Designed by KAW Architecten&Adviseurs, Veilige Veste is a safe house for victims of human trafficking and child prostitution. The three-storey building, first constructed as a police station in the 1970s, provides home for 48 girls that have suffered as victims of prostitution or abuse. Veilige Veste is the first major renovation in North Netherlands that implements Passivhaus principles. The building uses very little energy with optimum insulation and draft proofing and minimal installations.

The layout of the building is a perfect square with horizontal and vertical grids of 360 cm, which is also the starting point of the design. The facade is covered with diagonally angled, square elements. Beneath the white squares, wooden panels and large windows regularly alternate along the ground floor elevations. The building stands on a raised plinth, creating a fortress-like appearance. Although providing an intimate and sheltered atmosphere for the residents, the building engages in interaction with its surrounding. Read the rest of this entry »

By treating the extreme conditions of the California Mountains site as the means for formal and conceptual evolution of the project, Ecoscape integrates nature and architecture into a responsive system. The building’s skin is constituted of photovoltaic cells. Its surface geometry maximizes solar exposure by responding to a wide range of environmental parameters. These parameters are integrated to an algorithm that transforms and optimizes the surface geometry. Considering the requirement to design a project that would be self-sustainable, the maximized skin offers an important increase of energy production.

Customized according to the principles of discreet geometrical systems, the structure is a contemporary system led by a technological convergence of properties that generates its own natural paradigm. Its hypothesis seeks a modality that would engender architecture as nature by the use of cladding that generates both internal climatic and external architectural conditions such as skin and landscape. The structure does not only concentrate on the performance of the architectural entity as a matter of climatic conditions, but asks to treat the environment as an inclusive situation in which climate, surface and landscape are integrated to propose the evolution of events. Read the rest of this entry »

Instead of taking the conventional approach of building upwards in a successive manner, Vladimir Plotkin and Roberto Meyer have designed a new tower typology – one that rises by stacking housing blocks on top of each other. The M-City project references the stylobate, stepped platform  on which colonnades of columns are placed in classical Greek architecture. The entire building is pierced with triangular openings of multi-level atria and open-air courtyards, forming a silhouette of a symbolically rendered letter “M”. Read the rest of this entry »

The Earthquake Disaster Prevention Center in Istanbul was designed as a competition proposal  by CRAB Studio led by Sir Peter Cook. It was designed to resist the destructive forces of cunamis.The building’s concrete “blades” are meant to divide the streams of water and reduce the impact of the wave. The building meanders along the site as a chain of events. Its form is both structurally invaluable and lyrical, as it takes the appearance of a chain of flowers. The Center creates a series of highlights and shadows, rises and falls, with expressions of resistance and caress that, with their sense of dynamism, aim to be a focus for an otherwise unattractive piece of suburbia.

The building is a series of five Clusters. Beneath them are a series of shallow pools and dampened earth with indigenous plants. At the more formal edges of the site these rise to being banks of small trees, towards the south the ground is treated as a brittle, fractured shale-like surface with fissures that are themselves a reminder of the seismic inheritance. Most visitors will enter at the North-East corner, either parking below the building or walking directly in from the higher ground to the lobby and coffee shop in the First Cluster. From then on the route through the building is really an experience, but always having a simple interface with each of the Clusters. The Second Cluster contains the Planetarium and hovers over the parking area. The Third Cluster contains the Conference Room. The Fourth Cluster contains the Earthquake Simulation Section and the Fifth Cluster houses the Rainstorm Simulation and the Training Evaluation Section.

Maxthreads’ proposal for developing the Kaohsiung Port station in Taiwan explores the principles of sustainable urban planning by introducing urban agriculture farming to the city of Kaohsiung and existing old town Yen Chan district. The aim of the masterplan proposal is to strengthen a sense of community and environmental responsibility.

