On January 19, Japan House São Paulo will open the exhibition Architecture for Dogs, curated by Japanese designer Kenya Hara. Through the work of renowned architects, the exhibition presents doghouses in a pioneering exercise in scale that considers society's current relationship with these pets.
Clément Blanchet Architecture in collaboration with Etienne Tricaud (AREP) have been shortlisted for the French pavilion at Expo 2020 in Dubai. The proposal is intended to enhance both the virtual world and the real to support human communication, cultures and interactions. The pavilion will be built around the themes of Light and Mobility to create a hidden oasis with two vertical gardens facing one another.
Walking through the classrooms of the University of Buenos Aires' School of Engineering is like stepping into a time machine: fine wooden desks, rosettes, pointed ogival arches. Green chalkboards with theorems and equations waiting to be solved. Here, the foundations of knowledge are laid for the young minds who will later calculate bridges and dams, and optimize plants and processes.
As you walk up to the terraced workshops, the wood groans and creaks—a sound that signals the passage of time.
C.F. Møller Architects and BRUT have won a competition for the design of an ambitious urban development in Ostend, Belgium. The neighborhood of 500 houses demonstrates a method of using a human scale to improve the quality of life the residents and the urban realm.
The project centers on the De Nieuwe Stad quarter, where an existing social housing scheme from 1972 has become outdated. The competition for the site’s complete redevelopment attracted 54 firms, from which C.F. Møller Architects and BRUT.
For thousands of years, concrete has been a foundation of the built environment: the most widely used man-made material on the planet. However, as architects, and the public alike, sharpen their focus on the causes and effects of climate change, the environmental damage caused by cement has become a subject of unease.
As exhibited in a recent in-depth article by Lucy Rodgers for BBC News, cement is the source of about 8% of global CO2 emissions. The piece was written off the back of the UN’s COP24 climate change conference in Poland and found that in order to meet the requirements of the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement, annual cement emissions must fall by 16% by 2030.
Architect Daniela Lamartine has designed a floating community to address Sweden's national housing crisis. Called Floathub, the project creates a new mobile lifestyle to achieve long-term economic and residential security. Floathub would be created with a co-operative trust where residents become developers and owners through collective action. The trust would manage and build the floating typologies using CNC technology to enable a self-sufficient mobile lifestyle on water.
Venice captured all architects' hearts and minds last year, but 2019 —a Venice-less year— will be still a year full of biennials and festivals around the world (many of which we're proud to be official partners of). The excitement is already building.
From Chicago's new approaches to the traditional practices to Shenzhen's future technology prospect; from Oslo's degrowth agenda to Brazil's focus on everyday architecture, it's time to start saving dates for the following biennials around the world!
Rotterdam and Athens-based practice Anagram Architecture & Urbanism has designed an "Urban Theater" for the Ioannina Cultural Park National Competition in Greece. The proposal suggests an open and accessible public space that creates a new identity and captures the imaginary of the city. Connecting the city with the lake of Ioannina, the new public space presents a unified and flexible space for both everyday leisure time and large scale events to take place.
Aiming to internationalize emerging architectural production in Latin America, the Latin American Architecture Biennale (BAL 2019) has announced the practices selected to participate in the next edition of the event, which will take place in September 2019 in Pamplona, Spain.
A bus inspired by the Bauhaus school in Dessau will take to the streets during the school's centenary year to visit four cities around the world. The bus is part of the larger SPINNING TRIANGLES project by SAVVY Contemporary that is curated by Elsa Westreicher. Marking the 100th anniversary of the Bauhaus, the project aims to investigate, challenge and act against the neocolonial power structures inherent in design practices, theory and teaching.
Morris + Company has unveiled images of their competition-winning vision addressing London’s homelessness crisis. The M+C scheme, produced for the New Horizon Youth Center and Mayor of London-led competition, repurposes the abandoned York Road tube station into a hostel and co-working space.
Titled “Stepping Stones”, the project seeks to provide “an inclusive, viable, and holistic site strategy that can support a managed and balanced community by providing homeless young residents with a sage, supporting stepping-stone into appropriate long-term housing solutions.”
New photographs have been released of OMA’s Taipei Performing Arts Center (TPAC), as construction continues in Taiwan. Consisting of three theaters, each functioning autonomously of each other, the OMA scheme seeks to depart from the traditional consensus of performing arts centers as simply containing a large auditorium, medium-sized theater, and small-size black box.
OMA sees “no excuse for contemporary stagnation,” using the TPAC as an opportunity to experiment with the inner workings of theaters, leading to a dynamic external presence. Hence, the TPAC’s three theaters plug into a central cube combining stages, backstages, and support spaces into a single, efficient entity, allowing stages to be modified or merged for unforeseen scenarios.
Developed by researchers from the Federal Universities of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) and Bahia (UFBA), Cronologia do Pensamento Urbanístico is an online platform active since 2003 that brings together historical events, projects, key facts, and publications related to the history of urbanism in Brazil and worldwide.
The work of Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer is currently being featured by the city of Rio de Janeiro. Throughout the month of January, mock-ups and engravings signed by the architect can be seen in Barra da Tijuca, in the city’s West Side. There, visitors can discover the history of Brazilian architecture and see some of Niemeyer's most famous work. The RioCVB created the exhibition to celebrate Niemeyer's legacy and showcase Brazil's landmark buildings.
Design practice Snøhetta has created a series of secluded wooden shelters for Norway's largest hospitals. Sited in the forest, the shelters were created on behalf of the Friluftssykehuset Foundation. Designed to make hospitalization easier for patients and their families, the outdoor retreats offer a physical and psychological respite from treatments and the isolation that can follow long-term hospitalization.
Researchers at New York’s Columbia University have unveiled a method of vibrantly replicating the external and internal structure of materials such as wood using a 3D printer and specialist scanning techniques. While conveying the external profile and patterns of natural objects is tried and tested, a major challenge in the 3D printing industry has been replicating an object’s internal texture.
In their recent study “Digital Wood: 3D Internal Color Texture Mapping” the research team describes how a system of “color and voxel mapping “led to the production of a 3D printed closely resembling the texture of olive wood, including a cut-through section.
Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates (KPF) has announced the completion of the third-tallest building in Shenzhen. The China Resources Headquarters, a 400-meter-tall commercial office tower, stitches together retail, residential, and office functions surrounded by 2,000 square meters of public space.
The tower, inspired by the shape of winter bamboo shoots, seeks to “invigorate Shenzhen’s urban fabric while providing one of the country’s premier companies with a visual icon symbolizing its historic growth and prominent stature.”
The world’s largest ice festival has opened to the public in China. The Harbin International Ice and Snow Festival in Heilongjiang, North-Eastern China draws 18 million visitors, marveling at the festival’s spectacular castles and sculptures. In total, the 2019 edition saw 120,000 cubic meters of ice and 111,000 cubic meters of snow crafted by thousands of artists in temperatures as low as -35C (-31F) using swing saws, chisels, and ice picks.
Having begun as an annual tradition in 1985, the festival has gained accolades such as the Guinness Record for the world’s largest snow sculpture (250 meters long and 8.5 meters high). The 2019 festival sees more than 100 landmarks, and ice sculptures by artists from 12 countries.
The Harbin Festival will be open for one month, closing on February 5th. Below, we have rounded up our favorite images of the festival so far, demonstrating that red hot architecture can be cold as ice.
.jpg?1546979275 "Floathub. Image Courtesy of Daniela Lamartine")
