Architects: 100Landschaftsarchitektur Location: Quebec, Canada Directors in Charge: Thilo Folkerts, Rodney LaTourelle Collaborators: Laura Strandt, Maike Jungvogel Realization on site: Johanna Ballhaus, Elisabeth and Jessica Charbonneau, Sandrine Perrault Project Area: 250 sqm Project Year: 2010 Photographs: Rodney LaTourelle, Thilo Folkerts
Last week we featured the winning proposal for this competition in Leeds, UK, and now we feature the proposal by this young Spanish practice, Externalreference.
The competition site is located close to the main transport, cultural facilities and, at the same time, a five minute walk to the old industrial area. The location has good potential as a center for offices, business, conferences and leisure. Commercial and catering activities, which are intense in the city center, start to fade along the borders of the river. New commercial programs together with bars and restaurants will attract both the people who work on the opposite side of the river and those who live and work in the center. Before the Brewery wharf was built there were few conference venues close to the site. The introduction of new conference spaces will establish the area as an ideal place for business and meetings. There are few Spa centers in Leeds and new ones close to the site are reported to be lacking in service. Wellness activities integrate perfectly in business and city center environments.
We had published before several projects by Greek architect Aristide Antonas. Now, he’s sharing with us his project for the Piraeus Tower 2010 competition, that was looking for a fictional new facade of the Piraeus Tower.
More images and architect’s description after the break.
Configuring the contemporary condition for a School of Architecture
We have presented before some projects by Greek architect Aristide Antonas. Most of them really speculative and very interesting due the topics of research that Antonas use to study, as recycled materials or waste design. This time we’re featuring his proposal for a transformation in the Architecture School at Delft, that was devasted by fire in 2008.
Antona’s description of the project after the break.
We recently published the project Railway Footbridge at Roche-sur-Yon, now our friends from HDA_Paris share with us the Turin Footbridge, that was constructed for the 2006 Winter Olympics.
About the competition, we know that the city of Turin hosted the 2006 winter Olympic games and had embarked on an extensive programme of construction of various venues and infrastructure for the games. The city took advantage of the infrastructure programme to incite urban renewal in the southern part of the city that has been affected by the economic downturn in the car industry. The Olympic village, situated in the disused Mercati Generali in the Lingotto district adjacent to the main railway lines entering the city from the south, is part of this new infrastructure and will contain housing and a logistics centre.
The project for a footbridge located in Roche-sur-Yon was commissioned as a collaborative work in between HDA Paris, who has a previous experience with the footbridge they did in Turin for the Olympic Village in 2006 and Bernard Tschumi, who recently finished the Acropolis Museum.
Observation, organization, and transformation of urban settings.
“Although we will never fully comprehend the entire complexity of a city in one moment, we can understand the urban construct through the interaction of its parts”
The people from Lars Muller Publishers always keep in surprising us with their creations. In this case we are talking about a kind of book… which is not really a book but a series of transparent sheets which allow us to perceive the urban phenomena by isolating and superimposing individual components in order to have a personal interpretation of what the city is (that’s the reason of the title).
The publication offers an original approach to the study and comprehension of the complex urban systems, networks and connections. In words of the publisher it is “a mapping tool that creates a framework for understanding the continually changing configuration of the city. With transparent slides, the tool allows one to superimpose various realities like layers and build new urban connections. It invites readers in short to immerse themselves in the complexity of our cities”.
The author of this remarkable publication is Petra Kempf, a New York based Architect and Urban Designer.
The future well being of cities around the globe depends on mankind’s ability to develop and integrate sustainable technology.
LAVA designed the Masdar City as the city of the future; positioned at the forefront of integrating sustainable technology into modern architectural design. Rome, Athens, Florence; most great historical cities have had the plaza, forum, or square at their epicentre – where the life, values, ideals, and vision of the population evolved. Equally, the centre of Masdar must be an iconic beacon that attracts global attention to sustainable technology.
