Residential

As the demand of a sustainable lifestyle increases, cities are trying to find strategies to create environmentally friendly communities. From passive designs to recycled materials, architects are turning their attention to climate change and trying to find solutions through architecture and design.

The Zero Emission Neighborhood is an eco-village concept proposed by Architecture for Humans in the city of Pristina, Kosovo. The concept ensures optimum sustainability for the entire community through “zero emission” buildings, passive design strategies, active solar systems, and energy efficient appliances.

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A beautifully delicate design by ingenhoven architects, in cooperation with architectus, has bested series of internationally acclaimed architects to design Sydney’s tallest residential tower at 505-523 George Street. The 79-storey skyscraper will reach 270m, and include several uses, ranging from high-quality living and retail to hotel and leisure. The designers hope the tower will be “a profoundly visible landmark standing for an economical, environmental and socially sustainable, future-oriented development”.

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Architect Philipp Mohr has led the renovation of an apartment at Le Corbusier’s iconic Unite d’Habitation in Berlin, carried out to the architect’s original design. Over the course of two years, Mohr’s team engaged with archival research, antique shopping, and the surveying of the Unite d’Habitation Marseille in France.

Mohr purchased the apartment in 2016 and embarked on a journey of demolition, measurement, and extensive renovation including lowering ceilings and moving walls in order to recreate the interior likely envisioned by Le Corbusier.

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A team comprising Schauman & Nordgren Architects, MASU Planning, and Schauman Architects have been announced as winners of an invited competition for the design of a new exhibition, shopping, and housing scheme in an old customs area of Tampere, Finland. The “Tulli Halls” scheme is defined by a red brick materiality referencing the industrial heritage of the area, and a central tower forming a “beacon and focal point for Tampere.”

The scheme seeks to balance old and new, as well as public and private, with a form which has a “grounding in Tampere’s heritage as well as aspiring future” and public space to improve living conditions of residents and offer meeting places for the general public.

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Wickside is a £120m “permeable, mixed-use neighborhood” that will provide 475 homes and 300 jobs for the surrounding community. Designed by BUJ Architects and Ash Sakula Architects, the neighborhood has recently received the all-clear from the LLDC planning committee. Almost nine years in the making, the scheme uses “urban blocks set around ordinary London streets” to create a complex, diverse townscape with a variety of uses. The neighborhood is housed within a 28,800 square meter former waste transfer site in Hackney Wick, London. Integrating the context’s existing buildings and cultural heritage, Wickside aims to develop the existing creative community through “retention and regeneration,” and is one of the largest development sites in the area.

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Belatchew Arkitekter has released images of their proposed mixed-use residential tower in the Nacka City district of Stockholm. Named “Discus,” the tower seeks to form a new landmark for Nacka, directly above the district’s metro station.

Comprising approximately 500 apartments and 30 residential floors, the scheme will also include commercial and public facilities to form an active street front.

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As part of our 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale coverage we present the proposal for the Swiss Pavilion. Below, the participants describe their contribution in their own words.

The Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia is delighted to announce the presentation of «Svizzera 240: House Tour» at the Swiss Pavilion at the 16th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia. The exhibition focuses on the unfurnished interior of contemporary housing by celebrating a peculiar form of architectural representation — the «house tour».

Landmarks Illinois has released new images of a proposed radical extension to the James R, Thompson Center in Chicago. The images seek to portray the building’s versatility to be privately redeveloped as a mixed-use hub, featuring an eye-catching “super tower” at the southwest corner of the site, as proposed by the scheme’s original architect Helmut Jahn.

The new images follow on from a previous story we covered last year, detailing a 110-story tower proposed by Jahn in response to local plans to demolish the postmodern building. The latest images underlie a similar goal of demonstrating the potential for the Thompson Center to be protected and expanded, in response to its listing on the Most Endangered Historic Places in Illinois in 2017 and 2018. The Postmodernist piece lies in a precarious situation, with an administrative interest in selling the building and replacing it a high-rise development.

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New details have been released of Renzo Piano Building Workshop’s first residential building in the United States; a landmark luxury condominium scheme on Miami’s North Beach. Designed in collaboration with interior architects Rena Dumas Architecture Intérieure (RDAI) and landscape firm West 8, the 66-unit scheme seeks to embrace both the ocean and adjacent 35-acre park, with a fluid design to “blur the line between imagination and craftsmanship.”

