Inspired by the recent trend for super-skinny, super-tall skyscrapers currently dominating the Manhattan luxury residential market, ODA New York has developed a design for 303 East 44th Street which they describe as "a new urban reality" for the city. By taking a prototypical, modestly-sized tower building and stretching it skyward, the firm has inserted sculptural skygardens in the voids opened up between the floors to create a tower that combines the advantages of urban living with the spatial benefits of the suburban home.
Deeply intertwined with Mexican identity, Mayan culture has become a primary frame of reference when it comes to architecture in the country, with many local architects seeking to integrate Pre-Colombian, Mesoamerican ideologies with contemporary design.
With Mayan culture as a starting point, Mexican firm Sordo Madaleno Arquitectos has designed Isla Pasión (Passion Island), a project for a new tourism development on the Caribbean island of Cozumel, located to the southeast of Mexico. The masterplan incorporates suites, stilt homes, a spa area, common areas, and a residential zone. The project originated from an understanding of the context, both architecturally and naturally, resulting in the use of natural materials, like wood and stone, as well as carrying out a reinterpretation of traditional Mayan architecture for the shape of the volumes.
Learn more about this project, which was also a 2015 WAF finalist, after the break.
After an international competition, the contract for the extension and renovation of the Main Library at the University of Graz in Austria has been awarded to Atelier Thomas Pucher. The project, located at the heart of the campus, includes the addition of a 430 student auditorium; 650 reading/work areas; study and examination rooms; and administrative and storage areas. Read more about the winning design proposal after the break.
Courtesy of KHR Arkitekter, WHR Architects, and Arup International Ltd.
After an international competition, the design by KHR Arkitekter, WHR Architects and Arup International Ltd. has been selected for the new Bispebjerg Somatic Hospital in the Bispebjerg region of Copenhagen, Denmark. Being added to an existing hospital campus project that will include a somatic hospital, a psychiatry hospital, laboratory/logistics building and a parking garage, the new hospital will help meet the region’s demands.
BIG's "most mountainous project yet" has completed its first home outside of Hualien City on Taiwan's East Coast. The striated vacation housing project, built to resemble "Taiwan's spine of mountains to the west," is being developed by the Taiwan Land Development Corporation as a dense new neighborhood that "preserves and enhances the beauty of the surrounding nature" and offers "an active and social lifestyle outside the city."
The first model unit to complete, the 1000-square-meter home provides a first-hand look into life at the Hualien Residences with custom furniture designed by KiBiSi and an efficient layout shaped by the a distinct narrow floor plate covered in vegetation that plays into the development's overarching "folding hill structure."
Interior Rendered View. Image Courtesy of Arkitema Architects
In the midst of the transformation of Gellerup, a suburb of Denmark’s second largest city Aarhus, the decision has been made to move 950 municipal workplaces to the area’s centre and the contract for the new building, named Gellerup Nord, has been awarded to Arkitema Architects. Incorporating municipal work and meeting spaces with public functions like restaurants, cafes and a rooftop lounge, the building will produce an entrepreneurial “start-up environment” to revitalize Gellerup.
Following the selection of Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners' proposal for the TaiwanTaouyuan International Airport as the winning design, UNStudio has released their own proposal, which received 2nd place. Called the “most innovative design concept” and the design that the jury “wanted to experience the most” by Michael Sparks (jury member and Dean and Professor at Syracuse University), the proposal, with a design team headed by Ben Van Berkel, re-imagines the scale of the airport typology. Read more about their shortlisted entry after the break.
The Australian city of Subiaco has recently proposed closing its primary football stadium, the Subiaco Oval, which follows the shutdown of two major public markets. In response, and in order to avoid the closure of another cultural center, MJA Studio has reimagined the former Subiaco Oval site as a mixed use complex centered on a man-made wave pool. Read more about MJA's proposal after the break.
