Pliskin Architecture has been awarded as a finalist in the competition for the Mevaseret Music School, in Mevaseret Zion, Israel. The firm’s proposal centers on the site’s existing topography, as well as the idea of public space through the elevation of the classroom programs to the upper level, and the creation of a continuous open space at street level.
The new public space at the street level leads visitors to a partially covered plaza, which will act as the main access point for the various functions of the conservatory. A café will be located adjacent to the plaza, where visitors can be partially exposed to the school’s activity via the building’s massing.
Woods Bagot has released the plans for Glenelg Jetty, a redeveloped gateway and new tourist destination in South Australia. The 15-meter-wide by 400-meter-long public jetty project was born out of a study to help revitalize Glenelg and the City of Holdfast and is hoped to attract new visitors, including visiting cruise ship passengers.
Deputy Mayor for Housing and Economic Development Alicia Glen and NYCEDC President Maria Torres-Springer have announced New York City’s first official approval of the Lowline project in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. As the first major step in making the project a reality, the approval will help to create the world’s first underground park, a community-oriented public and cultural space that will become both a local resource and an attraction for worldwide visitors.
Although the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) did express interest in the space last fall, the Lowline team was awarded conditional use due its high community potential.
Philippe Barriere Collective (PB+Co) has released the plans for a Bio Climatic Health Care Facility at an eco-resort in Al Ain, United Arab Emirates. The facility includes a Chelation Clinic, Integrated Dental Domes, Healing Clinic, and individual bungalows for private patient residences.
Overall, the alternative medical center intends to combine wildlife discovery, nature conservancy, and outdoor activities as part of the patients’ healing processes.
India-based Studio MADe has won the Suncheon Art Platform competition with its proposal, The Hidden Cloister. The competition, hosted by the City of Suncheon, South Korea, sought to revitalize the Old City area with an art square featuring an art center.
Through The Hidden Cloister, Studio MADe aims to create a “psychological ‘void’ in the midst of a high-density area by creating an open-to-sky quadrangle as a pure subtraction of ground.” Thus, the proposal creates a new link in the heart of the Old City by connecting the riverbank and public space.
Dublin-based McCullough Mulvin Architects has released the plans for their first project outside of Ireland, a large-scale extension and modernization of Thapar University in Patiala, Punjab, India. Located in a fertile area, the project seeks to consider the University as a holistic landscape, "evoking and extending nature to form rocky heights and shaded valleys."
The project consists of the construction of two main building groups: The Learning Center, which is approximately 60,000 square meters; and the Student Accommodation, which is approximately 30,000 square meters. These new facilities will be connected with existing ones by a covered and planted walkway, which allows students and staff to walk through campus in contact with nature, while screened from the weather.
Knitknot Architecture, in collaboration with nonprofit group Seeds of Learning, has designed -- and is raising funds to build -- the El Jicarito School. Located in El Jicarito, a tiny village in Nicaragua, the school will serve 27 children who currently do not have a school to attend.
The low-cost school design aims to bring the community together through collaborative construction methods, the use of local materials, and the creation of a new educational landscape that will enhance creativity.
Several new renderings have been released of Robert A.M. Stern Architects’ TriBeCa condos at 70 Vestry Street, according to New York YIMBY. Located next to the West Side Highway in TriBeCa in New York, the 14-story building will contain 46 condos and over 153,000 square feet of residential space, with each apartment ranging from 1,700 to 7,000 square feet.
Architecture firm GRAFT has won first place in the competition to design the new Rose Square in Tbisili, Georgia.
Located in front of the Radisson Blu Hotel, which GRAFT renovated in 2009, the site will be transformed into a leisure area with various seating options, and a parking lot underneath.
RDH Architects has unveiled the plans for its Old Post Office Idea Exchange, a restoration project in Cambridge, Canada. The post office project will completely restore the existing historic building and transform it into a new space through the use of new glass additions that will increase usable space and improve accessibility.
Carlo Ratti Associati has teamed up with German engineer Schlaich Bergermann Partner and British design studio Atmos to design the world's tallest man-made structure. Nearly twice the height of the Burj Khalifa, the 1609-meter-tall tower was envisioned as a vertical "Central Park" clothed in vegetation and supported by a lightweight matrix of pre-stressed cables.
"Imagine you take New York's Central Park, turn it vertical, roll it and twirl it," said Carlo Ratti.
Four Dutch designers—Chris Collaris, Ruben Esser, Sander Bakker and Patrick van der Gronde—have envisioned a sustainable design of re-use for a discarded oil tanker in the Southern Gulf Region, which they have entitled The Black Gold. They believe that the oil tanker is the "perfect icon" for representing "the geographic, economic and cultural history of the Arabic oil states" – an icon which they predict will become more and more obsolete as the supply of crude oil is moved away from shipping and into pipe infrastructure.
New York Yimby has unveiled BIG's latest New York skyscraper: 76 11th Avenue. Planned for one of the largest plots along the High Line, the nearly 800,000-square-foot proposed project is comprised of two towers perched on a podium of retail, gallery and hotel space in the city's Meatpacking district. Rising 302-feet to the east and 402-feet to the west, the towers are divided by a "diagonal cut" through the site that opens up more views for residents to the High Line.
Among the firm's several hundred realized projects, however, many lesser known proposals were drafted but never constructed. Arguably a fundamental component of the OMA's practice, the unbuilt projects contain some of the firm's most outlandish and important ideas with incredible potential to influence architectural design worldwide. As a tribute to Koolhaas and OMA's continued pursuit of the unconventional, we've rounded up fifteen of OMA's most unusual unbuilt skyscrapers. Read on to find out which ones made the list.
OMA and Buro Ole Scheeren's vertical village in Singapore, The Interlace has been named the World Building of the Year 2015 at culmination of the World Architecture Festival (WAF). Celebrated for being "an example of bold, contemporary architectural thinking," as WAF Director Paul Finch described, the project is eighth building to ever win the illustrious award. It is considered to be a "radical new approach to contemporary living in a tropical environment."
Winners of the year's Future Project, Landscape, Small Project and Color Prize awards were also announced. Read on to see the who won with comments from the jury.
Zaha Hadid Architects has proposed an office tower in Beijing that is said to have the "world's tallest atrium." As the Architects' Journal reports, the Leeza SOHO project features a 200-meter-high atrium that extends the building's full height, visually splitting the cylindrical structure in two. If built, it will be anchored by an underground promenade that connects to a subway station below and public park to the west.
When thinking of metro stations, the word quiet generally doesn’t come to mind—with all of the train and pedestrian traffic, not only is noise produced in high quantities, but it is also echoed. With this issue in mind, London-based Variant Studio created their proposal for the competition to design the new Novoperedelkino station in Moscow, Russia. Although not selected as the winning design, Variant was one of five shortlisted teams. Learn more about their silent proposal after the break.
