Located in Phuket, Thailand, Paul Studio Architects‘ Bluepoint Sales Pavilion provides a space for potential clients to enjoy the surrounding views. The elegant wooden structure gracefully compliments the landscape by “responding to the powerful contextual site conditions.”
More about the residence after the break.
TWS & Partners named their latest work Studio 2 in 1, as it accommodates the function of a home and a studio within one place. The studio is located in the urban setting of Jakarta, amidst the semi-detached housing units that are typical of the area. With a small site measuring 10 meter by 20 meter, the project aims to “elaborate the tropical, shaded, natural illuminated, and cross ventilation, breathing space regardless all the limitation of space.”
More images and further project description after the break.
With the countless number of ridiculously tall skyscrapers planned for around the world, it is remarkable the controversy an 82-story skyscraper for Midtown Manhattan can create. Three years ago, MoMa completed an $858 million expansion, yet the museum is still in need of additional room to house its growing collections. The Modern sold their Midtown lot to Hines, an international real estate developer, for$125 million. Hines, in turn, asked Pritzker Prize Laureate French architect Jean Nouvel to design two possible solutions for the site. “A decade ago anyone who was about to invest hundreds of millions on a building would inevitably have chosen the more conservative of the two. But times have changed. Architecture is a form of marketing now, and Hines made the bolder choice,” reported Nicolai Ouroussoff for The New York Times.
“Bolder” is certainly fitting to describe Nouvel’s Torre de Verre which is planned for 53 West 53rd Street. The 1,250 foot tower will offer approximately 40,000 sq feet of new gallery space for the MoMa, in addition to 150 residential apartments and 100 hotels rooms. The tower’s unique silhouette will dominate the Midtown block, rising higher than the iconic Chrysler Building. Its irregular structural pattern has been called “out of scale” on numerous occasions by opponents of the project. Some complain that the tower will “violate the area’s integrity” noting that its height will obscure views and light. Shadow studies show that the building may plunge apartments in the area and the ice-skating rink at Central Park into darkness.
The aesthetic is definitely foreign to Midtown and, yet, while most are quick to reject change, the tower will sit in an area surrounded by highly revolutionary buildings. Its new neighbors include Philip Johnson’s “Lipstick Building” at Third Avenue; Hugh Stubbins’ Citicorp Building at Lexington Avenue, Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building and SOM’s Lever House at Park Avenue. At some point in time, each of those buildings exemplified a change in style, and yet now, they are staples in the area’s heritage.
With controversy still surrounding Nouvel’s design as it moves through the city’s review process (ULURP), John Beckmann and his firm, Axis Mundi decided to do something about it. A few short days ago, Axis Mundi unveiled a conceptual alternative design for 53 West 53rd Street. The alternative features a 600 foot, 50 story mixed use building that ”rethinks the tall buildings that have become synonymous with New York City’s identity.” Beckmann explained, ”Historically, the skyscraper was a unitary, homogeneous form that reflected the generic, flexible office space it contained…The Vertical Neighborhood is more organic and more flexible–an assemblage of disparate architectural languages. It reflects an emerging reality for tall buildings as collections of domestic elements: dwellings, neighborhoods, streets.”
More images and more about Axis Mundi’s alternative after the break.
Meir Lobaton + Kristjan Donaldson recently shared their design for a 36 story residential tower in Mexico City, Mexico. The project addressed the balance between the desire of living in a single-family residence with the cost of the land.
More images and more about the project after the break.
Architects: Carbajo Barrios Arquitectos / Manuel Carbajo Capeans & Celso Barrios Ceide Location: Santiago de Compostela, Spain Construction Manager: Enrique Martinez Render: Carlos Pascual Ayestarán – Artquimedia Interior Design: Fatima Amo Lighting: Tokonoma Aditional Support: Santiago Interiores Building Type: Mixed Use_Residential / Commercial / Office Design year: 2007/2008 Construction year: 2008/2011 Size: 20,000 sqm Project website: Grupo Arial
Paris / NY based architects PLANDA designed this house based on the cover of Cross, the album by the french band Justice, by inserting a residential program on the iconic shape of the Cross. The Cross is placed on a cliff at Santa Catalina island, California.
More after the break.
UPDATE: We wrongly credited the whole project to AS+GG, but they were only comissioned to design the three main towers, on a master plan designed by SOM Chicago.
It seems no one told Dubai about the financial crisis, as new projects keep being unveiled. This time, our green friends over Inhabitat tipped us on a mega development, owned by Maraas Holding: The Jumeirah Gardens. The master plan for this project was designed by SOM Chicago, and consists of a mixed-use development that incorporates low, medium, and high-density zones for business, residences, retail, leisure, and recreation – a city within a city, with an estimated cost of US$95 billion.
The three main towers were comissioned to Chicago based architects AS+GG (Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill), The most impressive one -and the third tallest tower in the UAE- is 1 Dubai, pictured above. The tri-partite skyscraper will be 3218 ft (981m) tall, and the towers will be connected by a series of glass suspension sky-bridges. This bridges are so big, they even grow palms on them as you can see on the further renderings. At the base of the buildings, grand arched entrances allow boats to travel underneath the building and into a central atrium space. The mixed-use development includes a hotel, residential, commercial retail and entertainment space totaling 800,000-900,000 square meters.
Remember the renderings from the mid-rise residential project by OMA in New York we posted a few days ago?
Well, OMA sent us more renderings that show more on the structural facade and the amazing cantilever of this building. more images after the break.
