Update: We've added a video, presented by PLANE-SITE, about the exhibition, featuring quotes from Carla Bechelli.
Carla Bechelli Arquitectos has created an exhibition of its multiple-residence project, Las Piedras Villas & Houses, a 2015 recipient of an International Property Award, which is currently on display at the 2016 Venice Biennale, at Palazzo Bembo.
Located in the suburbs of Buenos Aires in Argentina, the project consists of a series of small-scale buildings around a central lake intended to create a dialogue with the single-family housing in the surrounding neighborhood.
New-York-based studio Architensions has released the design for its shortlisted project, Rising Ryde, for the Ryde Civic Center in Sydney, Australia. In an effort to embrace local communities and contexts, the project is conceived as a hill-shaped building covered in local vegetation and it aims to prioritize people through its complex system of social connections and interactions with nature.
Courtesy of University of Washington: Buddy Burkhalter, Mingjun Yin, Connor Irick, Richard Mohler and Elizabeth Golden
The Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) has announced the winners of the Timber in the City: Urban Habitats Competition, a student competition exploring wood as an innovative building material. Out of more than 850 architectural student entries, three winners have been selected, along with two honorable mentions, with prizes totaling $40,000.
The competition focused on a site in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, and asked for designs for inhabitation, repose, recreation, and local small-scale commercial exchange, all while embracing the possibilities of wood and a variety of wood technologies.
Today, timber is being used in new, innovative ways to help address the economic and environmental challenges of the build environment,” said Cees de Jager, executive director of BSLC. “This competition brought to life the way the design community is recognizing the benefits of wood–from reduced economic and environmental impact to enhanced aesthetic value and structural performance–to design buildings and communities of the future.
The winners of the Timber in the City: Urban Habitats Competition are:
Forensic Architecture, a research agency based at the University of London, in collaboration with Amnesty International, has created a 3D model of Saydnaya, a Syrian torture prison, using architectural and acoustic modeling. The project, which was commissioned in 2016, reconstructs the architecture of the secret detention center from the memory of several survivors, who are now refugees in Turkey.
Since the beginnings of the Syrian crisis in 2011, tens of thousands of Syrians have been taken into a secret network of prisons and detention centers run by the Assad government for a variety of alleged crimes opposing the regime. After passing through a series of interrogations and centers, many prisoners are taken to Saydnaya, a notoriously brutal “final destination,” where torture is used not to obtain information, but rather only to terrorize and often kill detainees.
Located about 25 kilometers north of Damascus, Saydnaya stands in a German-designed building dating from the 1970s. In recent years, no meaningful visits from independent journalists or monitoring groups have been permitted, so no recent photographs or other accounts exist of its interior space, except for the memories of Saydnaya survivors.
nArchitects’Library as Home has won first place in the 2016 International Young Architects Design Competition for the 110,000 square meter Shanghai Library East Hall in China. Hosted by the Shanghai Pudong New Area People’s Government, the competition sought out designs that enhance Shanghai’s distinct cultural influence and promote community life.
Library as Home reflects these goals in its design as “a large house for all, with a rich variety of environments that Shanghai’s citizens could appropriate as their own.”
Foreign leading firm MLA+ and local leading firm the China Academy of Urban Planning and Design, in collaboration with Felixx Landscape Architects & Planners and the Shenzhen Municipal Design & Research Institute, have won first prize in the urban design competition for the regeneration of an area along the G107 highway in the Bao’an district of Shenzhen, China.
Located on both aspects of the G107, the one- to two-kilometer piece of land forms a 53-square-kilometer area for the new plan, which will redevelop a fragmented industrial landscape created by the highway and Shenzhen’s identity as a former “Factory of the World” city.
The AA School of Architecture’sDRL Masters Program has developed a thesis project, entitled Growing Systems, which explores adaptable building systems using methods of robotic fabrication and generative special printing within the context of housing.
Centered on a new method of structural 3D vertical extrusion, the project combines the precision of prefabricated elements with the adaptability of on-site fabrication, in response to the flux and dynamism of cities. The method becomes a system of elasticity that can accommodate site parameters, as well as future adjustments.
