Arup has unveiled a proposal to construct a new stadium for the Italian football club A.C. Milan in a central area of Milan. If built, the venue would integrate a “modern stage” for the team’s home matches with a hotel, sports college, restaurants, children’s playground and public open space.
“The project has been developed with a fully holistic and integrated approach where all the design components have been carefully balanced around the spectator’s experience,” stated Arup in a press release.
The word “treehouse” can conjure up fond childhood memories for many. As a kid, the idea of a house floating above the ground is an endless source of wonder-- and that wonder never truly goes away! Countless designers have experimented with the idea of suspending their architecture among the trees, and a large number of those projects have made their way onto our site. See nine of our favorites, after the break.
After two weeks of nominations and voting, we are pleased to present the winners of the 2015 ArchDaily Building of the Year Awards. As a peer-based, crowdsourced architecture award, the results shown here represent the collective intelligence of 31,000 architects, filtering the best architecture from over 3,000 projects featured on ArchDaily during the past year.
The winning buildings represent a diverse group of architects, from Pritzker Prize winners such as Álvaro Siza, Herzog & de Meuron and Shigeru Ban, to up-and-coming practices such as EFFEKT and Building which have so far been less widely covered by the media. In many cases their designs may be the most visually striking, but each also approaches its context and program in a unique way to solve social, environmental or economic challenges in communities around the world. By publishing them on ArchDaily, these buildings have helped us to impart inspiration and knowledge to architects around the world, furthering our mission. So to everyone who participated by either nominating or voting for a shortlisted project, thank you for being a part of this amazing process, where the voices of architects from all over the world unite to form one strong, intelligent, forward-thinking message.
John Tuomey and Sheila O'Donnell - recipients of the 2015 Royal Gold Medal. Image Courtesy of RIBA
When Sheila O'Donnell and John Tuomey, who practice in partnership as O'Donnell + Tuomey, were named as this year's recipients of the RIBA Royal Gold Medal, a palpable collective satisfaction appeared to spread throughout the profession. No one could find criticism in Joseph Rykwert and Níall McLaughlin's nomination, nor the ultimate choice of the RIBA Honours Committee, to bestow the award upon the Irish team. Their astonishingly rigourous body of work, compiled and constructed over the last twenty five years, has an appeal which extends beyond Irish and British shores. A robust stock of cultural, community and educational projects, alongside family homes and social housing projects, leaves little doubt about the quality, depth and breadth of their mutual capabilities and the skill of those that they choose to collaborate with.
Read the conversation with the Gold Medallists after the break.
Just over two years have passed since the tragic shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. Thanks to an 89% vote by Sandy Hook's residents in favor of demolishing the old building the site now sits empty - awaiting the construction of Svigals + Partners' design for a replacement building which is not only tasked with being a high level teaching facility, but also with sensitively addressing the collective trauma which inevitably remains a part of the site's history.
With such a challenging history to the site, how is it possible to balance the emotional needs of a community with the functional needs of an educational institution? We spoke to Jay Brotman AIA, a partner at Svigals, to find out.
The Edmonton Arts Council has commissioned Marc Fornes / THEVERYMANY to construct an “architectural folly” in the Canadian city’s Borden Park. The project, known as “Vaulted Willow,” aims to “resolve and delineate structure, skin and ornamentation into a single unified system” by “exploring lightweight, ultra-thin, self-supported shells through the development of custom computational protocols of structural form-finding and descriptive geometry.”
The 2015 Jury of Fellows from the American Institute of Architects (AIA) has elevated five international members to its prestigious College of Fellows, including two architects from the Spanish firm Nieto Sobejano Arquitectos that recently won the 2015 Alvar Aalto Medal. The award is given to those who have made significant contributions to the profession. All Fellows will be honored at an investiture ceremony at the 2015 National AIA Convention and Design Exposition in Atlanta. The complete list of newly inducted Honorary Fellows, after the break.
A group of six young architects under the leadership of Renzo Piano have been hard at work transforming unused spaces within Italy's suburban framework. The team, known as G124, focuses its efforts on injecting life back into overlooked and forgotten areas of its built environment and stimulating the local economy through design. This most recently entailed transforming a long abandoned area under a viaduct in northeast Rome into a bustling cultural hot-spot.
