KSP Engel und Zimmermann Architekten has shared their winning proposal for the new Art Museum for Nanjing, China. The museum lies near the cultural axis which is comprised of Changjiang Road to the south and the “revolution road”, Zhongshan East Road, to the north. These roads are slightly angled toward one another creating a “trapeze-shaped plot of land”. This distinct site inspired the team to respond to its critical surroundings. Components in the museum such as the Revolution Cube and the Culture Cube, are strategically placed to honor the project’s location.
More images and more about the museum after the break.
Many great projects are a result of important competitions around the world. So to start this week’s Round Up, we bring you previously featured awarded competitions from Croatia, Denmark, France, Spain, and Norway.
After 6 months and 4 rounds of jurying, Architecture for Humanity, a charitable organization that seeks architectural solutions to humanitarian crisis and brings professional design services to needy communities, just recognized eight team finalists for the 2009 Open Architect Challenge: Classrooms. The competition attracted 10,000 architects, teachers and students who came together to develop designs for more than 500 schools in 65 countries. “This initiative invited the architecture, design and engineering community to collaborate directly with students and teachers to rethink the classroom of the future. Designers entering the competition were given a simple mandate: collaborate with real students in real schools in their community to develop real solutions,” explained Cameron Sinclair, the co-founder for Architecture for Humanity and this competition.
The finalists include: Adaptable Hillside Classroom by Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios & Architecture for Humanity UK, Bamboowood School by Petr Kostner, Martina Sobotkova, Sona Huberova, Classroom for the Saltpan Community by Cohesion Foundation: Rajesh Kapoor, Prashant Solanky, Bharat Karamchandani, Kiran Vaghela, Teton Valley Community School by Section Eight Design, A Sustainable Community Classroom by Gifford, House In The Wood by Built Form, LLC / Northwestern University Settlement House, Justified Architecture in a Landscape of Transformation by Arquitectura Justa: Wolfgang Timmer, Fabiola Uribe, T. Luke Young, and Blurred Classroom by Gensler.
We would like to congratulate not only the eight finalists, but all participants who dedicated their time, effort and design skills for such an importance cause.
Project descriptions and images of the eight finalists after the break.
Our friends from 3LHD shared their awarded competition proposal for a private medical center for Firule in Split, Croatia. The Polyclinic is situated close to the sea and its fresh air, near an existing hospital complex.
The winners of the idea competition for the International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam (IABR) 2009 in collaboration with Ikatan Arsitek Indonesia (Indonesian Institute of Architects Jakarta Chapter) have just been announced. The IABR introduced this competition to ‘explore to what extent architects, with their knowledge, skills, and imaginative powers, can contribute to solving urgent problems in contemporary society. It therefore challenges the design disciplines, using the specific expertise of architecture, to conduct “research by design” and to develop concrete proposals, based on the Biennale’s theme’. The theme of this year’s competition Gotong Royong City (translated to be “mutual assistance”) is took create an “urban condition that enables diverse cultures and lifestyles to coexist….in the context of the extended metropolitan region of Jakarta.”
First prize was awarded to Jakarta Bersih!, second place was awarded to Let’s Catch the Water! Jakarta Sponge City, third place for Field Estate: A Platform for Symbiotic Urbanism, and special mentions to Ojek City: Permeable Mobility, Stitching the Strip, and Eco Gate as Border Device.
Winning project descriptions and images after the break.
In addition to the Benetton competition providing participants with the possibility to redefine the influence of retail in an urban landscape, the competition also provided participants with the choice to design “Building A” or “Building B”. While we shared some of the winning proposals for Building A (Grzegorz Witold Woronowicz and Giuseppe Iodice), we now share Maarten Scheurwater and Oliver van den Hoven‘s proposal for Building B, which placed second in the competition.
Architectural Design Competition d3 is pleased to announce the winners of the Natural Systems competition for 2009. The program promotes investigation of natural systems from microscopic to universal toward determining new architectonic strategies.
The competition invited architects, designers, engineers, and students to collectively explore the potential for analyzing, documenting, and deploying nature-based, sustainable influences in urbanism, architecture, interiors, and designed objects.
The competition awarded seven prizes, with first place captured by London-based Kenny Kinugasa-Tsui and Lorene Faure for their project: “Urban Agriculture: Hybridized Farm Bridge as City Garden”. Some of the awards, after the break.