Once again, our friend Architect Aristide Antonas surprises us with a wonderful project, this time in London. The design is really interesting but also the way he work the infographics, all in black and with, very sober and austere.
Hope you enjoy as much as I did looking at the project and understanding it!
Children curiosity is the tool for a wider reflexion about different ways and velocities of interact and percept daily spaces, depending on our age, using one Portuguese traditional materiality applied to exterior doors to protect from sun and insects, usually rejected and depreciated by contemporary architecture.
In the context of the Festival des Architectures Vives at Montpellier (18th-21st June), on the theme “Ephémères Curiosités”, ateliermob purposed to reinvent children’s universe on one antique mansion’s courtyard of Montpellier.
Three Rotterdam museums – Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, the Netherlands Architecture Institute and Nederlands Fotomuseum – are bringing the rich culture of Brazil to the city on the Maas.
Brazil Contemporary is running since 30 May until 23 August 2009.
As if it was a mix in between Huxley | Orwell story, Atelier Van Lieshout from Rotterdam is developing this project since 2005. Just like in Brave New World, future society is an embodiment of the ideals that goes beyond ethics and liberty, and the artwork it’s obviously influenced in the scripts of fiction books from the early XX century, like mentioned Huxley’s Brave New World, Orwell’s Men Like God or maybe some D. H. Lawrence novels.
Let’s hear what they have to tell us after the break
After meeting Claudia Pasquero and Marco Poletto, founders of ecoLogicStudio at the Beyond Media Festival in Florence, they talked to us about one of their latest projects, the STEMcloud v2.0 that now we want to share here, as is a really new and avant-garde vision about parametric and genetic architecture and the way that human interaction can bring new life to architecture projects:
The STEMcloud v2.0 project proposes the development and testing of an architectural prototype operating as an oxygen making machine. The project has been presented and designed for the SEVILLE ART and ARCHITECTURAL BIENNALE 2008.
Today at 11.00 AM took place the laying of the foundation stone of what will be the new iconic building in the area of Barcelona’s Forum, the Spiral Tower. This university campus will be located at the end of Avenida Diagonal, one of the main avenues of Barcelona, beside the Forum building designed by Herzog & de Meuron for the Forum of Cultures held in 2004.
Zaha Hadid came around 11:15 and the event had an intense political presence (the Mayor of Barcelona Jordi Hereu, mayors from areas like Maresme and Besós and key representatives of the Consorsi). The building, located at the confluence of streets Taulat and Sant Ramon de Penyafort, will have a ground surface of 20,650 sqm.
Hadid’s speech was short, she recalled his first trip to Spain when she was 7 years and then she talked about a competition in which she participated 20 years ago, related to the design and extension of the Diagonal Avenue. At that moment she had the opportunity for a better understanding about the urban development of Barcelona and it has been a big influence on the design of the Spiral Tower.
Architects: AMID (Cero9) / Cristina Díaz Moreno + Efrén García Grinda Location: Jerte Valley, Cáceres, Spain Client: Consejería de Cultura y Turismo, Junta de Extremadura. Program: Cherry Tree Fair and Convention Centre in the Jerte Valley Competition Team: Luis Cabrejas Guijarro, Jorge Saz Semolino, José Quintanar Iniesta, Bruno Gomes, Mireia Luzárraga. Project Team: Jorge Saz Semolino, Alex Muiño, Mireia Luzárraga, Margarita Martínez, José Quintanar, Dora Joana Moreira da Costa y Manu Jimenez. Models: Jorge Queipo and AMID (Cero9) Project Year: 2008 Images: AMID (Cero9)
The ninth edition of BEYOND MEDIA, international festival for architecture and media, will open at the Stazione Leopolda in Florence, Italy. A rich program of videos, exhibitions, and a symposium -in which the protagonist of the international debate will participate- will offer to the public, until July 17, a plurality of overviews on architecture and on its ever more intense relations with the media.
More images after the break.