Courtesy of Selyong Kim, Yongwon Kwon, Seongyen Hwang, and Wonyang Architecture
The collaboration of Seiyong Kim, Yongwon Kwon, Sungyeon Hwang and Wonyang Architecture has won second place in the International Ideas Competition for Establishing Busan Station as The Cub of Creative Economy in Busan, Korea. The competition sought out proposals to revitalize the original downtown area, Busan Station is the starting point for a larger Busan North Port redevelopment project.
As a final project at Shenkar College under academic advisor Arch. Yaron Golani, Rotem Guy Workshop has completed Urban Club for Soldiers, a project in Tel Aviv, Israel.
Based on the duality of order and movement, the project centers on a large multi-purpose building with its programs spread throughout “like a measuring stick.”
The design is generally modeled after historic “Tel Pach” temporary housing, specifically “Nissen huts,” which were cabins built with steel and rounded tin pegs. The project utilizes simple materials, like steel and tin, as well as mineral plaster and wet masonry.
A collaboration between Friis & Moltke and WE architects has won the competition to design Roskilde Campus, a new university complex in Roskilde, Denmark. The Campus will be a new 10,000 square meter educational area for 1,500 students in the fields of marketing, IT, and food engineering, made up of renovation and 4,000 square feet of new space.
Three main concepts, community, respect, and durability, have driven the overall design process.
MOR Architects has won first prize in the competition to design the Konaki Averof Cultural Center in Thessaly, Greece. The competition sought out proposals to convert an existing complex with historic importance into a modern socio-cultural multiplex.
In an effort to reinterpret the relationship between the building and its urban environment, the winning proposal reintroduces the horizontality of the landscape, before human intervention.
The design not only provides maintenance and restoration of the existing external shells of the complex but additionally creates a “new, free-standing longitudinal roof with extensive cantilevers on both sides.”
Sponsored by Queens Borough President Melinda Katz, the competition called for creative ideas to reimagine Philip Johnson’s New York State Pavilion, a “forgotten star” of the 1964-65 World’s Fair.
Firms Lyons and m3architecture have been selected to design the Sustainable Futures Building at the St Lucia campus of the University of Queensland.
The new building will house the School of Chemical Engineering, and is intended to amplify the University’s profile as a hub of chemical engineering leadership in Australia, the Asia-Pacific region, and a global stage.
Radar Architecture&Art has won second place in the ACTIVATE North Carolina 2016 Housing Competition, which sought out innovative ways to reinvent urban housing for the 21st century.
Through its design, Radar proposes a “new way of inhabiting” and “a new sense of community” via a hybrid structure of public, semi-public and private space.
Ennead Architects has recently celebrated the completion of the steel core of a new 295,000-square-foot Biological Sciences Building (BSB) and Museum of Natural History with a topping out ceremony at the University of Michigan. Due to open in 2018, the BSB will bring together the departments of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, the Research Museums of Paleontology and Zoology, and a re-envisioned Museum of Natural History.
London-based design firm Caventou has designed a series of “stained glass” everyday objects that turn daylight into electricity, even indoors.
Integrated with solar cells, Current Table and Current Window are both independent, intelligent power sources that function normally as household items.
Competition platform matterbetter has announced the winners of its Syria: Post-War Housing Competition for architectural students and professionals. The competition, initiated earlier this year, called for solutions to the housing scarcity crisis in Syria, “which will affect the country as more and more cities of the war-torn country will be freed and refugees will start to come back.”
With refugee camps around Europe and other countries in generally poor conditions, and Syrian towns in ruins, one solution to the housing crisis becomes the creation of living conditions that are attractive for once-displaced Syrians to return. The competition asked for a new housing concept that would be able to permanently accommodate people in need of a new home and new life in Syria.
Out of 245 submissions, matterbetter selected three winners, each of which was awarded a cash prize, there were also nine honorable mentions.
The winners of the Syria: Post-War Housing Competition are:
Czech-Republic-based firm Zavoral Architekt (ZA) has unveiled its proposal for Palach Museum, a museum and memorial to Jan Palach in Vsetaty, Czech Republic.
