In a recent article for 99% Invisible, Kurt Kohlstedt explores how integrating microalgae into buildings can create a dualistic system of living and built, in order to perform services like create shade, generate power, and work with HVAC systems to modulate interior environments.
Projects that utilize such technology include bioreactors that produce oxygen and bio-fuel, a building with a bio-adaptive façade, and a street lamp that filters carbon dioxide from the urban environment.
After a career as a professional skateboarder, Helsinki-based Janne Saario has become one of few landscape architects in the world with a practice devoted completely to designing skate parks for young people. Saario’s designs—all of which are located in Europe—diverge from the typical brutalist stereotypes of concrete skate park masses, and rather, are site-specific and heavily influenced by their natural surroundings.
“Young people are our hope and future,” says Saario. “And by offering beautiful and meaningful surroundings to grow, like wonderful skate parks, we can make a positive change on their picture of the world and future behavior.”
The architectural team comprised of Davis Brody Bond and Kieran Timberlake has unveiled its newest updates on the design for 181 Mercer, a 735,000-square-foot complex for New York University that will replace a 35-year-old gym facility and become NYU’s largest classroom building, as well as a space for performing arts, athletics, and students and faculty housing.
Is ARCH has announced the winners of the seventh edition of the ISArch Awards, an international award competition for students of architecture. In an effort to provide students with a “gateway to the professional and corporate world,” the competition calls for students to engage in dialogue and debate within the framework of their university studies.
The three winners of the seventh IsArch Awards are:
PLH Arkitekter has been announced as one of two winners in the international design competition for Rail Baltica, organized by The European Railroad Lines, Ltd. As a part of the European transport network, Rail Baltica will be a multi-modal public transport hub in the Latvian capital of Riga, with a railway bridge crossing the Daugava River.
The focal point of the project will be a train station building “that creates a strong visual identity in the cityscape, strengthening the sense of Riga as a metropolis.” Inspired by the archetypal form of the arch and the Art Nouveau period, the building will feature canopies that resemble arched fern leaves. On the north side of the building, the canopy shape allows for a unique view over the historic city, ideal for travelers entering or leaving the city to create a strong sense of place.
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Ziya Imren Architects has released its plans for Re-Naturing the Kizilirmak in Turkey, a new eight-kilometer-long urban design project around the Kizilirmak River. As the longest inland river in Turkey, the Kizilirmak, also known as the Red River, “has been regarded as a hard edge to the city due to access and safety concerns.” After recent municipal advancements, many areas around the river have been opened to a design competition with the goal of integrating the riverfront into the existing city fabric.
M CO Design has released its designs for “Dragon’s Link,” a new dragon-inspired, mixed-use infrastructure on the south side of Hong Kong Island “that will serve a large part of the community and will enhance a local historic monument,” the Tai Tam Dam, which will celebrate its 100th anniversary this coming February.
Drawing inspiration from local traditions and the natural topography of Hong Kong, the project will create new connections within an existing network of roads and hiking trails in Tai Tam Country Park in “a juxtaposition of old and new,” in order to improve user experience and infrastructure.
Architectural firm AL_A has unveiled its design for Pitch/Pitch, a series of 5-a-side soccer pitches designed for unused or temporarily vacant lots across London, as well as in other cities internationally.
Created as a response to shortage of sport space in inner cities, the project is meant to be fast and easy to construct, “meaning it could be set up for a fortnight to coincide with a World Cup tournament, or last for a year, bringing use to vacant sites that might otherwise lie dormant.”
After working with Arup, the practice developed a modular system that utilizes a lightweight carbon-fiber structure, a material generally associated with the aerospace industry, but that is emerging architecturally at larger scales.
China-based firm EID Architecture has been selected as the winner of a design competition for a mixed-use development, entitled Longfor Phase IV, in Chongqing, China. Designed as an exploration of vertical urbanism on a high-density scope, the project is composed of a “single tower and associated podium integrated as an assembled massing of stacked box-like volumes.”
