Architecture ZA 2010 is set to become Africa’s premier urban culture festival as it brings together leading-edge architectural thinkers and multidisciplinary practitioners from around the globe. It takes place in Johannesburg’s Newtown precinct from September 21 to 27 2010 and will open debate about our post-event cities and urban futures.
Your Building Here shared with us their entry for the New Embassy of the Czech Republic in USA Competition. See more images and architect’s description after the break.
The Business of Aura is an exhibition hosted in two locations, Elga Wimmer Gallery and Broadway Gallery, curated by Kelsey Harrington. It includes painting, drawing, photography, sculptural prototypes, and installation. The show examines the potential of studio processes to produce aura.
Denmark-based Henning Larsen Architects have won first prize in an invited competition to design the Batumi Aquarium in Georgia. See more images and architect’s description after the break.
Iran-based Bonsar Architecture Studio shared with us their proposal for the Tehran Business Hotel Competition, for which they received first prize. See more images and architect’s description after the break.
Henn Architects have won second price in the international competition to design the new South West Hotel in Beijing, China. The proposal was designed by Henn Architects Design & Research Studio HENNStudioB. You can see more images and architect’s description after the break.
The challenge for this competition is to design a Museum that has XX Century History of Wine exhibition areas and also be a landmark for the city of Santiago. To this end, the plot where this project will take place is located at Cerro San Cristóbal, since this hill is the most natural and, at the same time, urban backdrop to lay out a natural/artificial product such as wine. This is an amazing opportunity for the winning architect to become well known in a potentially growing market such as design of wine cellars and vineyards of all South America.
IN-SITE brings Cecil Balmond’s workshop to life. Featuring never-before seen material, the show covers Balmond’s work and collaborations, featuring over 100 original sketches and models. Included are Weave bridge for University of Pennsylvania (2010), the Pedro e Ines footbridge in Coimbra (2006), art installations, such as H_edge and Danzer, and Orbit, the 120m high sculpture designed with Anish Kapoor for London’s 2012 Olympics.
IN-SITE is scheduled to tour other galleries worldwide this autumn and is currently on show at the Casa da Arquitectura as part of Porto’s Open Source architectural event. The exhibition will continue until September 10. Some images after the break.
This summer, the V&A has commissioned seven architects at the forefront of experimental design to create their first built structures in the UK (see Rintala Eggertsson Architects’ structure here). The structures are installed in a number of locations across the landscape of the Museum and are designed as immersive spaces – places both of encounter and reflection – where visitors can escape the chaos of everyday life and directly experience the architecture first hand. 19 architects were originally invited to submit proposals, the designs and models of which are on display in the V&A+RIBA Architecture Gallery.
A space for theatre and performance that fragments the stage into six micro-stages, Vazio S/A created a series of inter-connected booths set around a central spiral staircase in the V&A’s Porter Gallery. The structure takes as its inspiration elevated dwelling spaces in high-density areas in Brazil. A number of practitioners from London working across theatre, dance and music were commissioned to devise new pieces of work in response to the structure, to be performed in the six booths at various points during the exhibition.
See more images after the break.
Every now and then we feature an article that doesn’t quite fit any of our most common categories. Like houses made exclusively for dogs, or a tower made of 850 bricks of sugar. Check our second selection of miscellaneous architecture after the break.
Houses for Dogs They are supposed to be man’s best friend, so why not give them a house? With pet industry growing every year, could this be a new field for architects? With four designs (including a Bauhaus based one), your dog may now have all they ever wanted: a mansion. Based in Germany, a company named Best Friend’s HOME are providing this four types of mansions and even allow you to design your own (read more…)
Egyptian architect Hunia Tarek Tomoum shared with us her proposal for the eVolo 2010 Skyscraper Competition. Her proposal is a three-dimensional structural mesh of variable size tetrahedrons where two different grids overlap to allow diverse programs and circulations. The building consists of a series of large pockets or community hubs with public amenities such as restaurants, theatres, parks, and plazas connected to diagonal units with offices, residences, and hotels.
The circulation network of vertical cores and diagonal elevators connects the community hubs with the private units. The tetrahedron skyscraper is planned as a see through mesh that will interact with the city and enrich the urban fabric – a visual pedestrian continuity is achieve by lifting the structure and creating open areas at ground level.
More images after the break.
The 2010 focus of 3610 -The Conference is on Design & Informal Cities. It aims to address the need for design interventions in the informal sectors of urban existence which are integral to the city. Scheduled between 22 to 24 October 2010, it is being organized jointly by the Indian Architect & Builder magazine and Citizens’ Groups that are actively involved with issues concerning informal settlements in Mumbai and especially the future of Dharavi one of Asia’s largest informal settlements, under much scrutiny.
Urban Reserve establishes a new vision for the development of single-family neighborhoods-one of sustainably designed, modernist houses, gently sited in a rolling, wooded landscape with close access to urban amenities. We envision houses that are of their time and place: cutting edge in design but low impact and co-existing harmoniously in the streetscape and landscape.
Three amazing houses, an educational project and an office building are the five projects you can’t miss from last week. Check them all after the break.
Ecole Professionnelle Viège / Bonnard Woeffray Architectes The new class building of the Viège/Visp College of Further Education achieves a transformation in terms of context and enables the linking of the neighbourhood’s schools, the creation of a training campus, and the integration of the future workshops and gyms. Associated with the new building, the former school playground becomes the benchmark public space of the campus (read more…)
The Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) and The Architect’s Newspaper are today launching the Los Angeles Clean Tech Corridor and Green District Competition. The competition asks architects, landscape architects, designers, engineers, urban planners, students and environmental professionals to create an innovative urban vision for Los Angeles’ CleanTech Corridor, a several-mile-long development zone on the eastern edge of downtown LA.
No other city has been as enthusiastic as Berlin in experimenting with modes of living. From mass housing to highly individualistic visions of living and extreme communal regimes, Berlin has long pushed the boundaries of what it means to live together. New organisational forms of dwelling, combined with alternative implementation methods, are currently challenging the roles of both architect and local authority in the process of delivering dwellings for the city.
The design of educational facilities serves as a major focus for architects and the communities in which they live and work. The National Center for Education Statistics reports that there were 95,726 public schools in the United States in 2005, nearly 10,000 more than in 1995. And even in the current economic downturn, the American Institute of Architects indicates that the design and construction of schools represents the driving force of designs fees for architecture firms in the United States.
OpenHAUS and DARCH invites design professionals and design students to create an ‘Advertisement for Architecture’. The most outstanding of these entries will be exhibited at the award winning Surry Hills Library and Community Centre in Sydney, Australia for the Sydney Architecture Festival 2010, 20 October to 7 November 2010.