The design uses the historical train track pattern as the starting point for the infrastructure. It combines living, working and leisure and balances the civic and natural space of the city. A series of historically integrated parks intertwine with the built space. The focus is on keeping as much of the old town as possible in order to impart a sense of history and Kaohsiung’s transformation from an old industrial city to a city of the modern times. Kaohsiung’s existing plan is based on gridded planning. In this plan the city is divided into various blocks where the roads cut each other in a rectangular fashion. The railway line lying on the edge of the city creates some sort of a boundary which demarcates the city limits from the adjoining Wan Shu Mountain. Read the rest of this entry »

The Georges-Freche School of Hotel Management in Montpellier, France, is intended for hotel, gastronomic and tourism-related disciplines. Situated on an area of 1,6 hectares, the structure consists of  two buildings for the school connected by 5 footbridges crossing the central courtyard with trees. The school includes a 12-room hotel, three public restaurants a gastronomic a brasserie and a pedagogic restaurant a multipurpose room. The whole structure is characterized by the presence of two cavities that provide, on one side, the entrance to students and visitors, on the other side, a secondary entrance for teachers. Read the rest of this entry »

Zaha Hadid Architects’s “Arum” installation at the 2012 Venice Biennale is an homage to Russian Suprematism. It is inspired by Frei Otto’s work which paved the way for material-structural form-finding processes. The pleated metal structure is an affirmative response to David Chipperfield’s premise of the Biennale that stresses the importance of continuity in the history of architectural research. This year’s Biennale theme “Common Ground” aims to show the cumulative power of architectural research and the historical lineage that unifies the discipline. Read the rest of this entry »

The Exocarp Chair is made using algorithmic design and a 3-axis CNC mill on three sheets of birch plywood. The results show incredible amounts of texture and dimension without even having to touch it. The design separates the surface areas by making the parts that the body touches really smooth and the parts that are on the outside, or away from the skin, are textured or irregular.

Description from the artist:

I have been fascinated for the longest time with reptiles skins and fruits with a tough skin.  I find fascinating the duality and poetics that are involved in such complex systems; the way that they perform and look is primarily functional… Some scales may be modified for specialized functions, such as protective spines. This notion of function vs rough beauty is something that I find highly intriguing, so I started to play with the idea of creating objects closer to the human scale that deal with the same system… The design of Exocarp came about by separating the areas where the body would touch the chair and areas where an extrinsic agent might try to approach the chair. Thus, the areas that the user touches the chair became smooth and comfortable whereas the areas approached by an extrinsic agent became texturized using a script that uses a perlin noise algorithm to generate the irregular texture, where the script to generate the irregular texture increases in amplitude proportionate to the surface area. Through the use of birch plywood, a secondary pattern emerged through the variation of grain.  This pattern was not really predicted and it was truly a wonderful surprise that can only be achieved by the use of CNC machines. This type of investigation starts to give more of an understanding of material and craftsmanship, as opposed to simply generating an output from a file; by layering the material and paying close attention to detail, a more personal product can be achieved through digital means, as opposed to a generic and utilitarian form.

Whitevoid’s LivingSculpture 3D module system was designed for Philips’ interactive product family. The giant waves of OLED screens is controlled via iPad. The modular plug and play lighting system that creates infinite variations in layout and arrangement. The surface onto which is mounted is transformed into interactive and ever-changing architectural element. The highly flexible system consists of an online configurator to create and order the individual arrangement, a plug and play modular hardware system and an iPad controlled light animation application. Read the rest of this entry »

The Crystal is built as an extension of the existing Nykredit premises in Copenhagen, Denmark. Designed by Schmidt Hammer Lassen Architects, it is a transparent, crystalline structure that floats above the adjacent plaza. The multi-faceted glass façade is highly reflective and features a system that allows the building to adapt to changing light conditions. The building references much of the surrounding architecture. The passage under the building provides a clear view towards Nykredit’s head office building, called the Glass Cube, and the harbor.

The interior of the building is constrained by the demands of functionality, flexibility and efficiency. The typical floor plan is disposed in a Z-shape around two atria, which ensures that all workstations are well lit and enjoy a view. The disposition of the plan allows the accommodation of open plan, separate offices or meeting rooms. The building is primarily supported by a rhombic construction system placed immediately inside the façade. The system functions both as an architectural element while also allowing the building to dispense with pillars. Read the rest of this entry »