Foster + Partners: The Latest Architecture and News

ADP Ingénierie (ADPI), part of the French airport authority Aéroports de Paris (ADP), has won the competition to design Terminal 1 at Beijing's new Daxing Airport, beating both Foster + Partners, and a team composed of the China Civil Aviation Construction Group Corporation (CACC) and the Beijing Institute of Architectural Design. The design competition for the 700,000 square meter airport was announced in July 2011, with Beijing New Airport Construction Headquarters (BNAH) putting the submissions through "a long and rigorous selection process," according to ADP.

Foster lost out on the competition despite having designed Terminal 3 at Beijing's main airport, which at the time of completion in 2008 was the largest airport terminal in the world. However owing to the rapid rise in use of air transport in China that airport is already running at full capacity, necessitating the creation of another airport at Daxing, 60 kilometres south of Beijing.

Yesterday, a consortium led by Foster + Partners and Fernando Romero of FR-EE were announced as the winners of the competition for the design of Mexico City's new international airport. Designed in conjunction with a masterplan developed by Arup, the airport will initially include three runways, but is designed to expand to up to six runways by 2062, all served by the single terminal building.

One of the world's largest airport terminals at 555,000 square meters, the building is enclosed by a single, continuous lightweight gridshell, the largest of this type of structure ever built with spans reaching up to 170 meters.

By utilizing a single airport terminal, passengers will not need to travel on internal train services or underground tunnels, and the design of the building ensures shorter walking distances and few changes of level, all making for a more relaxing experience for users.

The building is designed to be the world's most sustainable airport, with the single lightweight shell using far less material than a cluster of buildings, and cooling and ventilation strategies that require little to no mechanical assistance for most of the year.

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A duo comprised of British architect and Pritzker Prize winner Norman Foster of Foster + Partners and Mexican architect Fernando Romero of FR-EE has won the competition to expand the Mexico City airport, Reuters has reported.

The new airport not only plans to solve overcrowding at the current terminal, but also to “develop economically and socially one of the most densely populated and marginalized regions” of Mexico.  The project is set to be finished by the end of 2018. 

Learn more about the airport and the winning design team after the break…

The Airports Commission, the independent group charged with planning the future of the London's airport infrastructure, has finally ruled out an ambitious plan for a major airport in the Thames Estuary designed by Foster + Partners and supported by London Mayor Boris Johnson. Chairman of the Airports Commission Sir Howard Davies said the proposal had been ruled out because "the economic disruption would be huge and there are environmental hurdles which it may prove impossible, or very time-consuming to surmount."

Instead, the Airports Commission will select between three options to expand one of London's existing airports at either Heathrow or Gatwick. Read on after the break for the reactions to the decision.

At the moment it may be little more than a colossal, doughnut-shaped hole in the ground, but this video is in fact the first glimpse of Apple's new Norman Foster-designed Campus in Cupertino. The video, shot using a GoPro camera mounted on a drone, shows that construction of the building's huge underground parking garage has begun, with concrete poured in a section of the trench. And, as we've come to expect from Apple, the fact that it's a construction site is no excuse for messiness, meaning that elements of the design are already starting to be legible, such as a wider trench marking the main entrance close to the drone's position. Watch the video above to see the huge campus under construction, and read on after the break for more information about the building's design.

Architects have always questioned what the cities of the future will look like. In the 1960s and 70s, one of the most prominent advocates of this field of "futurology" within architecture was historian and critic Michel Ragon. In an upcoming exhibition entitled City As A Vision, the FRAC Centre pays tribute to Ragon by presenting both historical and prospective urban concepts by architects throughout the last fifty years.

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On the 26th of September, Norman Foster will be at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao as the inaugural recipient of the very first BIA (Bilbao Bizkaia Architecture) Award. Recognizing Foster's contribution towards the development of Bizkaia through architecture and urban regeneration, the prize highlights Foster's iconic original design for the Metro Bilbao stations in the Basque Country.

New images have been released of Foster + Partners’ and Heller Manus Architects’ design for “First and Mission,” a two tower, two million square foot mixed-use development project in downtown San Francisco.

The project consists of a 605-foot condominium tower -- the tallest residential project on the West Coast -- and an 850-foot hotel, residential and office tower. Together the two towers will add more than a million square feet of flexible office and commercial space, as well as 650,000 square feet of residential units to the Transbay Area.

View more images and learn more about the design of the "First and Mission" project after the break...

Foster + Partners has released new images of 425 Park Avenue in New York, the project which turned heads in 2012 when videos of the four competing architects presenting their proposals were released to Youtube. The new images show a slightly altered design for the glazed entrance, where a mezzanine on either side replaces what was originally a double height space in the entire lobby. The new images also give a glimpse into the building's interiors, where curtain glass walls make the most of spectacular views across Manhattan and Central Park. Read on after the break for all the images.

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Four firms have been shortlisted to design Qatar's Lusail Stadium, the centerpiece for the 2022 FIFA World Cup. Foster + Partners, David Chipperfield Architects, Mossessian & Partners and Mangera Yvars Architects are now competing to design the 80,000 seat stadium which will host the international event alongside Zaha Hadid's Al Wakrah stadium and others.

Read on after the break for more on the shortlist

In response to the UK Airports Commission's call for evidence, Foster + Partners has released a detailed feasibility study supporting their plans for a new airport on the Isle of Grain in the Thames Estuary. Their plan proposes a four-runway airport built on a 35 square kilometre platform constructed partially in the mouth of the Thames. The scheme is popularly called "Boris Island" thanks to its most prominent supporter, Mayor of London Boris Johnson.

Norman Foster said "Since the Airports Commission submission a year ago, the need for increased airport capacity has become even more urgent. It is time to get serious about the issue of airport capacity. Britain needs an effective long-term solution, not the usual short-term fix that is Heathrow’s proposed third runway. London today needs to follow in the footsteps of its nineteenth-century forebears and invest boldly in infrastructure. Only long-term thinking will properly serve the demands of our future generations."

Read on for a breakdown of the information contained in the report

Foster + Partners has been named the UK's biggest architecture practice for the third year running in the annual AJ100 run by the Architects' Journal. The list of the top 100 architecture practices in the UK, based on the number of fully qualified architects employed, was announced at an awards ceremony last night in London.

In the past year Foster + Partners has almost doubled its lead at the top of the list, with its 290 architects putting it 87 ahead of second-place rival BDP, showing how the practice dominates the architecture world not just culturally, but also in terms of business size.

See the top 10 UK practices, as well as the results of the accompanying AJ100 Awards, after the break

A court approved ruling has sealed the fate of Foster + Partners’ half-built Harmon Hotel in Las Vegas. Unfinished due to structural defects, the 27-story glass tower was once envisioned to be the staple of the $8.5 billion CityCenter entertainment complex. However, since problems arose in 2008, the stunted hotel and casino has instead served as a glorified billboard.

Though it has yet to be determined who will be blamed for the faulty construction, owner MGM Resorts International has been granted permission to dismantle the blue glass building floor-by-floor at a cost of $11.5 million.