SPOL Architects’ First Hotel OSL, a hotel near the newly extended Oslo Airport, has received planning approval after a unanimous vote in the Jessheim City Council. Designed to be a destination in itself, the hotel will be an environmentally friendly oval shape, featuring 300 rooms and a large atrium for sports activities.
Acting as a “meeting place for globe trotters,” the hotel aims to become a shared space for shared experiences for travelers.
Kaldor Public Art Projects, in collaboration with artist Jonathan Jones, has created barrangal dyara (skin and bones), the first Kaldor Public Art project to be produced together with an Aboriginal artist in the Royal Botanic Garden of Sydney, Australia. Inspired by the history of the 19th century Garden Palace building, which originally stood in the Royal Botanic Garden from 1879 to 1882 before burning to the ground, the artwork marks the original footprint of the building with a sculptural installation of 15,000 white shields spanning 20,000 square meters.
Where the Garden Palace’s dome once crowned the city, a dynamic meadow of kangaroo grass now disrupts the garden’s formal European design.
Eight Aboriginal language soundscapes, which were developed with communities throughout south-east Australia, are installed throughout the site.
At a vibrant intersection in downtown Jerusalem, The Architecture Department at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, in collaboration with the Israel Festival Jerusalem and EDEN—the Jerusalem development authority—created a temporary structure for the Israel Festival, which ran from the end of May to mid June of this year.
Located in Zion Square parallel to the tramway line, the pavilion creates a space to host art programs including lectures, concerts, dance performances, video screenings, and theater productions. The structure beautifully frames a dialogue between the urban routine and cultural experiences, giving users a new understanding of the Israel Festival, and of the potential of the spaces within their city.
In this TED Talk, co-founder of MASS Design Group, Michael Murphy, presents the question “what more can architecture do?” as the springboard philosophy behind the practice. Following a trajectory of MASS’s projects, Murphy reflects upon their practice’s progress in seeing architecture as an opportunity to invest in the future of communities.
Self-proclaimed “Instagram purist” Olivier Martel Savoie (@une_olive) has created #olive_libraries, a series of Instagram photographs portraying libraries around the world, using only the camera on his iPhone. Over the past two years, Savoie has traveled from his home city of Montréal, to Berlin, Amsterdam, Budapest, Rome, Riga, Paris, Moscow, and several other cities photographing the stunning architecture of libraries. Encountering language barriers and even intense security, Savoie’s dedication to taking the perfect photo has resulted in a stunning collection of images.
Experience the beauty of libraries around the world, after the break.
Denmark-based Studio LOKAL has won the competition for the design of a residential tower in Copenhagen, with The Hanging Gardens, its proposal for a merger of the historic brick buildings of Carlsberg with the concept of a personal garden for each resident.
Located on the site of a former vegetable market, the proposal aims to return to these homegrown roots by encouraging residents to grow their own produce in one of the tower’s gardens. Furthermore, the ground floor of the building will house a farmers market where residents can trade their own produce.
CannonDesign and NEUF architect(e)s have unveiled the design for the Centre Hospitalier de l’Université de Montréal (CHUM), the largest healthcare construction project in North America and one of the largest current healthcare projects in the world, which has been in the works for almost a decade.
Spanning over 3 million square feet, the 22-story complex will merge three aging hospitals into one, creating a space with 772 single-bed patient rooms, 39 operating theaters, and more than 400 clinics and examination rooms.
Excavation is usually a bane for real estate developers. To make way for new buildings, truckloads of excavated waste are removed from site in a noisy, time-consuming and gas-guzzling process. Exploring a more sustainable solution, the California-based company Watershed Materials have developed an onsite pop-up plant which repurposes excavated material right at the job site to create concrete masonry units (CMUs) used in the development. By eliminating truck traffic, reusing waste and reducing imported materials, the result is a win for the environment.
Artist and writer Yayoi Kusama has created an installation for the Glass House that will be on display in celebration of the 110th anniversary of Philip Johnson’s birth, as well as the 10th anniversary of the opening of the Glass House site to the public.
From September 1 through 26, Dots Obsession – Alive, Seeking for Eternal Hope will be on display, with the Glass House itself covered with polka dots. “Visitors who attend the exhibition during this time will be offered the unique experience to simultaneously see the world through the eyes of both Philip Johnson and Yayoi Kusama.”
The team of architects Maryam Fazel and Belinda Ercan, from Iran and Germany, respectively, have won first prize in the competition for the design of the Moscow Circus School launched by the Architectural Competition Concours d’Architecture (AC-CA).
The winning proposal, entitled Elytra, is an “eye-catching, cutting-edge, [and] unconventional” design that will tower over Moscow’s Tverskoy District, an area which features a burgeoning artistic scene.
Inspired by the forewings of insects—called elytra—the project opens upwards as a protective shell, and will feature both public and private space.
