This week’s curated selection of Best Unbuilt Architecture highlights educational and cultural projects submitted by the ArchDaily community. Through examples from all around the world, the article explores how these spaces of knowledge and discovery are designed to inspire and inform.
Featuring a monolithic museum in Portugal, a digital heritage centre with a media facade in Korea and a mobility research centre in Turkey, the round-up spans various kinds of educational and cultural spaces, as well as different attitudes towards the built or natural environment. The following projects reveal the ideas that shape spaces of knowledge in different contexts, illustrating diverse approaches toward what constitutes an institution of culture.
Read on to discover 10 educational and cultural projects, along with their descriptions from the architects.
Shelter on the ruins
WORS architects
Shelter on the ruins is a conceptual project of the museum «Nossa Senhora da Luz» Fortress. The borderline location of the ruins at the junction of the rich natural landscape, the immense ocean and the endless sky determine the museum's project, which is conceived as a path that runs through the ruins and connects the earth and the sea, memory and nature. Simple monolithic forms open up new perspectives on the ruins and provide a direct connection with the surrounding natural landscape.
National Digital Heritage Center of Korea
Our proposal is to offer a “Spatial Instrument” to be “played” by the people running the building; institutions -public and private, managers, curators, creatives, technologists, maintenance and operations personnel, and finally, its users. A contemporary and technologically advanced tool that will help develop the centre's content. The building is more than an exhibition space; it is also a place of creation and production of content. The building needs to communicate values that go beyond the use of its square meters of space. It should also be a “media instrument of communication”. We have designed a very special media façade based on Upcycled mobile phones.
Mobility Delta
Mobility Delta, located in Gemlik, Turkey, is adjacent to its international seaport and proposes an intertwined relationship between nature and technology for a new research and visitor centre that opens out to the world. The project emerges from the notion that the future of mobility is ubiquitous, with the emergence of hyper-connected, data-driven mobility networks that spread like the fibrous roots of an olive tree. The project site is envisaged as a new delta of potential for the future of mobility, where nature and technology combine.
The Library of SONGDO International City
DROO Da Costa Mahindroo Architect
On a site slowly building its identity with the introduction of new programs, the project synthesises multiple aspirations; it creates a strong sense of urbanity by defining the perimeter of the site, and in parallel, it creates its internal, curated ecosystem. Its interiority aims to create meaningful interactions between different parts of the library and create a significant urban space with a clearly defined aesthetic and functional quality.
USC Moreton Bay Campus-Stage 2
The project holds a key role in the development, enhancement, and extension of the ‘Knowledge Spine’ as one of the dominant major master planning strategies for the campus. The Stage 2 (and Stage 3) buildings will provide an activating frontage to the ‘Knowledge Spine’, including public spaces, key retail/cafes and interactive frontages. The building's development was considered from Concept Design to expand across the site, increasing footprint while reducing height and scale, providing commercial flexibility and future-proofing.
Daskalopoulos Arts Building
Oikonomakis Siampakoulis architects
With its scattered massing, brick façade and landscape integration, the studio’s proposal looks carefully into the site, program, IB curriculum, donor’s art collection, budget and sustainability. The building’s organisation seeks to enhance social and educational interaction inside and outside this new multifunctional facility and integrate this original typology into the landscape, educational experience and collegiate life.
Heldman Learning Resource Center
As part of a Design-Build proposal, IBI Group envisioned the new Heldman Learning Resource Center as a lantern for students at West Los Angeles College. A lantern provides light, which in this context helps lead the way forward towards a brighter academic, diverse, accessible, and environmental future. IBI Group’s concept strives to create a space that captures a compelling story through its sustainable features, including mass timber to campus integration that metaphorically, visually, and physically breaks down barriers to connection.
The Grove of Architecture
Untitled_01
During the design and conceptualisation process, the Untitled_01 team was keen to ensure that the new institutions in the Grove of Architecture would offer a complex, multi-disciplinary program of events that would provide a holistic view of visual cultural processes in Hungary, Central and Eastern Europe and internationally. The existing buildings on the site built many years ago, host service and support functions that will make visiting the exhibitions in the new museum building more enjoyable and the management of the collection more accessible. The new facility, proposed by the design team to complement these functions, will fit into the existing pavilion arrangement of the area and the district, with the three enclosed cubes connected by an atrium-like visitor entrance and foyer for the public reception.
Korean War Memorial Park
Erez Segalovitz architects and Lotem Hamama architects
In our vision, the Memorial Park's main goal was to cultivate a nuanced historical awareness by focusing on the principles of exposure and time. The park is structured as a movement from the present toward the past, concretising in form the visitor’s subjective experience. At one extreme is the past, marked so radically by the mass graves. The memorial complex, arises from the ground, bespeaks the visitor’s present and the recreation center holds the promise of a different future.
The D. Daskalopoulos Arts Building
Moved by the existing Educational Building (Benaki Hall) inherent qualities, we propose a floating canopy to house inside one ‘topos’ two distinct functions with dynamic boundaries while users enjoy views of the surrounding landscape and bathe in Attican Light. The New Building of Arts D. Daskalopoulos, interweaves the Educational and the Exhibition Center boundaries, which are evolving perpetually over time; winding around each other and with the surroundings into a harmonious symbiosis.
HOW TO SUBMIT AN UNBUILT PROJECT
We highly appreciate the input from our readers and are always happy to see more projects designed by them. If you have an Unbuilt project to submit, click here and follow the guidelines. Our curators will review your submission and get back to you in case it is selected for a feature.
