This city of Gyeongju in South Korea is going to accommodate a new headquarters for the Korea Hydro Nuclear Power (KHNP) Company, one of the nation’s most advanced energy institutions. Designed by H Architecture, the project is to be built on the site surrounded by rich historical heritage and is required to represent KHNP’s dynamic pursuit to purvey the world’s cleanest and safest methods of producing energy. Alongside the historical context, the new KHNP headquarters must also consider the rural, mountainous landscape of the site, which lies low at the center surrounded by adjacent small mountains. More images and architects’ description after the break.
Archpolis, a non-profit organization for architects, designers, artists and the performing arts, has invited architects and planners to submit their qualifications for the first stage of a design competition in Nikola-Lenivets Park in the Kaluga Region of Russia. Fifteen finalists will be chosen for the second stage of the competition with the objective to provide a conceptual design of a residential complex for artist in residence, along with a master plan and zoning details for the surrounding area.
Born in Guadalajara, Mexico, Luis Barragán was a formally trained engineer and self-trained architect. He is known for his emphasis on color, light, shadow, form and texture. In 1980 he received the profession’s highest honor – the Pritzker Prize. This video gives a brief overview of the prominent Mexican architect and his work.
Above is a video by Vincent Hecht, an architect and filmmaker in France, which highlights the KAIT (Kanagawa Institute of Technology) by Junya Ishigami + Associates. The video is part of a new collection of architecture movies about Japanese architecture. With the relaxing and calming music in the background, you are able to place yourself in the amazing studio and workspace where students get to spend their days designing.
Studio Mode / modeLab is putting on a two-day intensive parametric design workshop July 7-8 which will introduce participants to the fundamental concepts and essential skills necessary for effectively designing with Grasshopper for Rhinoceros. In a fast-paced and hands-on learning environment, participants will explore concepts such as object attributes/parameters, data types, data structures, composing algorithms, as well as the creation and manipulation of computational geometry through parametric modeling interfaces. workshop curriculum will additionally cover techniques for Ccntrolling the flow of data via functions, conditional statements/logical gates, sampling data, and user interface objects. For more information, please visit here.
The proposal by reSET Architecture for the Klaksvík city center unites the two town halves and acts as a place of meeting, relaxation and celebration. Their design creates a place that represents the new born heart of Klaksvík. The architects believe that the city should be attractive to more than just the people of Klaksvík itself, a place that attracts people from the Faroer and abroad. More images and architects’ description after the break.
With a challenge to make a series of random ephemeral public spaces using a simple structure in the Seattle Center, the intervention by Hoshino Architects proposes areas of such spaces to be transformed to voids and purely leave the circulation spaces on the ground level. In contrast, the public contents circles are randomly scattered on the field level. As normal urban spaces, the circulation spaces sometimes change to unexpected functions, such as a viewing gallery for the event staged at the field level. This dual layer structure intertwines and creates the complex ‘Porous-scape’. More images and architects’ description after the break.
Help kick start the suckerPUNCH + land of tomorrow exhibition that will feature twenty student projects from around the United States that explore the possibilities of fabrication and material experimentation at the start of the 21st century. Slated for Fall 2012, this exhibition will have it all – “transmogrifications, strange sensations, primal textures, unfamiliar geometries, self-propagating architectural species, augmented atmospherics, vicissitudinous juxtapositions, reinvented building typologies, sensual pleated skins, a crisis or two, physiologically responsive interfaces, threshold blurring gizmos, and plenty of robots”.
If funding is successful, this exhibition will provide the rare opportunity to display the exploration and research from multiple U.S. architecture schools in one location. The three top projects will have prototypes fabricated by Drura Parrish at PR&vD.
Cuban ballet star Carlos Acosta has selected Norman Foster to redevelop one of Fidel Castro’s unfinished spaces – the School of Ballet on the outskirts of Havana. Acosta studied ballet at the Cuban National Ballet School and has danced with the Royal Ballet since 1998.
The stunning, derelict building was never completed during the Cuban revolution, as the design and architects of the Cuban National Art Schools (las Escuelas Nacionales de Arte, or ENA) were deemed irrelevant in the prevailing political climate. However, in March 1999, the three architects – Ricardo Porro, Vittorio Garatti and Roberto Gottardi – were called to lay out a budget to preserve the languished schools. These preservation efforts include the School of Ballet, whose cluster of domed volumes, designed in 1961 by Italian Vittorio Garatti, are connected by an organic layering of Catalan vaults that follow a winding path.
As reported on bdonline, Norman Foster told the Sunday Times: “Carlos is a great dancer who is inspiring the regeneration of an iconic ruin of early modernism outside Havana.”
As if it weren’t enough that The New York Times just wrote a story on computer programs making architects obsolete, now it seems that computers are actually on the Architect-attack.
