What elements and qualities does space need for a well-balanced physical and spiritual recovery? How to design spaces that are healthy for both our minds and our bodies? What makes an environment livable and sustainable in the long term?
These are the questions we need to address in the era of the rapidly developing real estate market. Why do we tend to inhabit more and more high-density residential towers? Are we necessarily more mentally secure? If not, what are the spatial solutions or cures for the current urbanites’ anxiety? In this article, we will explore ways of unwinding and finding cures in space.
FOUN’TA’SY. Image Courtesy of Public Housing Enterprise J.S.C
Looking at the urban environment, this week’s curated selection of the Best Unbuilt Architecture highlights interventions in public spaces, submitted by the ArchDaily Community. Suitable for this monthly topic, the article underlines worldwide approaches that tackle the challenges of these areas through the introduction of innovative solutions.
Exploring a multitude of methods fitting for different contexts, this feature presents a tactical urban strategy implemented in a neighborhood in Kosovo and micro-mobility measures in Italy. Other projects evoke public approaches in private developments and enhanced historical and cultural connections between parks, buildings, and cities. In addition, this roundup showcases conceptual interventions that tackle social distancing and the challenges of the pandemic, in order to allow people to move freely and safely across space.
Transforming the typical artistic experience, Snøhetta proposed a design to renovate the Blanton Museum of Art at The University of Texas at Austin. The comprehensive grounds remodeling seeks to “unify and revitalize the museum campus, […] through architectural and landscape improvements”. Construction is scheduled to begin in early 2021 and conclude by late 2022.
Being in confinement has produced unconventional means of exploring architectural spaces and installations. Instead of putting everything on hold until life goes back to normal, designers and curators found inspiration from practices like performance arts and theatre, breaking down the walls between the subject and viewers but from a distance.
Ashley Bigham and Erik Herrmann of Outpost Office reimagined the theme of "mobility" by creating 1:1 scale drawings on the Ragdale campus using GPS-controlled field marking robots. Their unique urban installation, which addressed modern-day concerns such as public spaces, how we are engaging with them, and physicality, won first place in the 2020 Ragdale Ring competition.
Buffalo Bayou Park in Houston, by SWA. Courtesy Jonnu Singleton
The urban crisis brings many challenges, but also presents opportunities for landscape architects to help build more equitable green spaces and cities.
As a Los Angeles resident who doesn’t drive, navigating the city on foot and bike has always made me feel like I have the whole place to myself.
But over the last two months, Angelenos have been freckling the streets—it’s like they’ve all discovered for the first time that they’re capable of exploring this city without a car. While most beaches and trails in the city were shuttered (they have since re-opened), I noticed the LA River becoming the city’s new “it spot” for socially distant hangouts. And in a city that lacks adequate public parks, people are turning any patch of grass or sidewalk—whether it’s an elementary school yard, a traffic median, or a bit of concrete next to a parking lot—into a bit of respite from the madness.
Introducing elements of nature - such as water, vegetation, natural light, stones or even the use of wood - into interior design can provide richer and more complex compositions in the built environment. In these landscaping projects, the textures, silhouettes and, especially, the generated sensations, can establish new relationships of well-being and comfort for the user.
In all its multiple meanings the word heritage refers to what we inherit from the past, both in material and immaterial sense.
Some authors speak about heritage as a sense of past, meant as a form of past self-awareness, as a collective experience and as an essential dimension of a culture. Some other authors believe that the idea of heritage deals with the ability to put the contemporary human signs into an historical perspective, so developing a sense of place, that is the place’s value and meaning. Therefore, heritage can be intended as sense of past and sense of place together. The heritage’s
Canada's Capital Region - National Capital Commission
The NCC’s Urban Design Challenge 2020: Student Ideas Competition for Canada’s Capital is now on.
Urban Design Challenge 2020 is a competition that invites students from across the country to come up with design concepts for important sites in Canada’s Capital Region. The competition is organized by the National Capital Commission (NCC), the federal Crown corporation dedicated to ensuring that Canada’s Capital is a dynamic and inspiring source of pride for all Canadians, and building a legacy for generations to come.
The NCC is challenging students to propose innovative planning and design ideas for two important destinations in the Capital Region. • SITE
Salesforce Park, San Francisco, CA. Image Courtesy of PWP Landscape Architecture
This year showcased how landscape architecture is shaping public life in the built environment. In the first two decades of the 21st century, landscape architects created vibrant resiliency plans, rehabilitation projects, and new urban parks. As these twenty years come to a close, 2019 embodied many larger ideas and trends that will continue to influence the next decade of landscape design.
BRIEF: To build a tourist village that helps visitors to learn about the history of human evolution which not only sensitizes, but spreads awareness about the changing relationship between nature, natives and the country of Australia.
In a design proposal for Soprema’s new company headquarters in Strasbourg, France, Vincent Callebaut Architectures envisions an 8,225 square-meter ecological utopia. The building, called Semaphore, is described in the program as a “green flex office for nomad co-workers” and is dedicated to urban agriculture and employee well-being.
An eco-futuristic building, Semaphore is inspired by biomimicry and intended as a poetic landmark, as well as aiming to serve as a showcase for Soprema’s entire range of insulation, waterproofing, and greening products. The design is an ecological prototype of the green city of the future, working to achieve a symbiosis between humans and nature.
Journalist Fred A. Bernstein's new book takes readers into ten extraordinary private homes designed by the Chicago-based architect and educator Dirk Denison, providing a must-read for anybody curious about the myriad elements informing custom residential design at the highest level. Bernstein devotes the centerpiece to a fascinating portrait of the architect as a young man. Here, Denison reflects on his childhood in the ascendant Detroit of mid-century and early encounters with Mies, both Saarinens, both Kahns, Yamasaki, Bunshaft, Libeskind and Gehry, as well as studies at Cranbrook, the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD)and the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT),
Vazio S/A, Coletivo Aurora and Eduardo de Jesus have launched the open competition Outros Territórios – International Call for Urban Intervention.
Outros Territórios (Other Territories) is a suite of ephemeral interventions proposed for a hilly neighborhood in Belo Horizonte, Brazil called Buritis. The plan envisages an instantaneous transformation of the landscape through the simultaneous occupation of the many stilt systems propping up the hillside buildings.
The array of forgotten spaces, ignored for their unsightly strangeness, will be infused with city life through an event that posits an open field of study: the latent possibilities in the existing
CF Møller’s Storkeengen (Stork Meadow) is a landscape solution, bringing the town of Randers closer to the longest river in Denmark, the Gudenå River to prevent the threat of flooding. The storm protection uses the wetland meadows as an attractive nature park to handle the raised stormwater level, whilst a recreational pathway increases accessibility with the nature areas across the river.
Kleinewelt Architekten in partnership with Citizenstudio / Gorozhane Group, created a re-design proposal for the Northern River Boat Station Park, also known as the Park of Five Seas, in Moscow. Built in the 1930’s, the current park is supposed to act as the city’s gateway to the five seas: the White, Baltic, Black, Azov, and Caspian Sea. However, the park is removed from city life and separates Moscow from it’s historic waterways.
(%C2%A9minorormajor).jpg?1612954566 "Oasis-Playground. Image Courtesy of Studio Minorormajor")
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