The Toni-Areal is a crucial part of the plan to breathe new life into Zürich West. The building was formerly a milk processing facility, and the new design by architecture firm EM2N features spaces for cultural events, as well as the Zürich University of the Arts and two departments of the Zürich University of Applied Sciences.

The Toni-Areal is one of the largest construction projects ever undertaken in Zürich and will be the largest construction site in Switzerland during its realization phase. The total usable floor space is 108,500 m2, of which the colleges comprise 84,500 m2. The remaining 23,500 m2 are dedicated to housing, cultural events, restaurants, and small retail shops, as well as parking and technology. The construction price—including basic upgrades and tenant upgrades—amounts to about 350 million Swiss francs.

As processes evolve, architects and designers need superior tools to transition their designs from vision to reality. Answering that call is the Vectorworks® 2013 product line from Nemetschek Vectorworks, Inc. This multi-dimensional software suite helps users implement Building Information Modeling (BIM) techniques and workflows and gain an edge in drawing, 3D modeling, integrated rendering, and high-quality presentations.

When Massachusetts Institute of Technology commissioned Steven Holl in 1999 to design a new a dormitory for the school they had one goal in sight: that the spaces around and within the building would stir up interaction among students. While MIT focused on the building’s use and function, Holl aimed to create a memorable building. With MIT’s vision in mind along with Holl’s artistic architectural ideas, the ten-story undergraduate dormitory became a small city in itself with balancing opposing architectural elements, such as solids and voids and opaqueness and transparency.

More on Simmons Hall after the break.

“You do not have to look at it for long before you realize that this is as sensual a building as New York has seen in a very long time,” stated Pulitzer-prize winning architecture critic Paul Goldberger of the American Folk Art Museum. Completed by architects Tod Williams and Billie Tsien in 2001 the museum is 40 feet wide and 100 feet long and is surrounded by the Museum of Modern Art on three sides. It was the first new museum built in New York in over three decades.

More on the American Folk Art Museum after the break.

Completed in 2004, the Greenwich Street Project by Archi-tectonics is a 64,000 square foot multi-unit residential building in New York just a few blocks from where the Hudson River meets the city. With the West Village to its north, SoHo, the heart of style to its West, and TriBeCa, where entrenpreneurship has transformed industry into lofts to its south, the Greenwich Street Project is the meeting point of three of downtown’s major cultural districts. Ironically enough, its design also involved the merging of an old renovated warehouse with a completely new structure, combining both to create appropriate live-work spaces that served its context.

More on Archi-tectonics Greenwich Street Project after the break.

Stretched upon three acres of land in the Hamptons in Long Island, New York, the Long Island Residence by architects Tod Williams and Billie Tsien is a quiet, serene home that blends in with the tranquility of nature that surrounds it. Also known as the Rifkind residence, Williams and Tsien designed the house for clients Robert, a lawyer, and Arleen Rifkind, a pharmacolegy professor, and their children. Due to their busy city lives in Manhatten, the Rifkinds wanted a weekend retreat where they could go with family and friends to relax and embrace the outdoors. Therefore the solution, in the words of Williams and Tsien, was “a house that is marked by quiet serenity, openess to the landscape, and a sense of spaciousness without monumentality.”

More on the Long Island Residence after the break.