The COVID-19 Pandemic is a disruptive moment for our world, and it’s poised to spur transformative shifts in design, from how we experience our homes and offices to the plans of our cities. The webcast series Design Disruption explores these shifts—and address issues like climate change, inequality, and the housing crisis— through chats with visionaries like architects, designers, planners and thinkers; putting forward creative solutions and reimagining the future of the built environment.
Episode 2 will be streamed online on ArchDaily, YouTube and Facebook today, Monday, July 6, at 12 pm EST, and will focus on the future of the office. Our guests will be Eliot Postma, partner at London-based Heatherwick Studio, and Verda Alexander, co-founder of San Francisco-based Studio O+A.
A now-scrapped redevelopment vision for the Toronto lakefront was heavy on timber construction and concern-prompting tech solutions. (Courtesy Sidewalk Labs)
In May, Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs announced that it would cancel its high-profile Quayside project because of “unprecedented economic uncertainty.” The statement marked the end of a three-year initiative to create a living, urban “testbed for emerging technologies, materials, and processes.”
Reversing the traditional order of city planning, Sidewalk Labs imagined building a new urban district on Toronto’s waterfront from the internet up, with sensors and other data collection infrastructure embedded in the fabric of a large city block. The ambitious development—with an area of 2.65 million square feet, including 1.78 million square feet of residential space—was to be built entirely from mass timber; indeed, the extensive use of modular cross-laminated timber (CLT) and glue-laminated timber (glulam) was a chief selling point of the design (by Heatherwick Studio and Snøhetta, using a kit-of-parts developed by Michael Green Architecture).
As architecture is increasingly reliant on renderings to convey its message and depict the unbuilt, many practices turn to seasoned 3D artists to help them portray their designs in the most favourable light; thus they externalize visualizations to a handful of firms.
Singapore has emerged as a global design center. As a city-state and island country in Southeast Asia, the Lion City is home to a new class of high-rise buildings, gardens and iconic landmarks. While the design world is familiar with structures like the Safdie's Jewel Changi Airport or OMA's Interlace, Singapore has also built a range of new public and civic buildings alongside extensive land reclamation projects.
Design and the City is a podcast by reSITE, raising questions and proposing solutions for the city of the future. In the first episode, Thomas Heatherwick founder of Heatherwick Studios discusses the notion of Designing on a Human Scale, describes his conceptual approach and introduces his latest venture in the heart of historic Prague. Joining the interview is ArchDaily editor, Christele Harrouk.
New renderings were unveiled for Heatherwick’s first residential project in New York, currently under construction. The recently dubbed “Lantern House”, in West Chelsea’s neighborhood, will join a series of developments, expanding the High Line's facades.
Design and the City is a podcast by reSITE about how we can use design to make cities more livable and lovable. Every week, a new episode will be released featuring speakers that explore the future of our cities, like Thomas Heatherwick from Heatherwick Studios, Chris Precht from Studio Precht, Leona Lynen from Haus der Statistik and Yosuke Hayano from MAD Architects among others.
Heatherwick Studio offered a first look at the freestanding glass lobby pavilion at Lantern House, the firm’s first residential building in the United States. The project consists of 2 volumes, an east structure standing at 10-stories and a west structure standing at 22-stories, connected under the High Line.
Heatherwick Studio has released their latest images for the 1,000 Trees Development in Shanghai. Dating back to August 2019, the images showcase the construction progress of the 300,000-square-meter project, with the near completion of one of two mountains, set to open in 2020.
Open More Doors is a section by ArchDaily and the MINI Clubman that takes you behind the scenes of the world’s most innovative offices through exciting video interviews and an exclusive photo gallery featuring each studio’s workspace.
This month, we talked with London-based design firm Heatherwick Studio to talk about their multidisciplinary firm, offices, and how their "collaborative" design approach is translated from their own space to their employees and projects.
The new Quayside smart city development by Sidewalk Labs will be scaled back after a vote last week in Toronto. As the subsidiary of Google's parent company Alphabet, Sidewalk Labs aimed to "unlock the potential" of the city’s Eastern Waterfront. The government agency responsible for development of the area, Waterfront Toronto, voted unanimously to limit the team’s original 190-acre plan to 12 acres.
