in a funny way (read more…)
By invitation of Nexity/SAEM, STUDIONINEDOTS was awarded second place in the competition for their design of macro LOT AA in Paris, an icon for life. Their intention was to create a recognizable residential building with a luxurious appearance where, by making a smart intervention, all residents can enjoy the great qualities of the site. More images and architects’ description after the break.
The University of Technology, Sydney commissioned PTW Architects to design a Multi-Purpose Sports Hall and Teaching Facility. Situated under a green park area in the university’s city campus on Broadway, the design started in early 2009 and has just recently been completed. More images and architects’ description after the break.
The Mackintosh School of Architecture recently made us aware that their Friday Lecture Series is available to watch online. We will be showcasing a few periodically over the next couple of weeks. Among other topics, in this video Wiel Arets talks about the world becoming one big city in the near future. It is a fairly engaging talk that you should check out.
PIQUE, a collaborative of design professionals shared with us a video of their proposal por the Henry Art Gallery facade. The goal of this project is to transform the Henry Art Gallery storefront from a busy corridor into an energetic, engaging extension of the Gallery that makes people aware of the act of observing, reacting and interacting.
A proposal for an Olympic complex for Harbin’s bid for the 2022 Winter Olympics, SuperStadium, designed by Alan Lu, seeks to integrate the multitude of Olympic arenas and villages into one continuous entity. Consequently, this design allows for a seamless transition between programs and events. More images and project description after the break.
This space houses the corporate headquarters for a young company that is developing new technology for concrete. The objective was to design a think tank that would encourage interaction and reflect the innovative green products that they are developing.
Architect: The Felderman Keatinge + Associates (FKA) Location: Los Angeles, California, USA Photographs: Courtesy of FKA
Providing the winning design for the Parc des Expositions (PEX) in the innovation zone of Toulouse, in southern France, OMA conceived PEX to be a new gateway to the city hosting exhibitions, conferences, and concerts. The 338,000 sqm project is designed to be a compact mini-city – an antidote to the sprawl of a standard exposition park, and a means to preserve the surrounding French countryside.
Surpassing three submissions by internationally-renowned competitors, the project, led by OMA’s director of French projects Clément Blanchet, will be completed by 2016. Blanchet commented: “This project is not only about architecture, but rather infrastructure. It’s a condenser for diversity, a machine that can promote an infinite amount of possibilities.”
Architects: OMA Location: Toulouse, France Designers: Rem Koolhaas and Clément Blanchet Client: Société Publique Locale d’Améngement (SPLA) Project Area: 338,000 sqm Project Year: 2016 Renderings: Courtesy of OMA
Chicago-based firm Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture recently announced that it has won an international competition to design the Wuhan Greenland Center, which will likely be China’s third-tallest building, and the fourth tallest in the world, when completed in about five years at 606 meters (1,988 feet) high. Construction is scheduled to begin this summer in Wuhan near the meeting of the Yangtze and Han rivers.
More images and project description after the break.
The Neenan Company, an integrated architecture and construction firm based in Fort Collins, Colorado, partnered with the EMU Festival, an eco-conscious music festival held in Snowmass, Colorado, to re-invent the traditional music festival tent.
Neenan employees were invited to participate in a contest to create the world’s first sustainable festival tent. The goal of the contest was to create a portable structure that could be installed on a city street as easily as it could at the top of a mountain. Materials for the tent were required to be biodegradable, recyclable, or have a sustainable end-of-life plan, so none of the pieces would end up in a landfill. In addition, the design needed to be easy-to-assemble, so that the tent could be put together by a few people with minimal or no tools.
Designer: Ben Shepard, 3D Animator, The Neenan Company Location: Fort Collins, Colorado, USA Collaborators: Randell Johnson, AIA, Vice President Business Development, The Neenan Company; Timothy Wooster, Founder, EMU Festival Project Year: 2011 Renderings: The Neenan Company Photographs: Yann Ropars and The Neenan Company
Manhattanhenge, is the term used to describe a biannual occurrence in New York City when the sun aligns with the east-west streets of Manhattan’s main grid. Adopted in 1811 the famous street grid of Manhattan, the Commissioners’ Plan, was the original design plan for the streets in which the grid plan is offset at 29.0 degrees from true east-west. Twice a year photographers gather to witness this urban solar phenomenon, when the sun sets perfectly between the skyscraper corridors and illuminates the north-south facades of the streets. Tripods and pedestrians filled the crosswalks this past Wednesday to catch a glimpse of this moment.
But you can browse the last one: 417