Benoy’s UAE studios best known for their work in the MENA region have released the plans for Abu Dhabi’s upcoming Sheikha Fatima Bint Mubarak Park. In a redefinition of the former Khalidya Ladies Park, the renovation—as a portion of the AED94 million renovation—was commissioned by The Department of Municipal Affairs and Transport at Abu Dhabi City Municipality to “fuel discovery and support the core tenets of the Abu Dhabi Vision 2030.”
The open-air project centers on the concepts of sustainability, economic diversification and growth, improved social and community facilities, the promotion of Arab and Emirati culture, and a focus on contemporary living.
Mecanoo has unveiled the designs for the new Ede Wageningen Train Station in the city of Ede in the Netherlands, after winning the competition for the design of the project in 2014. As a gateway to the Veluwe National Park, the transport hub is designed to support future expansion in response to growth in passenger numbers.
Inspired by the local Veluwe landscape—its topography, typologies, and existing buildings and monuments—the Station building is nestled in the slopes of the moraine between the Veluwe Massif and the Gelderse Valley.
The wooden clock tower and roof of the project serve as the station’s hallmark. Consisting of a series of wooden triangles, the roof cascades over the bicycle parking, retail space, and other station facilities, ending as the overhang of the main entrance and connecting all quadrants of the hub in a uniform manner.
As.Architecture-Studio and VHA Architects have unveiled their plans for the urban design and architecture of a new campus at the University of Science and Technology of Hanoi (USTH) in Vietnam. Located 30 kilometers east of Hanoi City, the new campus is designed to be a “New Model University,” and will feature facilities for administration, teaching, research, housing, student activities, services, and infrastructure.
Through its position around and across existing lakes, the project aims to offer researchers and students a living area structured by landscape. “The presence of water, along with the tropical architecture of the buildings and their specific technologies, will embody the unique character of the USTH being a Vietnamese University leading in sustainability and renewable energy.”
Foster + Partners has broken ground on the new headquarters for Ferring Pharmaceuticals A/S in Copenhagen, Denmark. Located on the urban fringe of Copenhagen in Kastrup, the 39,000-square-meter project occupies a waterfront site along the Øresund crossing between Copenhagen and Malmö near the Copenhagen International Airport.
With this location and neighborhood of predominantly low-rise development, the new company offices will feature expansive views towards Malmö and the Swedish coast, where the company was founded.
Form4 Architecture’s project, Innovation Curve Technology Park, has been honored by the Green Good Design Awards presented by The European Centre for Architecture, Art, Design, and Urban Studies, in collaboration with The Chicago Athenaeum’s Museum for Architecture and Design.
The project, which recently broke ground in Palo Alto, California, “celebrates the creative process of invention” through its sweeping metal curves, which represent the highs and lows of exploratory research and development. The tall, two-story curves “rise to represent the crescendo of the creative spark and pragmatic analysis of ideas, and descend to transition into long, horizontal bands symbolizing the implementation phase of invention.”
Instagram photo by Christopher Beckman * Aug 21, 2016 at 9:33pm UTC
Almost four months after going up in flames, the Serbian Orthodox Cathedral of St. Sava has begun the process of rebuilding in the Flatiron district of New York. On the night of May 1, a four-alarm fire blazed through the 1851 building by Richard Upjohn, burning the majority of the church.
In the time since the fire—which was caused accidentally by improperly extinguished candles—church officials have been working with city government agencies and have determined that the addition of metal beams and other small reinforcements will be sufficient to salvage the remaining structure of the church.
William McDonough + Partners and GXN together with 3XN Architects, BCVA and Urland have teamed up to develop a master plan for the Agro Food Park (AFP), a hub for agricultural innovation near Aarhus, Denmark. Aiming to serve as a benchmark for future global food industry development, the project will combine urban density with agricultural test fields in a collaboration of academic and commercial business.
Over the next 30 years, the current AFP—which was opened in 2009 and spans 44,000 square meters with nearly 1,000 employees—will expand by an additional 280,000 square meters.
We are privileged to have been chosen by GXN to collaborate on what will become an entrepreneurial ecosystem for addressing the future of food and plant resources, said William McDonough, founder of William McDonough + Partners and co-author of the text, Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things.
MOB Architects’ project Liaisons has been shortlisted for the 2016 World Architecture Festival in the Future Projects \ Residential category and has won the Residential category for the 2016 AR MIPIM Future Projects Awards.
Designed for the MOLEWA (Mount Lu World of Architecture) competition, Liaisons is a residential project in Ruichang, China near the “Flower Ocean Garden,” one of the world’s largest flower theme parks.
Inspired by the concept of blooming, the project centers on introducing a flourishing essence to the neighborhood by analyzing floral and vegetal properties in pixels and converting them into patterns, which are applied in arrangements and spatial organization principles.
