A few days ago, Korea's Incheon International Airport broke ground on its latest addition, Terminal 2. Gensler, in collaboration with the HGMY Consortium, designed the $2.5 billion project that will double the size of the country's busiest airport with its 72 gates and 7.4 million square feet of space. The project includes a second airport control tower, train station, parking facilities and an airside Intra Airport Transit (IAT).
Keep reading for the architects' description.
Supermarket stores have become the last link in the linear and out of consumer sight “farm to fork” chain. For the new Chedraui Supermarket Store in Santa Fe, Mexico City, Rojkind Arquitectos proposes that folding the chain onto itself and bringing it into view becomes an opportunity for interactive and educational programs, connection to local markets and a place for community. The proposal comes in response to the company’s desire to launch itself into a new direction offering something more that just groceries and goods; it tries to position the brand in a new market segment not considered to date, to help establish the new sustainable direction the company is trying to achieve and to offer a unique experience to it’s consumers while giving a public space back to the city.
Henning Larsen Architects has won a competition to design a new city hall for Kiruna in northern Sweden. The design, which has already been named Krystallen (The Crystal), is intended to "become the city's natural gathering point, where the traditions of democracy will be united with a vision about a dynamic meeting place for politics as well as social and cultural events". Comprising of two buildings, the outermost circular in form and the innermost "shaped like a crystal", the design has been "inspired by the enormous concentration of iron ore" that can be found beneath the site, the discovery of which led to the founding of Sweden's northernmost city.
Following the news that Studio V Architecture has been commissioned to convert the 19th century Empire Stores, next to Brooklyn Bridge, into 380,000 square-feet of office, restaurant and commercial space, Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) has unveiled designs for "a flowering meadow with seasonal grasses, a sprawling field and a triangular wooden viewing platform" close by.
After fifty years of neglect the Empire Stores, located next to the Brooklyn Bridge, are now the most coveted waterfront property in New York. Midtown Equity has partnered with Studio V Architecture to adaptively reuse the 19th-century coffee warehouse into 380,000 square-feet of office, restaurant and commercial space, highlighted by a Brooklyn-centric cultural museum. "After the Brooklyn Bridge," says Joe Cayre, Chairman of Midtown Equities, "the Civil War era Empire Stores are the most iconic structures on the Brooklyn waterfront. As a Brooklyn native who raised my family in the borough, it is an honor for my firm to be chosen for the redevelopment of the Empire Stores."
Learn more after the break...
Schmidt Hammer Lassen Architects, together with LOOP Architects, COWI Denmark and Norway, Transsolar Energitechnik and Vugge til Vugge Denmark, has won the Nordic Build Challenge in Norway with their innovative scheme, Urban Mountain. The winning proposal, which would be Norway's tallest building, seeks to refurbish and extend an existing 50,000 square-meter office tower in central Oslo into 79,000 square-meter sustainable icon. Not only would the building be the first Norwegian high-rise to utilize natural ventilation, but the design would employ Cradle to Cradle principles and BREEAM Outstanding certification targets to significantly reduce the building’s energy consumption and CO2 footprint.
Continue reading to learn more...
As a continuation to his “Shan-Shui City” concept, which envisions a “city of mountains and water,” Ma Yansong of MAD Architects has proposed an interpretation of China’s ancient natural philosophy in the contemporary city: the Chaoyang Park project. Situated in the world’s second largest city park and surrounded by a typical Chinese business district, the Chaoyang Park project seeks to infuse the “vigorous Shan-Shui culture” with a new urban typology that unites architecture and nature as a single entity.
In 2003, BOLLES + WILSON won a national competition that gained them commission of the new Luxemburg National Library (BnL Bibliothèque Nationale de Luxembourg). After years of hibernation, the 39,000 square meter library will break ground in 2014.
Follow us after the break for more analysis on the library...
Consider a social-networking experience that combines real-time amusement with an awareness of your surroundings. Dutch architecture firm, UNStudio, together with Ferris Wheel Investment of Japan, have laid out a colossal vision that expects to attract millions of visitors to a mixed-use retail, food and beverage center anchored by an architecturally-iconic observation wheel, Nippon Moon. The concept utilizes a user's smart phone or tablet, extending the rider's experience far beyond the moment they physically enter one of the 32 single or double-decker capsules.
One of Coop Himmelb(l)au's latest competition winning designs is the Dawang Mountain Resort near Changsha, China, a combination of an entertainment ice world with an indoor ski slope, a water park and supporting restaurant and shopping facilities. Positioned directly on top of a historical cement mining quarry pit and lake, this proposal aims to combine "striking landscape with ambitious design" in a way that could redefine the idea and aesthetics of recreation for the south-central Chinese city.
Designed by spatial practice, their proposal for the Harbin High Speed Railway (HSR) west train station Twin Towers. is an iconic project set to include office spaces, residential apartments, retail spaces and a hyper link to a new underground infra-structural hub. With China having the world’s longest High Speed Rail (HSR) network that connects the entire country from north to south and from east to west, the new West Train Station in Harbin will become the northern China gateway connecting to China’s major cities with daily high-speed links to Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai and Guangzhou. More images and architects' description after the break.
Designed for the Expo 2017 theme "The Energy of the Future", Saraiva + Associados' proposal was recently selected as one of the top 10 finalists in the competition. Their concept proposes an enduring landmark in Astana that integrates renewables, efficiency, clean technologies and sustainability into livable and feasible architecture where "Energy is Life". From the master plan to the individual buildings, this design embraces the idea that "Life should be built on the conservation of energy" and clearly makes a statement that energy concerns on Buildings and City Planning can be put immediately into action - and the best way to do it is by providing high quality contemporary concepts that efficiently integrates proven technology into feasible designs that can effectively make the difference today. More images and architects' description after the break.
