schmidt hammer lassen architects has won an international competition to design a new home for the West Shanghai Workers’ Cultural Palace. This project has been a widely popular destination for Shanghai’s Labor Union workers and local community since it opened in 1959. The new proposal will include a theater, cinema, art and exhibition spaces, as well as office, sports facilities, commercial spaces, and a transportation hub -- all settled within the eight hectare site.
Snøhetta is collaborating with Stantec to design a library for Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Envisioned as the campus' "social and academic heart" for students and the surrounding community, the new building will house a "variety of study spaces, resource centers, sophisticated information technology, public spaces and event hall" upon completion in Fall 2018.
Sydney-based firm Stewart Hollenstein has been awarded an Honorable Mention in the international design competition for a new 17,000 square-meter library in Varna, Bulgaria. Their design scheme focuses on Varna's rich history as a city known for its public gardens, and seeks to make the library a cultural center of the city.
MOBO Architects has won the Colombian Society of Architects’ (SCA) public competition to design an institutional building for the department for social integration in the city of Bogotá.
Modernism was a stylistic evolution meant to jettison the baggage that had moored culture to habits and historicism. But it was more than an architectural style: it was a new and universal way of life meant to eradicate variability, to relish in the ease of sameness and reproducibility. It’s easy to be seduced by Modernism when you’re talking about motel rooms, or Starbucks, or your shirt size at a favorite store, all instances where replication is reassuring. But the movement’s biggest advocates, governments and developers, pushed the style to its extreme in large housing blocks - a typology long out of fashion in the United States, but which continues to be de rigueur in countries intent on achieving rapid economic expansion and concentrating its populations in urban regions.
Look at an aerial photograph of the periphery of any Chinese city and you will see the monotony of towers that rise out of the ground like modules on a silicon circuit board. Viewing drabness with cautionary eyes, designer Feifei Feng’s project "Urban Playhouse: A Communal Drama in Seven Acts," proposes a series of interventions, or "acts," on a field of four and six-story slab housing buildings in Jinan, China, adding social spaces ("follies") that are intended to regenerate the spontaneity and theatricality of living in close quarters.
Witherford Watson Mann Architects, in collaboration with writer Ken Worpole, has unveiled their design for an almshouse for the elderly in Bermondsey, London. Located on the site of a vacant, post-war nursing home, the 6,152 square meter space will serve the United St Saviour’s Charity, as an independent living accommodation for around 90 residents.
HENN has won first place in the competition to design Kingdee Tower, the headquarters for software company Kingdee in Shenzhen, China. The 44-story glazed tower will be the central building for the new headquarters, rising from an irregular pentagon plan situated between two existing nine-story blocks.
London based Mossessian Architecture, in collaboration with Paris based exhibition architects Studio Adeline Rispal, has won a competition to design a museum of Islamic faith in the city of Mecca.
The Makkah Museum will be located seven kilometers from the Grand Holy Mosque, which is visited by millions of Muslims each year. The museum "will offer a unique interpretation and reflection of faith to the millions of Muslims who visit Makkah from around the world and who, up until this point, have had no cultural institution of this kind to enhance their visit to the holiest of Muslim cities," write the architects.
“Valdemars Have” by schmidt hammer lassen Architects is an urban residential block located within walking distance of Aarhus, Denmark's main cultural attractions. By using and adding to the greenery of Aarhus, Valdemars Have seeks to be an oasis within the city and serve as a public, urban garden. Overall, there will be 106 apartments ranging from two-bedroom flats to penthouses with private roof terraces.
Flanagan Lawrence has won a competition to design a new Summer Theatre in Kasprowicza Park, Szczecin, Poland. The outdoor performance space will update an original structure, including the arch—made from a membrane of plastic fibres—designed by Zbigniew Abrahamowicz and opened to the public in 1976. Read more about this project after the break.
UPDATE: This article has been updated with the latest project information and new renderings.
Herzog & de Meuron has released new images of their latest project in New York, a 12-story condominium building at 160 Leroy Street with a curved concrete and glass facade. The project is their third major New York building in recent years, following another condo building at 56 Leonard Street and a hotel at 215 Chrystie Street, and once again features a concrete structure which is clearly expressed on the facade.
Featuring 49 luxury apartments, 160 Leroy Street is the latest in a series of developments which will upgrade Manhattan's West side, after former mayor Michael Bloomberg designated the area as the city's new 'Gold Coast'. The $250 million project is slated for completion in Fall 2016.
"It will be apparent when Ian Schrager's 160 Leroy building rises out of the ground that it was inspired by the philosophy of the great Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer—which Pritzker Prize winning architects Herzog & de Meuron used as a starting point in conceiving this original, new iconic structure," says the developer.
Renzo Piano Building Workshop (RPBW) has released plans for a 25-story residential tower in New York. Dubbed the "SoHo Tower," the new skyscraper will be rise on a vacant lot at the western edge of the city's Soho district between Broome and Watts Street. It will be comprised of 115 apartments, a fitness center, swimming pool and automated parking, grounded by street level commercial units.
