Architecture News: The Latest Architecture and News

White Arkitekter A/S has revealed its plans for Arven fra Havet, or Legacy of the Sea, a World War II memorial to be built at the Mindelunden site in Ryvangen, Denmark. Arven fa Havet will honor the 2,000 Danish sailors and more than 800 Danes who died in merchant ships serving the Allies, and in Operation Overlord, respectively.

Currently, the Mindelunden site is a graveyard bound on one side with dense bushes and trees. With the new memorial, the site will be better framed by creating a symmetrical boundary, mimicking the proportions of the low tombs, but at a larger scale to represent the common grave of all sailors, the sea.

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109 Architectes has released its proposal for the Beirut Museum of Modern Art (BeMA), for which a competition was recently held. The proposal was shortlisted, but did not ultimately win. In this proposal, BeMA is a box—“a generic form that belongs to everyone”—based on a scene in The Little Prince, where a traveler is asked to draw a sheep. The Prince rejects each sheep drawing until the traveler draws a box, inside of which a sheep is hidden. “The cube is a neutral form in the Little Prince’s search for identity. Within it, he sees what he wants to see.”

Within this generic box, visitors will thus be able to project their views of Beirut—the city’s chaos, diversity, creativity, history, streets, people, and more.

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Archimatika Architects has unveiled the plans for “Leopol Town,” a new housing project located on Styiska Street in Lviv, Western Ukraine. Overall, the project will include seven buildings, with 757 flats, shops, cafeterias, restaurants, and public access at the lower levels.

In an effort to combat the uncomfortable Soviet “sleeping neighborhood” feeling of the city, the project will feature open blocks, parceling, energy efficient systems, and sustainability principles to “invite nature in.”

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LAVA (Laboratory for Visionary Architecture) has won the competition to redesign an energy park and energy storage building in Heidelberg, Germany, for the Stadtwerke Heidelberg. Currently a cylindrically shaped storage center, the space will be transformed into a dynamic sculpture, city icon, and knowledge hub for sustainable energy, fully accessible to the public with city views.

In order to display the concepts of energy transition, decentralization, networking, flexibility and adaptability, the project will feature a multi-layered façade structure inspired by geometries in nature like leaves, spider webs, and reptile skins. “The result is a dynamic, ever-changing surface of light and shadow, animated by wind, turning the building into a beacon of a dynamic new energy regime.”

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Behnisch Architekten has announced the groundbreaking of the AGORA—Cancer Research Center located in Lausanne, Switzerland within sight of Lake Geneva. As the new home of the Swiss Institute for Experimental Cancer Research (ISREC), the Center will bring together 400 researchers, scientists, doctors, and clinicians under the goal of enhanced communication.

The new AGORA building will connect to an existing building on one side, with minimal disruptions to existing programming. “Visual relationships both on the site and to the landscape beyond require a carefully defined building mass and the new building responds sensitively to these site conditions while sculpturally standing out from its heterogeneous surroundings.”

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Los-Angeles-based CO Architects has released the plans for the Biological Physical Sciences Building (BPSB), a new life sciences facility at the University of California in San Diego. In order to “blend the richly diverse fields” of neurobiology, chemistry, and biochemistry, the seven-story, 128,000-square-foot building will promote collaborative research and visibility in teaching spaces.

Our goal at UC San Diego is to create opportunities to maximize interdisciplinary collaboration between multiple research and academic units, said Jennifer Knudsen, AIA, LEED AP BD+C Principal at CO Architects. We want the building to accommodate a range of research activities and teaching models capable of evolving over time.

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Maksim Atayants and Maksim Atayants Workshop have announced the construction of Laikovo, a new, large, classically-designed city in the Moscow Region that will be built from scratch – which, according to the architects, will be the first classical city to be built from the ground up in Russia in over 100 years.

Intended to embody the best practices of Russian and global urban planning, the city will be designed in the modern classic style in five districts, and will become Moscow’s nearest satellite city, located near Rublyovka, with easy access to the paid expressway, the M-1 double.

50 percent of the 116-hectare city will be dedicated to public space, including a two-hectare park and lake at city center, as well as a main waterway that will become the Moscow Region’s longest artificial channel.

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The team of tvsdesign and Shanghai Hecheng (上海合城) Architectural Design Ltd.(Cospace) has won the competition for the design of the Zhumadian International EXPO Center, located in Zhumadian, a city known for its agricultural industry, in the Henan Province of China. The competition sought out convention center designs that could not only serve as a location to hold agricultural conventions and trade fairs but could also connect back to the city’s historic roots in order to expand the area as a rendezvous of agriculture.

Drawing from the fact that Zhumadian is specifically known for supplying China with sesame seeds, the proposal utilizes the imagery of the seed in its shape—with rounded triangular forms—as well as in its overarching concept: “as an epicenter of activity in the agricultural industry, the convention center represents origins, life, growth, and health for the region and the people who visit the building" described the architects.

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Gort Scott, in collaboration with developer Pocket Living, has secured planning permission to build 45 affordable “Pocket” apartments on the site of an unused office building in Walthamstow, England. In an effort to produce highly-sought-after living space in the heart of the city, the design features three- and four-story elements that complete the terrace in the rear of the existing building, filling the gap between neighboring developments.