South Africa’s architecture is defined by a multicultural history. Located at the southernmost tip of the continent, the county has built upon past traditions and building techniques in a range of modern architecture and cultural projects. These structures showcase new design approaches in South Africa and experiment with diverse formal and spatial strategies.
The London based Heatherwick Studio, have unveiled plans to design their first venture in the Czech Republic, in historic Prague. The project consists of regenerating an important site and create a mix of retail, office and public spaces.
East Entrance. Image Courtesy of DBOX for Mori Building Co.
Heatherwick Studio’s first built venture in Japan is a huge planted pergola, put in place to create a new hub for the district of Toranomon-Azabudai in Tokyo, Japan. The project is due for completion in March 2023.
More than 80,000 votes were cast over the last two weeks and, after careful review, the results of the 2019 ArchDaily Building of the Year Awards presented by Unreal are in. Building of the Year, which itself celebrated ten years this year, is the largest peer-based crowdsourced architecture award in the world, showcasing the projects chosen by you, our readers, as the most significant of the year.
This is no mean feat. More than 4000 projects were in contention this year, challenging readers to carefully consider a wide variety of projects across type, scale, and location. 4000 projects were whittled to 75 finalists; 75 have now been reduced to the 15 winners - one for each typological category.
The results are as diverse as the architecture itself. Well-known names are, as in years past, present among the bunch, among them Zaha Hadid Architects, MVRDV, and Heatherwick Studio. For London-based Heatherwick, their win marks the second consecutive year they have taken top honors for a refurbishment-based project. But less-renowned names dominate the ranks of the winners this year. Innocad’s serenely simple office building for a real estate company elevates what corporate architecture can be while the technical and material mastery of Sameep Padora’s Maya Somaiya Library is enough to make any architect look twice. The library is, in fact, one of two Indian projects to take top honors this year - a strong first year showing for the nation whose design talent seems finally to be coming to the fore.
But for all their many beautiful differences, the winners share a crucial element in common: they represent the values of our mission, to bring inspiration, knowledge, and tools to architects everywhere. Building of the Year - indeed, ArchDaily itself - would not be possible without the generosity of firms and readers as invested in our mission as we are. We give our profound thanks to all who participated this year, no matter the form. Congratulations to all the winners!
Sidewalk Labs has released new renderings from Snøhetta and Heatherwick Studio of the Quayside neighborhood development in Toronto. After announcing plans to create a model smart city, Sidewalk Labs has been working to pioneer a new approach to future urban developments. Plans for Quayside were first revealed last summer, designed to be interconnected smart neighborhood for the city. The latest renderings were released with further documents outlining how the company plans to pay for the ground-up development.
This edition of a+u introduces the 23 recent works of architecture and technology that emerged from their relationship with the urban structure or the development history. In this issue, we focus our attention on the process of conceiving and realizing the projects driven by various motivations and tactics. We invite readers to look beyond the confinement of a single building and examine the works on their possibilities to be in use for a long time.
Olympia London. Image Courtesy of Heatherwick Studio
Heatherwick Studio has received planning approval to transform Olympia London, a 150-year old exhibition and event space in West Kensington. Working with SPPARC, the project will transform the 14-acre site into restaurants, hotels, performance venues and office space, as well as create 2.5 acres of new public space. The proposal aims to turn Olympia London into a world-class cultural hub in West London.
TomasPrinc-400.jpg?1580894143 "Thomas Heatherwick from Heatherwick Studios. Image © Tomas Princ")
TomasPrinc-221.jpg?1580898318 "© Tomas Princ")
_3161.jpg?1572863335)
_3161.jpg?1572863335 "© Laurian Ghinitoiu")
_3150.jpg?1572863322 "© Laurian Ghinitoiu")
_3021.jpg?1572863389 "© Laurian Ghinitoiu")
_3066.jpg?1572863162 "© Laurian Ghinitoiu")