Milan-based RRC Studio's latest undertaking, the Xiang River Tower, will be an office and residential project in Changsha, a city under heavy development in China. Located near the Xiang river in a prime area of the city’s downtown, the tower will dominate the city's horizon and bear a strong presence on the skyline.
Read on for the architects' description...
Installed in Auckland Art Gallery’s Lower Grey Gallery for the 5th Auckland Triennial, the Model Home 2013 by Michael Lin and Atelier Bow-Wow, with Andrew Barrie, responds to the specific design challenge of recreating the building that was also exhibited at the Rockbound Museum in Shanghai in 2012. Originally made of welded steel frames clad in structural insulated panels, they explored the potential to translate the house into the Kiwi timber-and-plywood construction idiom. This would have reduced the cost somewhat, but not solved the dilemmas of waste and conceptual inconsistency. More images and architects’ description after the break.
The Maxwan, in collaboration with MS architekti, designed Red Hill Rise proposal is a mixed use building on top of a metro station, which includes offices and retail located along a major spine road connecting the airport and historical city center of Prague. They came up with the idea of ‘breaking-up’ the building volume and inserting landscape and public space in between. More images and architects’ description after the break.
Designed by NRJA + IG Kurbads, their ‘Show Under Skin’ proposal for the reconstruction of the new Riga Theatre corresponds to the dynamism of the creative process within the theater - minimalist, smooth finish, combined with a twisted in a motion stopped volume.The skin is a multi-functional covering structure which is connected with the historical volume, covering it and combining various features and space dimensions in a single organic volume, also matching different adjacent building heights. More images and architects’ description after the break.
Designed by Buro AD and SPECTACLE for this year’s CityVision Competition, their Rio de Inverso proposal critically addresses the historically cyclical attempts by urban planners to impose order post ex-facto on Rio de Janeiro's informally created, complex and spatially rich urban fabric. With the theme of the competition ‘sick and wonder (wonder and disgust),’ the architects demonstrate how the city was the arena for a continuous struggle. More images and architects’ description after the break.
Designed and constructed by QASTIC Lab, ‘Balance Through Buoyancy’ is a temporary researchpavilion called “Floatastic” which was designed and built for a private client to serve as a shade pavilion for a wedding ceremony. Situated in Edgerton Park, in New Haven Connecticut (an Olmsted planned landscape), this deployable structure aims to create a floated shelter which avoids imposing any loads to the ground, which traditional structures require. Instead, it proposes a well-fabricated balloon, which is filled with Helium to raise the imposed loads of fabric veils and any possible dynamic environmental loads toward the sky. More images and architects’ description after the break.
OMA (NY), along with local collaborators Gomez + Castro Arquitectos, has been selected to masterplan the Bogotá Centro Administrativo Nacional (CAN) in Colombia, a mixed-use civic center roughly the size of Washington DC’s National Mall. Located at the midpoint of Calle 26 Avenue, the city’s main axis that has symbolically charted its growth from the historic downtown to the airport and the international gateway of Colombia, CAN will serve as a new city center and government headquarters with additional programs of residential, educational, retail and cultural developments.
Shohei Shigematsu, director-in-charge of OMA New York, commented, “Our proposal enables CAN to be a lively node, providing a continuous public domain that curves through the site to connect the park, the university and Calle 26. With a single gesture, the arc achieves a clear urban identity while accommodating programmatic diversity.”
As we announced last week, BIG+WHR+Arup has been selected as one of three design teams to participate in the second phase of the design competition for Nyt Hospital Nordsjælland, a 124,000 square meter acute hospital in Hillerød, north of Copenhagen. BIG’s proposal for the new hospital, serving over 300,000 people, seeks to "preserve the site’s existing natural features while optimizing the efficient hospital machine."
Read on for more from the architect's description...
New York-based, Serbian-born performance artist Marina Abramović has successfully secured funding via Kickstarter for phase one of an interdisciplinary performance and education center in Hudson, New York. The project, known as the Marina Abramovic Institute for the Preservation of Performance Art (MAI), aims to be the first crowdfunded cultural institution ever to be built as well as the only international arts center dedicated to presentation and preservation of long-durational work. With the help of Abramović’s “global community of collaborators,” OMA will now move forward with the project’s design development process. More information on the MAI’s design can be found here.
Located in the intersection of the pedestrian axis of Festival Street within the heart of Magok city in Seoul, the competition winning proposal by Wooridongin Architects for the Magok Central Plaza weaves itself into the surrounding city. The plaza is a great traffic node since it is where the subway lines 5, 9 and Incheon Airport train cross. Its close location to Han River greenery and ecosystem aligning with the River, Jungang Park and Green Area Connectors makes it to be part of a continuous open space system. More images and architects’ description after the break.
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A conceptual framework for the development of the city of Medellin, the Urban Current[s] competition proposal by L+CC (Land+Civilization Compositions), Taller 301, and openfabric considers it important to think of the river territory beyond a simple design of public space. Instead, this is seen as the opportunity to re-structure and establish a framework for the future development of Medellín. Their approach creates new principles for the development of the city by using all available resources (natural, social, economic, political, and cultural) to link the city with its history, its ecology, and the movement of people in the territory. More images and architects' description after the break.
