Cultural: The Latest Architecture and News

From England, Norway, Netherlands and China. Some great Cultural Centers have been featured in ArchDaily. In case you missed the first part, check it our right here.

Tod Williams and Billie Tsien Architects, a renowned practice with expertise in public/cultural buildings, just unveiled the details for the new Reva and David Logan Center for the Creative and Performing Arts at the University of Chicago.

This new building will offer 170,000sqf for studios, rehearsal space, director’s cut screening rooms, state–of–the art acoustical theaters, lecture rooms and set–building shops, that will be shared by many departments including visual arts, theater, music, as well as cinema and media studies.

The project includes a 11-story tall tower, which will become a new landmark at the south of the campus. At the top of this tower we find the Performance Penthouse, a tall space for performances and rehearsals with an amazing view over the city (see render below).

The rest of the complex is distributed on smaller buildings, with an interesting set of skylights to naturally lit the interiors.

As usual in Tod Williams Billie Tsien works, such as the American Folk Art Museum in New York, the Phoenix Art Museum and the East Asian Library at Berkeley, the simplicity of the materials (stone and glass) give the building a contemporary yet ageless look, a building that will stand over time, not just a fad.

More renderings after the break.

Ginseng Chicken Architecture P.C. has proposed a renewed identity for the St. Paul Church and Vadabus Square in Rakvere, Estonia by attempting to integrate three disparate elements of the site into a cohesive design strategy for a main concert hall. With Arvo Pärt’s musical legacy and contribution to the genre of minimal music in mind, non-organization and non-sequentiality became the main driving force behind the design of the annex and were then translated into an architectural language.

We have received an update on the design of the Baton Rouge Downtown Library by Trahan Architects, which clarifies several aspects of the circulations, the relation with the surroundings and details of the facade.

The facade looks very interesting, and on the diagrams you can see how the exterior envelope varies along the elevation to achieve the folded paper like look. A detail of the section reveals further information about this.

All the diagrams/drawings, courtesy of Trahan Architects, after the break.

Our friend Xavier Vilalta from Barcelona-based xvstudio sent us his new project: the Melaku Center. The Melaku Center will be new center of learning, working and projection for the inhabitants of Mek’ele, capital of the Tigray, a region of the north of Ethiopia.

The Melaku Center will be a reference model of sustainable development in Africa, from the design of the buildings to the program itself. The whole project will be a ecosystem of knowlegde, development and natural resources.

A common parameter in the traditional African architecture is the use of the fractal scale: small parts of the structure tend to be similar to the bigger ones, for example, the circular villages are made of circular houses. More description and images after the break.