2017

Mecanoo and Ayesa have broke ground on its "Palace of Justice" courthouse in a residential area of Córdoba, Spain. The first-prize winning proposal of an international design competition in 2006, the project was significantly delayed by the area's economic instability. Slated for completion in 2017, the building aims to unify the neighborhood's mix of contemporary and historic influences while providing essential public services for the region.

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Servicing up to 10,000 cruise ship passengers a day, the New Keelung Harbor Service Building by Neil M. Denari Architects (NMDA) is set to become a bustling hive of activity in Taiwan's Port of Keelung. The project takes a two-phase approach that unites a public plaza and service base with a restaurant and the terminal proper, using an office building to mediate between the two.

Occupying 117,000-square-meters and with a construction budget of TWD $5 billion, the project is slated for completion by December 2017.

Read more about the project and view selected images after the break.

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Traditionally, hospital environments are internalized, cut off from the natural world, and structured around efficiency, despite its affect on patient health. Moving beyond this, Kengo Kuma & Associates have unveiled plans to replaced an aging medical center in Setagaya, Tokyo, with a “modest,” “actively open” hospital centered around a landscaped courtyard garden.

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Four years after winning a competition to rebuild 71 Via Boncompagni in the heart of Rome, MAD Architects has been awarded approval and will now enter the implementation phase of their first European project. This approval will allow the Chinese practice to transform an incongruous 1970s commercial courtyard building into a 145-unit residential complex that reutilizes the building’s “bookshelf” structure by stripping away its facade and inserting new living quarters, giving it an entirely new look and function.

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Moscow-based architectural studio Nefa Architects (Nefaresearch) have been chosen to redesign the Solntsevo metro station. Their project, which is designed to “create a solar spray effect” on the station’s subterranean platform, won an international competition whose winners were ultimately chosen by Moscow’s citizens.

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Henning Larsen Architects, in collaboration with an international team consisting of Tredje Natur, MOE and Railway Procurement Agency, has won Frederikssund municipality’s architecture competition to design a regional train station and new quarter in the future town of Vinge. While primarily serving to connect Vinge to the regional public transit system, the undulating, circular urban hub is designed to prevent the railway from dividing the town in two halves.

“The proposal best connects the train station, nature and town structure as one united whole,” lauded the selection committee regarding Henning Larsen’s winning scheme. 

Paris-based architecture and engineering firm Marc Mimram has been appointed to design a new TGV station in Montpellier, France. To be completed in late 2017, the station is intended to serve up to 3.5 million passengers a year by 2030, connecting with the existing Perpignan to Barcelona line, ultimately reducing the travel time between Paris and Barcelona.

The station's striking roof structure is composed of five 8 metre wide pleated shells, made from a fibre reinforced, ultra high performance concrete (UHPC). The high performance concrete combined with the pleated form allows the shells to be just 5-6 centimetres thick, with glass panes embedded directly into the concrete during casting.

Trahan Architects have collaborated with Christopher Counts Studio to design a 15-hectare, two-phase masterplan for a mixed-use convention center in Tbilisi, known as "Expo Georgia." Organized within a lush garden landscape, the masterplan’s first phase will see the completion of the convention center’s first half, which will be constructed in a sequence of repetitive gabled forms broken down as stepped, nine-meter modules.

More about the center and masterplan, after the break.

BIG has unveiled plans for Bassin 7 (BSN7), a new civic-minded, mixed-use neighborhood in Denmark’s second largest city. The phased development will “breathe life into the harbor front,” placing importance on the public realm by organizing the site’s seven residential buildings with a series of recreational and cultural activities, including a beach zone, swimming pools, theater and cafe, along a public promenade.

Videos

In preparation for groundbreaking, Bernard Tschumi Architects have released the final design for the ANIMA (Arts, Nature, Ideas, Music, Action) cultural center in Grottammare (Ascoli Piceno, Italy). The 30-meter “perfect square” will offer the Piceno region and the Adriatic coast a public centre for collecting and cultivating the broadest manifestations of artistic, creative and productive culture.

An animation, the architect's description and more images after the break.

The West Kowloon Cultural District Authority has recently unveiled the landscape design plans for the West Kowloon Cultural District, a scheme that will activate the waterfront and create a dynamic green space in what will be one of the largest cultural developments in the world. Developed by Dennis Lau & Ng Chun Man Architects & Engineers, with West 8 and ACLA, the concept plan features outdoor areas for exhibitions and performances, recreational lawns, and a waterfront promenade.

GRAFT and Kleihues+Kleihues has teamed up with Genossenschaft für urbane Kreativität (Cooperative for urban Creativity) to realize a complex of five towers centered around working and living in Berlin, Germany. Titled “Eckwerk,” the new complex is set to rise within the confines of an existing viaduct, whose shape and materiality served as the project’s main source of inspiration.

Construction has begun on 3XN’s first project in India. Aesthetically inspired by local foliage, the 136-meter “Grove Towers” are designed to interweave at their base, much like the roots of the native mangrove trees. These lower, “interwoven” floors will house retail establishments, while the upper floors will be given over to residential units.

Herzog & de Meuron has been commissioned to design the fourth and final extension to Helvetia’s Head Office in St. Gallen. The new west wing will join three other structures, all of which share the same uniform facade treatment, to complete the insurance company’s headquarters and provide a prominent entrance, cafe, meeting rooms and additional office space.

Thomas Heatherwick has been commissioned to transform a 125,000 square meter park in the heart of Abu Dhabi into a multifunctional “sunken oasis.” Inspired by “fractured desert crust,” the park is designed as a series of fragmented canopies that rise to form a three-dimensional landscape across the site. Beneath the cracked surface will be a series of interconnected public spaces cooled by lush vegetation that provide organic produce to local restaurants and space for community gardens.

The fertile Anqiu region of China’s Shangdong Province is known locally as the land of “cultivation, stone hills, and creeks.” Thus, Little Diversified Architectural Consulting’s (LITTLE) design for Anqiu’s new cultural campus and fitness center is based upon these very elements.

Videos

Zaha Hadid Architects has designed a 40-story luxury hotel for Macau’s premier leisure and entertainment destination known as “City of Dreams.” Perceived as a single “sculptural element” united by an exposed exoskeleton mesh structure, the “simple volume” was extruded from its rectangular site as two towers connected at the podium and roof levels, with two organically-shaped bridges punctuating the tower’s center external void. This central void is then celebrated by a 40-meter tall, “grandiose atrium” that greets visitors as they enter the hotel.

Take a digital tour through the building and into the atrium via a newly released video, after the break...