Last night, international design firm Gensler received the London Planning Award for Best Conceptual Project for its latest vision: London Underline. The proposal explores the potential of an underground bicycle and pedestrian park beneath the streets of London. Not only does this public interest design utilize existing abandoned space, but also generates the electricity to support itself simply by being used.
National libraries, often monumental in scale and "dominated by nationalistic ambitions and overwhelming architectural details," will be the subject of a new exhibition opening later this month at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD). Icons of Knowledge: Architecture and Symbolism in National Libraries seeks to examine why national libraries are amongst the most symbolic icons of modern day countries. In the global milieu of the "rapid digitisation of print," this exhibition aims to shed light on why nations are "vehemently investing resources in the construction of buildings that will project their cultural legacy and house the most precious treasures of their written history."
Nearly eight months ago, a team of four design students won a competition to design an artist’s residence in the south-western countryside of the UK. Now, Charlotte Knight, Mina Gospavic, Ross Galtress, and Lauren Shevills (in collaboration with artist Edward Crumpton) have seen their design, “The Observatories,” realized. Conceived as two rotating structures that house a studio and living quarters, The Observatories will be moved to four different sites over the course of two years. During this time, they’ll take in twelve artists, each for two-month residencies.
ADP Ingeniérie (ADPI) and Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA) have unveiled designs for what will be the world’s largest airport passenger terminal - the Beijing New Airport Terminal Building. The Daxing scheme, based off the bid-winning planning concept by ADPI, hopes to alleviate traffic from Beijing’s existing Capital Airport, which is operating beyond its planned capacity.
“Initially accommodating 45 million passengers per year, the new terminal will be adaptable and sustainable, operating in many different configurations dependent on varying aircraft and passenger traffic throughout each day,” stated ZHA in a press release. “With an integrated multi-modal transport centre featuring direct links to local and national rail services including the Gaotie high speed rail, the new Daxing airport will be a key hub within Beijing’s growing transport network and a catalyst for the region’s economic development, including the city of Tianjin and Hebei Province.”
The Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) has opened a Dubai office to design and oversee projects in the Middle East-Africa region. Together with headquarters in Rotterdam and offices in New York, Hong Kong, Beijing and Doha, OMA Dubai aims to “strengthen the practice’s presence in the Middle East, and also provide a connection point for future work in Africa and India.” The office is located in Al Warsan Tower in TECOM.
Judges Patty Hopkins, Eva Jiricna and John McAslan have awarded Jane Priestman the Ada Louise Huxtable Prize. The 85-year-old British designer, lauded for being a “visionary” client, is the first to receive this lifetime achievement award, which honors non-architects which have significantly contributed to the architectural profession.
“Her contribution to future generations is immeasurable,” said the judges. “Priestman had the belief that architecture could change people lives, and wanted to work with architects who could help her do it.”
Andrés Jaque / Office for Political Innovation’s project COSMO has been selected by the Museum of Modern Art and MoMA PS1 as winner of Young Architects Program’s (YAP) 16th edition in New York. Scheduled to open in late June, just in time for MoMA PS1’s 2015 Warm Up summer music, COSMO will serve as a “moveable artifact” with a mission to provide clean water for the world’s population.
“This year’s proposal takes one of the Young Architects Program’s essential requirements - providing a water feature for leisure and fun - and highlights water itself as a scarce resource,” said Pedro Gadanho, Curator in MoMA’s Department of Architecture and Design. “Relying on off-the-shelf components from agro-industrial origin, an exuberant mobile architecture celebrates water-purification processes and turns their intricate visualization into an unusual backdrop for the Warm Up sessions.”
Workplace design has undergone a radical transformation in the last several decades, with approximately seventy percent of today’s modern offices now converted to open plans. However, despite growing concerns over decreases in worker productivity and employee satisfaction, the open office revolution shows no sign of slowing down. The open office model has proliferated without regard for natural differences in workplace culture, leading to disastrous results when employees are forced into an office that works against their own interests. If we are to make offices more effective, we must acknowledge that ultimately, design comes out of adapting individual needs for a specific purpose and at best, can create inviting spaces that reflect a company’s own ethos.