Inspired by the legacy of the William Morris School that previously occupied the site, as well as by the Warner Houses typical to the city, the exterior of the project will be characterized by a decorative fletton type red brick and precast concrete.

Soaring high above! #SanFrancisco #RealEstate #181Fremont #LEED #tech #office

181 Fremont—which will become the third tallest structure in San Francisco and the most resilient tall building on the West Coast of the U.S.—has been awarded the REDi™ Gold Rating, a new earthquake resilience rating. The building was designed by San Francisco-based Heller Manus Architects.

The 56-story mixed-use tower, built above five basement levels, is being constructed in compliance with a new set of holistic design and planning guidelines—the Resilience-based Earthquake Design Initiative (REDi Rating System)—that allow it to withstand the impact of a 475-year seismic event (roughly a M7.5-M8.0 earthquake on the San Andreas Fault) with minimal disruption.

Developed by Arup with contributions from external collaborators, the REDi™ system outlines design and planning criteria within a resilience-based framework, creating a system that not only considers occupant safety but also takes into account the future of the building after an earthquake.

The winners of the 2016 Restaurant & Bar Design Awards have been announced. Now in its eighth year, the global competition seeks the best of food and beverage spaces, and “covers every imaginable space, from ships to airports, museums to burger vans, and from revered Michelin-starred establishments to the fleeting dynamism of pop-ups.”

This edition of the annual Awards attracted 1,000 entries from the UK and 70 other countries, and was judged by a panel of influential design personalities.

The winners of the 2016 Restaurant & Bar Design Awards are:

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JCJ Architecture and Leong Leong have unveiled their design for the Center for Community and Entrepreneurship, a new mixed-use community building for the non-profit organization, Asian Americans for Equality (AAFE), which will be located in Flushing, Queens, New York. Upon completion, the building will span 90,000 square feet over seven stories at the corner of College Point Boulevard and 39^th Avenue.

Inspired by AAFE’s mission to enrich the lives of Asian Americans and others in need throughout New York City, the design is modeled using a progressive building form following the concept of holding hands in interweaving fingers.

The MIT School of Architecture’s Self-Assembly Lab has teamed up with Google to create Transformable Meeting Spaces, a project that utilizes woven structure research in wood and fiberglass pods that descend from the ceiling, transforming a large space into a smaller one. Designed as a small-scale intervention for reconfiguring open office plans—which “have been shown to decrease productivity due to noise and privacy challenges”—the pods require no electromechanical systems to function, but rather employ a flexible skeleton and counterweight to change shape.

This skeleton is composed of 36 fiberglass rods, which are woven together into a sort of textile or cylindrical braid. Thus, the structure behaves “like a Chinese finger trap: The circumference of the pod shrinks when it’s pulled, and expends when relaxed.”

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From Yaba in Lagos to the suburb of Bandra in Mumbai, Metropolis Magazine provides a scenic tour around the world’s “most creative” neighborhoods. Spread across ten rapidly growing cities like Cape Town and Turin, the article provides a comprehensive glimpse into these lesser discussed hubs of creativity.

Total Engineer Team RSVP has unveiled the renovation design for the Main Building of the Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands, which, once completed, will be the most sustainable university building in the world. On September 27, the design was awarded as BREEAM Outstanding under the BREEAM-NL sustainability label of the Netherlands, with a score of 93.86%.

The university building, which will be called Atlas upon completion, was designed by a multidisciplinary team consisting of Team V (architect), Van Rossum (construction engineer), Valstar Simonis (building installations engineer), and Peutz (building physics engineer and sustainability expert).

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75 buildings have been announced as the winners of the 2016 American Architecture Awards by The Chicago Athenaeum: Museum of Architecture and Design and The European Center for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies. Now in its 22^nd year, the American Architecture Awards recognize “the best new buildings designed and constructed by American architects in the U.S. and abroad and by international architects for buildings designed and built in the United States.”

This comprehensive and even-handed overview of new American Architecture for 2016, allows you (as a viewer) to witness the enormous diversity in the American practice of architecture today, said Christian Narkiewicz-Laine, Museum President, The Chicago Athenaeum. This year’s selection by the Denver jury was more interested in discussions concerning the problems of the environment, social context, technical and constructive solutions, the responsible use of energies, restoration and adaptive- reuse, and the sensitive use of materials and ecology.

The 75 winners of the 2016 American Architecture Awards are:

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U.S.-based firm Sasaki has won the international competition to redesign Suzhou Creek—also known as the Wusong River—in Shanghai, China, which was historically one of the city’s most vital water routes, but which, in recent decades, suffered severe pollution and neglect. After receiving a grant from the Asian Development Bank, the waterway has been cleaned and is now in the process of becoming a new centerpiece for Shanghai.

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Sam Jacob Studio has created a replica of Adolf Loos’ unrealized 1921 mausoleum in Highgate Cemetary, London, which is home to the graves of Karl Marx and Malcolm McLaren, amongst other notable figures.

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