The results from the first brief of Think Space's MONEY themed cycle of competitions, Territories, have been announced. David Garcia (MAP Architects), juror of the Territories competition, invited participants to send in proposals "that tackle the present economic and territorial challenges in the present and future of the Arctic lands." See them all, after the break...
Francesco Veenstra, one of six partners at the Dutch practice Mecanoo and Lead Architect on a number of major projects in the United Kingdom, recently spoke to Mies. UK about the practice's approach to design and their unique take on sustainability. Having recently completed a major public building in Birmingham (which was put to the vote and won the AJ's 2013 Building of the Year), and with more in the pipeline, the practice's international outlook is growing. How has the practice's design methodology and core ideas influenced this success? Read more after the break.
ArchDaily recently spoke to Ben van Berkel, co-founder and principal architect at UNStudio, an international network of specialists in architecture, urban development and infrastructure based in the Netherlands. The office, which was founded in 1988, has completed projects around the world ranging from Rotterdam’s Erasmus Bridge to the Mercedes-Benz Museum in Stuttgart. With over 81 built projects, and 54 currently in progress (including Raffles City in Hangzhou and Scotts Tower in Singapore), London’s Canaletto Tower (which is due to be completed in 2015) marks the practice’s first major project in the UK.
Mies. UK recently spoke to Roger Stephenson OBE, Managing Partner at Manchester based stephenson:ISA Studio, about his award winning practice's approach to "using craft in a contemporary way". The office most recently completed an addition to Chetham's School of Music, winning the 2013 RIBA Regional Building of the Year Award, RIBA National Award, and the RIBA Regional Award. This project is the latest in a long list of innovative buildings that are part of a "rigorously coherent, contextually progressive architecture" that has made the practice one of best known regionalist design offices in the UK.
Read the interview in full, and watch a three minute tour of Chetham's School of Music, after the break.
The London Cinema Challenge, organized by Combo Competitions, challenged participants to design a new cinema located on Newman Street in central London which should "reflect the participants’ ideas of the cinematic experience in the near future." The scope of the proposal, along with the extravagance of the idea, was decided by the individual competitors with the only criterion being that the design provided a space to watch movies. In addition to the cinema, each proposal had to include a "unique feature helping to serve the main purpose" of the building. Whether "an intimate screening room for indie films, or a commercial multi-storey cinema complex showing blockbusters," the winning proposals demonstrate an array of unique ideas.
Slash with Phillips/Pilkington Architects have been announced as the winners of the Royal Adelaide Hospital Site International Design Competition, which was open to registered architects and landscape architects from around the world. The competition centred around redesigning the current hospital site, which will be vacated in 2016, in order to create an iconic place within the Greater Riverbank Precinct of Adelaide. See the winning and shortlisted proposals after the break.
The American Institute of Architects (AIA) and MIT’s Center for Advanced Urbanism has produced a new report examining urban health in eight of the USA’s largest cities, which has been translated into a collection of meaningful findings for architects, designers, and urban planners. With more than half of the world’s population living in urban areas - a statistic which is projected to grow to 70% by 2050 - the report hinges around the theory that “massive urbanization can negatively affect human and environmental health in unique ways” and that, in many cases, these affects can be addressed by architects and designers by the way we create within and build upon our cities.
TOTEMENT | PAPER's competition proposal to design an international multipurpose cultural and leisure exhibition complex, close to Moscow's Kremlin, centers around resolving the aesthetic disconnection, or "visual conflict", between the image of a modern European city - defined by the Ismailovo hotel complex - and the historic context of the site. Their designs (two variations of each other of which one has won the competition) do not blend into the existing cultural monuments but rather offer a modern antidote to the issues of scale, perception and "grandiose historical stylization" that currently exists.
Scandinavian practice C.F. Møller Architects, in collaboration with DinellJohansson, has been announced as winner of the HSB Stockholm architectural competition. The winning scheme includes three "ultra-modern residential high-rises" planned for Stockholm's city center. Only one of these proposals will actually be built, including the world's tallest wooden skyscraper. Completion of the chosen tower is set for 2023, the 100th anniversary of the competition organizer and Sweden's largest housing association, HSB. View the three project proposals after the break.