"The fragmented building massing, detail and materiality reinforce the human scale of this project within the scale of the city," says the architects.
Designed by Post-Office Architectes, 30 Warren St. is a new, luxury 12-storey building, featuring 23 residences and 9,700 square feet of retail space on the ground floor. Located along Church St. between Warren and Chambers St in the Tribeca neighbourhood of New York City, the project is set for completion in the fall of 2017.
BIG has revealed plans for a new Wilson Secondary School in Arlington, Virginia. The five-story school, designed to feel more like a single story building, features a pivoting stack of classroom "bars" fanning across the site. By rotating the bars, BIG expands the school's available open space, creating a series of outdoor terraces that connect directly to each classroom. Beneath the "bars," cavities are occupied by a gymnasium, auditorium and administration space, as well as additional public green areas.
"The new Wilson Secondary School expands and relocates two existing county-wide secondary programs in a new building. Located in a dense urban context along Arlington’s urban Rosslyn-Ballston Corridor, the school is designed across multiple levels in order to maintain open green space for recreation," says BIG.
Collaborating with Man Made Land, Knippers Helbig and Mafeu Architektur Consulting, COBE Berlin has received 1st prize in an international competition to design Berlin’s “Urbane Mitte am Gleisdreieck,” a master plan located at the gateway to Gleisdreieck Park in Berlin, Germany.
Zaha Hadid Architects has released more information on their first Brazilian project - a luxury residential building known as Casa Atlântica. Planned for a site on Rio de Janeiro's Avenida Atlântica at Copacabana Beach, the 11-story building features a spine-like facade with expansive balconies and a roof top pool.
"The natural forms of Rio’s morros and beaches generate an elastic, malleable quality within the city’s urban fabric, while the dynamism of Copacabana - with its energy and rhythm - is one of the city’s most important public spaces," says ZHA.
"Casa Atlântica’s design continues the liberating composition and spatial flow inherent within Brazil’s rich Modernist tradition, engaging with the unique tempo and vitality of Copacabana’s urban beach culture, as well as the fluidity of its renowned Burle Marx promenade."
In May 2015, Shenzhen Art Museum and Shenzhen Library organized an international design competition for their new homes in Longhua District. 134 firms submitted concept proposals for the first stage, eight firms were selected to enter the second phase competition in July, among them OMA, Steven Holl, Mecanoo, OPEN, KSP, and others. Below is OPEN’s competition entry for the second phase.
Büro Ziyu Zhuang and RSAA has unveiled the design for its Zhangjiagang Church project, a community center and church complex in Zhangjiagang, China. Based around the idea of addressing current challenges of religion, the main church is separated from other functions, which are clustered in supporting buildings.
Alajajian Marcoosi Architects has unveiled designs for an Armenian American museum, with the aim of educating the public on the Armenian American story. The project will be located on the corner of Verdugo Road and Mountain Street in Glendale, California, with negotiations currently underway for ground lease agreements.
MVRDV has taken it upon themselves to reimagine the Chinese Hutong. Focusing in on Beijing's prominent and currently vacant Xianyukou Hutong, the practice has set out to define its future and envision "the next hutong" - one that is "monumental, dense, green, mixed and individual" and can be built in phases.
Taller EC (TEC) has released the plans for the Plaza Artesanal Reina Victoria, a cultural project located in the northern, central part of Quito, Ecuador. Situated in front of a traditional artisan’s market, the new proposal consists of a set of autonomous pieces of different sizes connected by an interior plaza.
David Chipperfield Architects is preparing to break ground on a new concert hall in Künzelsau, Germany. Planned for a hillside site south of the city, the quaint "Carmen Würth Forum" will add a new event hall and a chamber music hall to the area by 2017. In the project's second phase, a conference center and museum for the Würth art collection will be added.
"The building is embedded in the landscape, characterized by expansive meadows and fields, which it integrates as an architectural theme," says Chipperfield.
.jpg?1451412913)
ZAAD Studio has teamed up with Challenge Studio to envision a new residential typology for Mashhad, Iran. The 40,000-square-meter tower is designed to incorporate passive green energy strategies and emulate a "small town" feel. It's distinct shape, based on a philosophy of "void design," resulted from the desire to exchange built program for share green space that will enhance interaction between dwellers.
David Chipperfield Architects has revealed plans to transform Berlin's former Bötzow Brewery into a new "public destination." Located near the city's Alexanderplatz, the 24,000-square-meter industrial site was first home to the Bötzow Brewery in 1885, before being severely damaged during World War II.
With the new masterplan, Chipperfield plans to restore the surviving 19th-century structures and added three new buildings - all centered around a public plaza - to provide space for a brewery, art gallery, restaurants, medical innovation center, boutique hotel and more. Construction is expected to complete in 2019.