The architectural concept behind the scheme, titled “Eighty Seven Park,” was to create a “coastal sanctuary” floating above the lush landscape of North Shore Park. Though simple in form and motif, Piano’s design prioritizes an intricate attention to detail; “the belief in perfecting every element of its design and construction.”

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Studio Gang has released details of their first project in Los Angeles, a 26-story mixed-use tower designed in collaboration with local development partner Creative Space and European lifestyle brand MOB. The scheme places an emphasis on community spaces, with a curved form creating dynamic public plazas at street level, forming a link between Chinatown, the recently-opened LA State Historic Park, Union Station, and El Pueblo.

Located on 643 North Spring Street, the scheme will provide 300 apartments ranging from studios to three-bedroom units, and a 149-room hotel operated by MOB. Emphasizing the importance of community space and interaction, the residents and hotel guests will share a rooftop amenity deck with landscaped terraces on the second and third floor, as well as a gym, coworking spaces, rentable offices, pop-up stores, a rooftop swimming pool and bar, and space for outdoor cooking.

International design studio Woods Bagot has generated a masterplan for what they are calling, “the next generation of mixed-use developments for Perth.” The 17,469-square-meter island development, named Applecross Central, boasts three sides of storefront in the heart of the Canning Bridge Precinct, overlooking the Swan and Canning Rivers.

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Far from the noteworthy neighborhoods that often have buildings design by renowned architects, São Paulo's houses capture the modest scale that permeates the identity of its citizens. Alberto Simon, an artist based in the city of São Paulo, photographed the remarkable details of these unassuming housing in his project titled "tamanho_M," which roughly translates to Size M.

Find out more about the project in the artist's own words and see the impressive photos below.

For the "Imagine Angers" international design competition, Vincent Callebaut Architectures worked in collaboration with Bouygues Immobilier group to submit a proposal for the French city at the intersection of social and technological innovation, with a focus on ecology and hospitality. Named Arboricole, meaning “tree” and “cultivation,” this live-work-play environment gives back as much to the environment as it does its users. Although WY-TO prevailed in the competition, the Callebaut scheme succeeded in winning the public vote.

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Imagine having input in the design process for your custom apartment built alongside the second largest river in Europe. T2.a Architects has unveiled their design for DANUBIO, a new residential development in Budapest, which aims to do just that.

The driving concept behind the development of DANUBIO is to give the freedom of design back to the residents, inviting them to give input into the configuration of units within the building. Using Grasshopper, a Rhinoceros plug in, a script was developed to allow creative flexibility in the design of each resident’s future home. This algorithm is altered every time a new resident enters the community by allowing them to define the typology, orientation, and location of their future home during the design process.

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International architecture competition, Imagine Angers, asked designers to create an innovative solution for one of six sites in Angers, France. Paris-based architecture firm WY-TO and Crespy & Aumont Architectes interlaced the natural landscape with a contemporary lifestyle for all ages in their winning design, Arborescence.

Herzog & de Meuron has released images of their proposed scheme for the redevelopment of an old brewery site on the banks of the Moscow River. The Badaevskiy Brewery project will see the transformation of a largely abandoned cluster of historic, industrial buildings, a delicate restoration project contrasting with the contemporary addition of a residential “Horizontal Skyscraper.” With this bold addition elevated on tall, slender stilts, a new ground-level public park is created to strengthen ties between the brewery site and adjacent river.

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Construction is moving along quickly on The Eleventh, BIG’s twisting residential towers located near Chelsea Piers on New York City’s High Line park.

A new rendering released of the project shows the design in its final form (developed through a series of iterations), standing out even amongst notable neighbors including Frank Gehry’s IAC Building, Jean Nouvel’s 100 11th Avenue and Foster + Partners’ 551 West 21st Street.

How can we plan a better city? The answer has confounded architects and urban planners since the birth of the industrial city. One attempt at answering came in the form of a spectacular modernist proposal outside of Amsterdam called the Bijlmermeer. And, as a new two-part episode by 99% Invisible reveals, it failed miserably. But, like all histories, the story is not as simple as it first appears.