Andrea Maffei Architect's competition entry for a new stadium for Ruch Chorzów, one of Poland‘s largest football clubs, offers a capacity for 12,000 and provision for up to 16,000 seats. The design encourages the stadium and its surroundings to act as a new civic point of reference for Chorzów as part of a wider complex of shops and restaurants. The architects' understanding of the movement of people on match days is complimented by the facilities that the new stadium will offer to visitors seven days a week, the design for which will provide Ruch Chorzów with a state-of-the-art football pitch and associated amenities.
schmidt hammer lassen architects has been announced as the winners of a competition to design a large new central library in Ningbo, one of China's oldest cities with a population of seven million. The building will house the library's significant collection of over two million historic and ancient books, and will aim to double the library's daily visitors to around 8000 per day. Situated on the edge of a new ecological wetland area, the proposal will also form a new cultural hub within the city. As the latest in schmidt hammer lassen's long list of libraries (including the Royal Library in Copenhagen) with eight completed and four currently under construction, Ningbo's will be the practice's first in China.
The RIBA has announced that the Lubetkin Prize, awarded annually for the past thirteen years to the architects of the "best new building" outside the European Union, is to be replaced with the new "international prize" in 2015. As a result, there will be no RIBA International Awards or Lubetkin Prize awarded in 2014. According to the RIBA, "the Lubetkin Prize has been a useful platform to highlight the work of RIBA members around the world. We are currently working on creating a prize that has even greater international impact and look forward to announcing more details in the future." The Lubetkin Prize's last recipients were Wilkinson Eyre and Grant Associates for Cooled Conservatories, Gardens by the Bay in Singapore.
For Peter Aspden's first encounter with the architect of the Guggenheim in Bilbao and the Walt Disney Concert Hall in LA, Frank Gehry did not "exude sweetness." "You are not going to call me a [...] ‘star-chitect’? I hate that." In a candid interview with the Financial Times, Gehry discusses the problem of being branded for beginning the Bilbao Effect in spite of the fact that he insists that "you can’t escape your signature." Gehry talks at length about Facebook's latest headquarters and, in particular, his relationship with his client, Mark Zuckerberg. Read the full interview here.
Poland-based GowinSiuta Studio has won "Changing the Face 2013 Rotunda Warsaw," an annual design competition (now in its 13th year) to revamp the "sawtooth-topped Rotunda, a favorite landmark and meeting spot in central Warsaw." Alongside being awarded the $15,500 prize money, the practice also plans to see their proposal realized by 2015. The studio's proposal, entitled Modern Urban Oasis / Warsaw City Lounge, transforms the Rotunda into an integral part of a public square.
New Wave Architecture's proposal (one of eight) for the 2015 Milan Expo demonstrates an essence of Iran brought together in a series of organic forms. The expo's theme, Feeding the Planet, Energy for Life, is encapsulated the designer's exploration of the trace of cookery in culture, literature and Iranian art. The conceptual idea behind New Wave's proposal, The Persian Garden, reflects the cycle of a tree: the organism is fed by the soil, grows and blossoms, before nourishing people and spreading throughout the earth "to asset its support."
The Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) has announced the President’s Medals Student Awards at a special event in London. The awards, known to be the world's most prestigious awards in architectural education, were inaugurated in 1836 and are therefore the institutes oldest award (even older than the RIBA Gold Medal). Three medals - the Bronze for a Part I student, the Silver for a Part II student, and the Dissertation Medal - are awarded to "promote excellence in the study of architecture [and] to reward talent and to encourage architectural debate worldwide."
Around 300 schools of architecture from over 60 countries were invited to nominate design projects and dissertations by their students, of which students of the Bartlett School of Architecture at University College London won all of this year's primary awards.
The winners of the 2013 AR+D Awards for Emerging Architecture have been announced! The awards, presented by The Architectural Review and now in its 15th year, have seen "projects from locales as diverse as Bloomsbury and the Himalayas." This year over 350 entries were discussed by four esteemed judges, including Sir Peter Cook, and have led to four winners who will share a prize fund of £10,000. See both the four winning entries and the ten highly commended schemes after the break...