Exterior Rendered View. Image Courtesy of mcdowellespinosa
The Chicago Architecture Foundation (CAF) has announced the three winners of its ChiDesign ideas competition to design the Chicago Centre for Architecture, Design and Education (CADE). The competition was in conjunction with the first ever Chicago Architecture Biennial, following the spirit of Robert McCormick’s international competition for the Chicago Tribune Tower in 1922 which opened discourse on the importance of design to the public. Similar to McCormick’s competition, but tackling a more modern, mixed-use typology, the Chicago CADE is envisioned as a facility to house the Chicago Architecture Foundation; the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat; a design and allied arts high school; and learning spaces for an extra-curricular youth program. Read about one of the winners, "Layered Intelligence" after the break, and see another winner, "Unveiled" here.
The landscape architects of Gustafson Porter has shared with us their newest project in the center of Singapore's business district: Marina One. The massive mixed-use scheme is said to be "one of the first" to "integrate soft landscape into the fabric of the building," carving a public "Green Heart" in between the development's four towers - two residential and two commercial high-rises designed by Ingenhoven Architects and A61.
"The ‘Green Heart’ at the center of the Marina South towers evokes a rice paddy field, terraced into steep hillsides and made arable for the cultivation of rice, an essential crop of the East Asia," says Gustafson Porter. "Visitors and inhabitants ascend skywards from the Green Heart into Strata Terraces, a Cloud Garden, Green Screens and Rooftop Gardens that allude to the changing environments and habitats that one might experience whilst climbing a mountain."
HENN has broken ground on the Innovation Center at pharmaceutical company Merck's corporate headquarters and factory in Darmstadt, Germany.
The new Center follows the site’s pre-established master plan, also designed by HENN, placing the new building complex between two existing company buildings and at the end of what is to become a spacious public square.
Atelier King Kong has unveiled the design of the new Vitry-Centre metro station in Vitry-sur-Seine, part of the Grand Paris public transport network. The station, located in the southeast portion of the red line of the Grand Paris Express, is a town center station that provides access to the Town Hall and sports and cultural facilities, “links to existing above-ground transport networks (buses) and services to come (tramway), and connects with the RD5, one of the main north-south highways of the southeastern Paris region." Learn more about the design after the break.
Garden Spiral Tower on the Harbor. Image Courtesy of O'Neill McVoy Architects
In Mark Foster Gage’s essay “Rot Munching Architects,” published in Perspecta 47: Money, the Assistant Dean of the Yale School of Architecture strove to find meaning in the current design landscape. Taking the essay title from a larger stream of expletives spun across the facade of the Canadian pavilion as part of artist Steven Shearer’s installation at the 54th Venice Art Biennale in 2011, Gage found truth in the vulgarities, arguing that - in a very literal sense - “architectural experimentation has left the building” as the discipline has been made impotent under the hostage of late capitalist ambition.
Last summer, when Brooklyn Bridge Parkunveiled 14 proposals as finalists for two residential towers at the park's controversial pier 6 site, you could be fooled into thinking that design is alive and well. A caveat of the park’s General Project Plan (GPP) was to set aside land for retail, residential and a hotel development, in order to secure funding and achieve financial autonomy. The plans had already fueled a decade of legal battles and fierce opposition from the local community, with arguments ranging from the environment, to park aesthetics, to money-making schemes, but last year a bright outcome appeared a possibility, when the park unveiled the competing plans including those by Asymptote Architecture, BIG, Davis Brody Bond, Future Expansion + SBN Architects, WASA Studio, and of particular interest, O’Neill McVoy Architects + NV/design architecture (NVda).
Maqueta. Image Cortesía de Pezo von Ellrichshausen
Pezo von Ellrichshausen has unveiled the designs for Chile's new LAMP museum. To be located in the city of Concepción, the museum will host a collection of 2,000 paintings, 500 sculptures and 1,800 books of Chilean artist Eduardo Meissner and painter Rosemarie Prim. The museum will take shape at the foot of the Caracol hill in the city’s Ecuador park, with construction expected to start in 2016.