Dutch firm Studio Anne Holtrop has won the 2016 Challenge of The Time, an international architectural prize named by architect and artist Iakov Chernikhov. Now in its fifth iteration, the prize honors young architects up to 44 years old for the “best architectural project concepts that [feature an] innovative approach” and face “challenges to the future.”
Studio Anne Holtrop’s work varies from spatial temporary models and pavilions to extensive public buildings. For instance, over the past several years, the studio has designed the Museum Fort Behten near Utrect, and the National Pavilion of Bahrain for the EXPO exhibition in Milan, as well as for the Venice Biennale.
Cannon Design has unveiled its proposal for a mixed-use Cancer Hospital in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Originally envisioned as a “private hospital serving patients that can afford a high quality of health care,” the project transformed into a partnership between the public and private sector after preliminary feasibility studies determined the price of the site to be prohibitively high.
Thus, the project expanded to become a mixed-use complex with ownership shared between socially minded city government and private investors.
Seattle-based firm LMN Architects have won an Urban Land Institute (ULI) Global Award for Excellence for its Tobin Center for the Performing Arts in San Antonio, Texas.
“Designed by LMN Architects in partnership with executive architects Marmon Mok Architecture, the $150 million expansion and renovation project embrace the multi-faceted cultural identity of the city with a distinctive tapestry of form, materiality, light, and landscape" stated Mark Reddington, FAIA, lead designer and partner at LMN Architects.
Completed in 2014, the project incorporates a metallic veil that wraps program elements in programmable LED lighting, in order to create a variable play of light on the city’s skyline.
White Arkitekter has teamed up with the City of Stockholm to redevelop Södra Skanstull, a neighborhood characterized by obstructive overland infrastructure bridging the south of Stockholm to the island of Södermalm.
In order to reclaim these underused areas of the city, the revitalization project will create pedestrian and cyclist boulevards, as well as 65,000 square meters of space for culture, sports, and offices, 22,000 square meters for commerce, and 750 new apartments. The project will additionally identify, map, and upgrade existing facilities.
Pneumatic Vacuum Elevators, LLC has created a series of air-powered, space-saving, “plug & play” elevators designed to be easily installed into home environments.
Ranging from a single-passenger to a three-passenger, wheelchair accessible model, the elevators—called Pneumatic Vacuum Elevators (PVE)—are self-supporting, and do not require equipment rooms or other additional spaces above or below the shaft. Similarly, the elevators are completely enclosed and are not built into the framework of the home around them, and thus it can easily be relocated.
VOID is an interactive sensory art installation created by New York-based artists Sergio Mora-Diaz, Oryan Inbar and Jordan Backhus, that manipulates light in physical space to generate an immersive interaction arena and a meditative, transcendent spatial experience, which reminiscent of the cosmic sky and streams of information.
The installation is composed of an arrangement of translucent screens, digital generative images displayed through a projector and sensors that respond directly and visually to the proximities and movements of its users.
The New Zealand Institute of Architects Incorporated has announced the winners of the 2016 New Zealand Architecture Awards, which recognizes the best works by New Zealand’s architects.
Out of the 28 winners selected from 50 shortlisted buildings, four projects have received special acknowledgment and have been named outstanding New Zealand Architects.
The winners of the 2016 New Zealand Architecture Awards are:
Ennead Architects has broken ground on the Shanghai Planetarium, a new 38,000-square-meter project that will define a new identity for the Shanghai Science and Technology Museum (SSTM) in the Lingang district of Shanghai, China.
Inspired by astronomical principles, the design is centered on the concept of orbital motion. “Each of the building’s three principal forma—the oculus, the inverted dome, and the sphere—acts as an astronomical instrument, tracking sun, moon, and stars, and reminding visitors that our concept of time originates in distant astronomical objects."
Woods Bagot has begun construction on the redevelopment of the former Funan DigitaLife Mall, into a mixed retail, office, and residential project that will expand its previous function as the definitive IT mall in Singapore by incorporating the tech experience throughout its entirety.
The 887,000-square-foot project will be composed of a six-story retail, dining, and lifestyle podium, two six-story office towers, and one nine-story housing block. These programs will be connected vertically, and are designed to appeal to tech- and socially-savvy consumers interested in a creative environment.
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