HOK‘s Los Angeles office, with Parsons Brinckerhoff, was just announced the winner for the ARTIC (Anaheim Regional Transportation Intermodal Center) in Anaheim, California. This new transit center, featuring a high-speed rail network, will update Anaheim’s public transportation system and ignite further development in the city. “We’re getting the critical infrastructure in place where you can actually envision a day in the future where you can reliably get around without a car,” added Todd Osborne, vice-president at HOK.
More about the ARTIC transit center after the break.
The winning concepts for the Bering Strait Project International Ideas Competitionwere recently announced in both the professional and student categories. The objective of the competition was to construct a bridge or tunnel to span between Russia and the United States. The project would create a world highway linking Asia, Africa and Europe with North America and South America.
The competition seeks to not only achieve an architectural connection but also a connection among all races in an attempt to form a future society to prepare the world for unity rather than disjunction. The project, due to its massive scale, would require mutual efforts on both sides to complete, thus all must cooperate and communicate to reach success. ”Eventually, it aims to remove the barrier of human race, culture, religion, and nations by letting this obstructed way flow and to being peace to the world…the Bering Strait project can be rephrased as an elimination of all the barriers like spatial disconnection of national borders and chronological disconnection of today and tomorrow, and thus, stepping forward to peace and prosperity for all earth and mankind,” explained the jury.
A great video clip of the project and the full list of jury winners after the break.
The municipality of Helsingborg, in Sweden, chose Schonherr and Adept Architects as winners of the planning competition with their proposal entitled the Tolerant City. Their contextual project will add value to its urban environment by creating a new identity and exploring the future possibilities for Helsingborg.
Canadian architects Saucier + Perrotte shared with us their finalist proposal for the Planetarium de Monteral competition, a black mantle connecting the different programatic pieces.
Architect’s description, credits and more images after the break:
https://www.archdaily.com/23179/planetarium-de-montreal-saucier-perrotteAmber P
The prize winners of the re-Growth House competition were recently announced. The competition, organised on behalf of the people of Victoria that lost their homes in the Black Saturday bushfires, sought inspirational design ideas that can offer a way, for residents who have lost their homes to the bushfires, to re-build.
The first stage of the competition attracted 36 entries that were assessed anonymously, with seven shortlisted. The panel included Adam Kalkin, Marcus Trimble, Dan Honey, Peter Johns and Stoney and Jacqueline Black a family that lost their home in the fires and are now living in the re-Growth Pod.
Images and architect’s description of the four winning proposals, after the break.
The second cycle of the Holcim Awards competition has reached its pinnacle: the top sustainable construction projects out of thousands of submissions from all continents have been selected. THOLChe four winning entries are a river remediation scheme in Morocco, a greenfield university campus in Vietnam, a rural planning strategy in China, and a shelter for day laborers in the USA. A series of prize-handovers will be held at the site of each project to celebrate the winners and their highly-acclaimed examples of sustainable construction.
Almost 5,000 sustainable construction projects and visions from 121 countries entered the five regional Holcim Awards competitions in 2008. Winners of the Gold, Silver and Bronze Awards in each region automatically qualified for the Global Holcim Awards competition in 2009. The global jury was headed by Charles Correa (architect, India) and included Peter Head (structural engineer, UK), Enrique Norten (architect, Mexico/USA), Saskia Sassen (sociologist, USA), Hans-Rudolf Schalcher (civil engineer, Switzerland), and Rolf Soiron (economist, Switzerland).
More images and description of the winning projects, after the break.
Schmidt Hammer Lassen Architects was recently announced as the winner to design ‘Urban Mediaspace’, the largest public library in Scandinavia. The 228 million euro project is located in Aarhus, Denmark and is only the latest in the studio’s history of library designs. Other finalist in the competition included Mecanoo, GPP architects and A-team, a collaboration between two danish studios, Aart and Arkitema.
Schmidt Hammer Lassen’s deisgn aims to re-examine the traditional concept of library design. Rather than focusing on books, the building is envisioned as a hub for social interaction that includes indoor and outdoor recreation spaces, as well as studying, socialising and relaxing areas. Measuring 30,000 square metres, ‘Urban Mediaspace’ is located in Aarhus’s old cargo docks area. The building is heptagonal in shape and features a glazed-facade.
However, Los Angeles is changing. The city’s Transport Authority has planned in the last years a series of measures aiming to improve quality of life through improving transit and walking and providing alternative to car commuting.
Barcelona based architect Josep Lluís Mateo won the first prize for the public competition for the reconstruction of the historical center of Sibenik, Croatia.
For more information, click here. More images and architect’s description, after the break.
