Land used by the former Bethlehem Steel Corporation in Pennsylvania is now being transformed into a dynamic arts, culture and education campus known as SteelStacks. Anchoring the 4.5 acres campus will be Spillman Farmer Architects’ ArtsQuest Center, a four-storey glass and steel structure with 68,000 sq ft of distinctive venues to showcase the arts.
More about the ArtsQuest Center after the break.
Our friends from Abitare recently published their 500 issue!
MONU – magazine on urbanism is a unique bi-annual international forum for artists, writers and designers that are working on topics of urban culture, development and politics.
Each issue collects essays, projects and photographs from contributors from all over the world to a given topic. Thus MONU examines topics that are important to the future of our cities and urban regions from a variety of perspectives.
They have just released their latest issue on the topic of “Real Urbanism”. You can see more about the articles on their official website. Also, you can browse the entire issue YouTube (video after the break).
During 2009 the Guggenheim Museum celebrated its 50th anniversary. The museum commissioned nearly 200 artists, architects and designers to imagine their dream interventions on the most significative space of Frank Lloyd Wright’s building, the central void.
Comte Vollenweider Architects shared their winning design for the extension of Cannes airport with us. The airport’s elegant construction focused on the functional side of improving the services offers concerning business aircraft, for both welcoming the crews and performances concerning plane’s maintenance. The structure is an open volume, allowing the space to be maximized, which offers complete freedom to the planes and their to maneuver.
Our friends from Abitare shared this cool noodle shop designed by ISSHO Architects with us. Located in central Tokyo, the ‘soba’ noodle shop has Machiya-style wooden louvers, invoking a traditional Japanese townhouse. The varying depth of each louver creates a textured sensation across the facade. Regionally different patterns of light spill through the façade from the interior, allowing a gradual change of character at dawn, especially as viewed from the main street. The facade aesthetic is modified on the interior’s ceiling as white curved panels contrast the concrete and wood dinning areas to soften the space. A minimalistic residential apartment for the owner sits above the noodle shop.
More images after the break.
As we reported earlier, an 8.8 earthquake hit Chile last Saturday.
Here’s a kind of project we don’t frequently see a lot of…a public bathroom facility. Shuichiro Yoshida, a Tokyo based architect, designed lavatories housed on less than 9m2 of ground space in Chikusei City. The site is a historic storage building, (one of the few still standing after the WWII), and a volunteer group obtained the ownership of the building to use as their activity base for “discovering the region-specific historical and cultural heritages.” Yoshia was asked to add lavatories for visitors and staff (as there are none within the building). Faced with such a small area of land to provide facilities for both men and women, the bathrooms are, in fact, an elegant addition to the main building. Due to the small footprint, the bathrooms maintain an open feeling because they are open to a high ceiling with exposed timber supports. The lavatories are seen as a way to not only preserve the region-specific landscape but also to create new landscape for the future. The exterior is clad in elastic plasterer finish while the interior walls are finished in a white material known as “Shikkui” which has humid conditioning and fire prevention.
More images after the break.
You can now pre-order 49 Cities, by WORKac. For this second edition, the book includes a new interview with Michael Webb (Archigram) and an essay by Sam Jacob (FAT).
Frédéric Haesevoets, a Beligan architect, recently won a competition for his design of a new city hall for Herstal. The international competition asked participants to design a new city hall to accommodate office spaces for central administration, archives and mixed use areas. The project is divided into two major forms that bookend a public open courtyard. Connected by a bright red bridge, the two arms house the major program areas and open to a landscaped area for the public to enjoy. The geometric form offers a break from the surrounding structures, emphasizing the importance of this communal structure. The faceted facade fuses the natural and the synthetic as sections of greenery are scattered among sections of glass. Inside, bright warm colors greet workers, a drastic change from the typical office color palette.
More images after the break.