While the architects describe the project as “a generic spatial structure for a specific condition,” Meissner wrote in an open letter that “the collection will occupy a diaphanous and convincing new building, full of flowers, birds, maidens and spheres, replete with life and air. A building that I imagine floating, with you inside, facing the Biobío river.”
Exterior Rendered View. Image Courtesy of Studio Kuadra
Studio Kuadra’s design for a new church complex in Cinisi, Italy has been selected by the Monreale diocese as one of the winners in the New Redemptoris Mater Church competition, held by the CEI’s National Service for the Building of Worship. The design, incorporating strong liturgical elements – including custom religious artwork – focuses on a relationship between exterior and interior. Read more about this proposal after the break.
Building on these precedents, Hawthorne predicted that after years of baroque parametricism, in 2015 architects would use last year’s meditations on history as a practical foundation for new projects and proposals. An example of this can be found in the work of Michael Ryan Charters and Ranjit John Korah, a duo who recently shared the top-five prize for the CAF led ChiDesign Competition (part of the Chicago Architecture Biennial) for their project Unveiled. In a brief that called for “a new center for architecture, design and education,” and with lauded jurors including Stanley Tigerman, David Adjaye, Ned Cramer, Monica Ponce de Leon, and Billie Tsien, Charters and Korah proposed what could casually be summarized as a terracotta framework over a multi-story crystalline form of wooden vaults, but is actually something much more complex.
Aerial Rendered View. Image Courtesy of gmp Architekten
Slated for completion in 2017, construction on the Suzhou Industrial Park (SIP) Sports Centre has begun. The complex, designed by gmp Architekten, will combine sports, leisure and cultural facilities along with generous retail and hotel areas all embedded in a generous public landscape. Read more about this addition to China’s Suzhou Industrial Park after the break.
Maka-Sojka Architects have won a competition to design a new facility for Polish public broadcasting corporation TVP in Warsaw. Driven by their desire to communicate transparency in journalism, and centralize the many programs involved in television, the project consolidates many different factors, much like journalism itself. Read more about the TVP Information Agency building after the break.
Elevation Rendering. Image Courtesy of Parsa Khalili
Parsa Khalili and ATELIERPAP have received an honorable mention for their proposal in a competition to design the Busan Hub of Creative Economy - part of the first phase of a revitalization project to spread industry, culture and jobs in the South Korean city’s North Port. Reacting to the changing demands of the creative economy, Khalili and Pap have proposed a structure comprising a plinth conjoined with a tower, wrapped in a grand staircase.
Oscar Properties has unveiled a collaborative project with BIG that will bring 140 new apartments to Stockholm's Gärdesfältet area. The project, 79 & Park will be comprised of a mountainous stack of prefabricated wood-clad units that are designed to "harmonize" with the neighboring Royal National City Park. Lush terraces, connecting to units that range from one to six bedrooms, aim to soften the "boundary" between park and building.
Interior Rendered View. Image Courtesy of Andrea Maffei Architects
Andrea Maffei Architects has unveiled their entry for the Redemptoris Mater Church competition to design a new church complex in Cinisi, Italy. Influenced heavily by religious iconography, their design makes use of liturgical concepts to organize its spaces. Read more about the entry after the break.
Aerial Rendered View. Image Courtesy of Vo Trong Nghia Architects
Known for their work in adding greenery to the cities of Vietnam, Vo Trong Nghia Architects have unveiled their latest set of condominiums for Ho Chi Minh City – three towers covered in bamboo. Located 3.5km from the centre of Ho Chi Minh City, their project “Diamond Lotus” has enough units for 720 families, with a total floor space of 67,240 square meters across its three buildings. Read more about this project after the break.
“I’ve always been fascinated by the High Line and its possibilities for the city. Decades ago, I used to visit the galleries in the area and consider how to build along the route. It's very exciting to be building there now,” said Zaha Hadid. “The design engages with the city while concepts of fluid spatial flow create a dynamic new living environment.”