CLOG is seeking submissions for its 13th issue, CLOG: Landmark. The latest edition from the New York-based publication explores the "powerful and complicated" nature of landmark status, examining the factors which dictate whether a building is to be destroyed or preserved. CLOG: Landmark plants itself in the nexus between architecture and social issues, dissecting ideas of "cultural value" and the framework by which this is determined. Critique and commentary of all forms will be considered, including images, graphics, diagrams, and text of not more than 500 words. Submissions must be received by March 1. Further guidelines for submission can be found here.
UK universities are failing to properly equip graduates with the necessary skills required for practicing architecture, according to RIBA’s 2014 Skills Survey. Of the 149 employers and 580 architectural students or recent graduates who responded to the wide-spread survey, a large majority criticized architectural education for prioritizing “theoretical knowledge ahead of practical ability” and agreed that most graduates are ill-prepared for work after studying at the university.
“I can think of no other profession where new graduates must wait a decade or more to be given significant responsibility because they have not acquired basic skills in university,” says Yarema Ronish, RIBA client adviser and director at Richard Morton Architects.
Following the extensive preservation battle over Bertrand Goldberg's iconic Prentice Women's Hospital, the Chicago landmark was demolished a few months ago to pave the way for Perkins+Will's new Biomedical Research Building for the Feinberg School of Medicine. The four year preservation struggle was marked by repeated appeals to the Commission on Chicago Landmarks and Mayor Rahm Emanuel with attempts to place the building on historic registers, proposals to adapt it for modern use, and design competitions to gain public opinion on the future of the building. Ultimately, the outpouring of global support by architects and preservationists to save Prentice fell short of the political agenda of progress, prioritizing future development over preserving the city's past.
The sun drenched interior promenade. Image Courtesy of The Whitworth
In an article for The Observer, Rowan Moore visits Manchester's Whitworth Art Gallery (1908), a compact museum which has now undergone a comprehensive restoration and extension by MUMA (McInnes Usher McKnight). The practice, who won the job against 130 other bids for the project, worked with a budget of £15million in order to realise an ambitious brief. Their interventions and innovations, many of which are modest and unseen, have not only reconnected the building with its surrounding parkland but also elevated the interior rooms into world-class exhibition spaces. For Moore, their work is striking but muted: "the virtues of the new Whitworth – sustainable, accessible, sensitive, thoughtful – could all be synonyms for 'dull' or at least 'worthy'. But, thanks to its pleasures of light and material, it is not. It is a job very well done."
Martin Lesjak, co-founder of Austrian firm INNOCAD and 13&9 Design, has been named Contract magazine’s Designer of the Year 2015 - the magazine’s 36th annual awards’ most prestigious honor.
“Martin Lesjak elicits power, grace, and emotion from his engaging and sensuous interior spaces. Through both his visionary architecture and interior design, as well as beautiful product design, Lesjak is clearly a design star that others in the profession look up to,” says Contract Editor in Chief John Czarnecki, who selected Lesjak as Designer of the Year. “Martin has won a total of three Interiors Awards from Contract in the previous two years, those projects turned heads in the U.S., and his body of work continues to grow and gain international attention.”
Polish studio Zupagrafika has released a collection of five paper cut-out models representing London’s brutalist architecture from 1960s and 70s. Scattered around the districts of Camden, Southwark and Tower Hamlet, the “raw concrete (paper) tour begins with iconic tower blocks (Balfron Tower and Space House), leads through council estates doomed to premature demolition (Robin Hood Gardens and Aylesbury Estate) and concludes with a classic prefab panel block (Ledbury Estate).”
The series, "Brutal London" is Zupagrafika’s unique way of cataloging London’s modernist architecture at risk of demolition.
MoMA's largest-ever Latin American architecture exhibition will feature an official partnership with Instagram. The project invites the Instagram community to share their photos of buildings as part of the Latin America in Construction: Architecture 1955–1980 exhibition.
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