Organized by Europan Europe, 2:pm Architectures & CUAC Arquitectura met for a 4-days long international workshop to explore how agriculture and architectural development are in symbiotic relationship. In analyzing the growth of Vienna and Oberlaa, they can easily understand how architecture born on agricultural results in footprints so they offered a system to develop Oberlaa. It’s a system which is able to offer countryside qualities within contemporary city density. More images and architects’ description after the break.
If you read our infographic, then you know that Public-Interest Design is one of the few growing sectors of the architecture industry. From the prevalence of Design-Build curriculums in Architecture Schools to the rise of the 1% program and non-profits like Architecture for Humanity, Public-Interest Design (PID) is hitting its stride.
The latest SEEDoc follows the story of the Grow Dat Youth Farm - a brilliant example of what we call “Urban Agri-puncture” (a strategy that uses design & Urban Agriculture to target a city’s most deprived, unhealthy neighborhoods) that is changing the lives of New Orleans youth.
LAVA, the Laboratory for Visionary Architecture, and Designsport collaborated with local Ethiopian firm JDAW to win the international architecture competition for a national stadium and sports village, held by the Federal Sport Commission, Ethiopia. Now, football and athletics-loving Ethiopians will have a new FIFA and Olympic-standard 60,000 seat stadium in Addis Ababa thanks to a design that combines local identity with new technology. More images and architects’ description after the break.
Presenting an opportunity, remaining largely unbuilt and mostly unburdened by heritage, the proposal for the Badel Block Complex by Luka Anic, Danko Balog, Tamara Baresic, and Srdan Gajic introduces new spatial configurations to the city center, opening the block area to public access and use. The large demanded gross built area quoted in the competition brief (65 000 m2) instils initial reproach. However, its justification can be found, apart from the apparent economical argument, in the term of density. A dense city is a live, vibrant city. Multiplicity of people, events, and spaces makes a city. And high quality density is what Zagreb lacks. More images and architects’ description after the break.
The Episcopal Church of the Redeemer, designed by 5G Studio Collaborative, aimed to address the needs and desires of the growing community through sustainable capital improvements on the existing campus that sought to reflect the past and contemporary contexts. Through dialogue, observation, and reimagination, the potential to reposition the existing underutilized courtyard as the centroid of the Church’s social life became evident. Beginning with the courtyard and progressively outwards to the lot perimeter, the new campus design creates places of varying moods and moments to enrich the Church’s environmental and social connectivity with its neighbors. More images and architects’ description after the break.
Following our previous announcement revealing the 2012 RIBA Award recipients, we now present to you 12 international projects that have also received top honors from RIBA. Buildings outside the European Union by RIBE Chartered Architects and RIBA International Fellows are eligible for this award. These 2012 RIBA International Award winners will now compete for the RIBA Lubetkin Prize – an award named in honor of the Georgia-born architect who worked in Paris before coming to London in the 1930s to establish the influential Tecton Group. In 2009, the RIBA Lubetkin Prize went to the National Stadium Beijing by Herzog & de Meuron with China Architectural Design & Research Group and Arup Sport for National Stadium Company.
And now, the 12 RIBA International Award winners are…
If you have ever used SketchUp, you probably really like what it does, which is basically allowing 3D viewing and modeling of everything from furniture to cities, as the website declares. At the University of Washington’s , researchers in Computer Science and Architecture have decided that SketchUp needs some additional functionality. Why? Because, as they say, while “SketchUp may displace the use of physical models in design, has not eliminated difficulties in the ad-hoc navigation of digital models by non-experts, which often occurs during design reviews.” In fact, as they see it, SketchUp’s mouse navigation requires a great deal of skill. Keyboards and mice are clunky and difficult to use when examining 3D computer models, especially for non-designers, i.e. those who are unfamiliar with using the software frequently.
The 2012 RIBA Award winners have been announced! Since 1966, RIBA has set the standard for architectural excellence across the UK with the RIBAAwards. As bdonline points out, this year RIBA has halved the number of projects who have received awards in an attempt to harden the competition. Shortlisted from 739 entries, the 59 winners chosen from the UK and EU will now be considered for the 2012 RIBA Stirling Prize – the UK’s most prestigious architecture prize whose 2011 winner was the Evelyn Grace Academy by Zaha Hadid Architects.
RIBA president Angela Brady said: “The judges were delighted to see so many well considered, crafted and innovative projects, and the use of beautiful materials; these projects are truly exciting and inspiring.”
In April, Black Spectacles filmed a discussion with Stanley Tigerman and the AIA Chicago Education Knowledge Committee revealing an intimate look at Tigerman’s 60+ years in the profession in his own words. The discussion is guided by a series of questions from the audience that send Tigerman into stories from his experiences, his attitude towards the profession today, technology and ethics.
Read on for key points from the interview after the break.