We recently featured Preston Scott Cohen‘s Nanjing Performing Arts Center and, now, we share his winning competition proposal for the Taiyuan Museum of Art. Currently under construction, the building’s strong dynamic form is a geometric spin on the agricultural landscapes native to the Shanxi Province. The tessellated surfaces respond to contemporary technologies for controlling natural and artificial light, in addition to producing unexpected spatial conditions as the user circulates through and around the building.
More images and more about the project after the break.
Update: High res version of the drawings have been added.
EXH Design was hired to redesign the façades of high-rises in one of the most active urban areas in Shanghai. With the plans of the buildings already halfway through government approval, EXH was allowed little leeway in trying to change the existing plans. Instead, EXH turned their attention to “sculpting” the building’s surface. Taking a geometrical approach, the new façade aims to create a dynamic effect that will become a strong architectural expression for the surrounding areas.
More about the facades after the break.
HDA’s construction technologies used for the arch of the Turin Olympic Footbridge (previously featured on AD), have been further refined for their most recent award winning competition proposal, entitled Pylons of the future: Dancing with Nature. The competition, held by Terna, a private national electricity provider, asked participants to design pylons of the highest technical and aesthetic quality with a minimal impact on the environment. HDA’s design response was based on transforming the current ‘industrial soldier’ image of today’s pylons into an elegant shape whose form was inspired by nature.
More images and more about the pylons after the break.
An interesting concept for retrofitting buildings in Sydney has been shared with us thanks to Laboratory for Visionary Architecture (LAVA). This innovative plan, which is sustainable and cost effective, is known as “re-skinning”, and can easily be applied to other aging icons around the world. LAVA developed a simple skin for the University of Technology Broadway Tower that promises to transform it into a sustainable and stunning building. “The speculative project, ‘Tower Skin’, offers a unique opportunity to transform the identity, sustainability and interior comfort of the once state-of-the-art building,” said Chris Bosse, Australian director of LAVA.
More about the project, including a video, after the break.
Our friends at EXH Design shared their design of a hotel in Ordos, which is scheduled to be completed within a few months, with us. Taking inspiration from the yurt, the circular tent-like dwelling of Mongolian peoples, the team transformed the traditional scheme to meet the demands of modern life. The design “makes an accommodation experience in Ordos different from anywhere else and arouses a local cultural interest,” explained the architects.
More about the hotel and more images after the break.
The exhibition ”Eurovisions”, designed by Fantastic Norway, features the winners of Europan 10. It recently opened at the Norwegian Centre for Design and Architecture in Oslo.
“Eurovisions” consists of a vast number of hovering cityscape profiles, portraying the three current Europan sites. Together the silhouettes create a vast graphical landscape, creating a pseudo-3D or “two-and-a-half-dimensional” effect as you walking through it. This technique was widely used in early Disney movies (as well as in classic theatre scenography) to create the sensation of depth and movement through 2 dimensional drawings.
Runner up – and winner projects were exposed at the back of these silhouettes. In addition to this the exhibition features an educational area where information, facts and models of the Europan cities are exposed. Projected onto the walls, fake TV-news clips (set in a not to distant future) reports a variety of stories portraying possible futures for the cities at hand.
More images after the break.
UR Architects were awarded first prize for their design of a sports center in Antwerp. The center, which is intended for non-competition sports, is aligned with the existing sports hall along the main street of the new master plan development. The building attempts “to communicate” on all sides as the sports hall, dance hall and rental depot are positioned on the edge, interconnected by a T-shaped service area. This extroverted model opens the building to the community and the architecture reflects the modernism of the surrounding buildings. The roof is designed as a fifth facade to relate to the nearby housing blocks of Renaat Braem while the facades of the halls are made of multi-layered polycarbonate. Partly translucent, partly transparent, this material combines the dynamic spectacle of changing light and shade, with diffuse daylight admission and a high insulation value, resulting in a low energy building.
More images of the sports center after the break.
Latvian architects Mailītis A.I.I.M., were selected to design the Latvian Pavilion for this year’s Shanghai World Expo. Construction started in the end of 2009.
More images and architect’s description after the break.
