The Graft Tower is a Parametric-designed eco-hotel and vertical farm conceived by Diego Taccioli, Sizhe Chen, and Tyler Wallace to be located on the New Monserrate Street at the intersection of the San Juan’s two arterial public transportation routes. It is a net plus resource building that provides water, food, and energy for the neighborhood. The program on the ground levels is an epicenter of commercial activity and services to support the light-rail hub. The tower has a eco-tourism hotel and living units for permanent residents. It is a design using a new language of an interlaced mesh -work of structural columns spiraling into the sky with connecting fingers spreading out to the new plazas below. The structure is literally grown by grafting in-osculate fibers around the basic skeletal frames of the commercial and housing units. Optimizing the frame’s capacity for natural ventilation and cooling, a twisting tower is created, with each unit’s shape stretching toward the west, as determined by wind dynamics. Water is collected at the bottom of each unit and then dispersed throughout the open framework into the vertical farming. The plants grow sporadically throughout the transforming building, as they are able to find water and sunlight. Read the rest of this entry »
The Graft Tower is a Parametric Eco-Hotel and Vertical Farm in Puerto Rico
The Koreatown Performance Media Center / Cehei Design
The Korean Performance Media Center designed by Cehei Design is situated within a mid-sized residential complex. It promotes a blending of programmatic spaces through the application of a responsive surface media. The display of information and signage prevalent in Koreatown provoked the use of solar powered LED panels which could act to create a new transportation resource (electricity) while also serve as an alluring technology in order to promote the inclusion of a Performance based Media Center at this medium sized residential development. The urban surface in this project is expanded by the use of LED panels which respond to the weight of human interaction and also serve as a new medium for the display of artists residing in the Center. The hopes are that this new center will spawn a drive towards solar resource capture while it provides the culture of the neighborhood with fun and interactive technologies. Read the rest of this entry »
The Askim Museum / Moh Architects
Moh architects is a Vienna based group of architects dedicated to developing an innovative approach towards architecture, urbanism and design. Their work encompasses both methodical research as well as the application of innovative design strategies through built work.
The Askim Museum Competition was about designing a museum for a private art collection. The functional program of roughly 2800 sqm had to be embedded in the surrounding urban fabric in an intelligent way, credibly delivering a strong figure/anchor for the region while not overpowering the delicate natural backdrop.
The site given is located on sloped terrain, slightly elevated from the nearby city center. It is connected through a single road which terminates at a derelict quarry. The design proposes this derelict quarry to be an alternative building grounds rather than the original site, as the existing topographical changes and the resulting voids within the hillside lend themselves almost ideally for the museum’s functional spaces. Read the rest of this entry »
Stack Pavilion – “Re-grounding” digital architecture / FreelandBuck Architecture
FreelandBuck is an architectural design practice based in New York and Los Angeles whose work assumes that “fabrication and construction can enhance the spatial and sensual qualities of digitally designed form rather than compromise them”. Affiliated with Yale and Woodbury Universities, the team’s work exploits both formal undulation and graphic variation – of pattern, color and material – to synthetically enrich surface and space.
Stack Pavilion is a non-modular construction system, cut and assembled from flat plywood sheets that produce ornate detail and lush pattern directly from its logic of assembly and structure. Here, it is manifest as a dynamically torqued pavilion for exhibitions and lectures designed for the Lightbox Gallery in Sussex, UK. Read the rest of this entry »
Issy les Moulineaux Promenade-Morphing the pedestrian Eden / Stephane Malka Architecture
Engaging in the discourse on redefining the architectural vocabulary of infrastructure, the project designed by Stephane Malka Architecture reinvents the footbridge typology. Using building potentials of abandoned roads, it reveals the realm of mutating territories and establishes new local identities. The single line unifying local pedestrian flows from the banks of the Seine and the Boulevard Victor RER station serves as an infrastructural transversal to and from Issy les Moulineau, a suburban area of Paris.
By reducing the structure of the E05 periphery ring road and increasing the visibility of Issy, main views from Paris are identified and exposed, obtaining urban clarity and clear marking of entry points to the area. After determining various disadvantages of the site such as zones of congestion as well as visual and physical restrictions, a synthetic equation of different uses is created. The bridge structure, a veritable vegetal muscle, weaves the major points of the site, directing them towards the entry to Issy while filtering pollution. The blade that constitutes the structure benefits both pedestrians and cars by intermingling with their immediate context. By overhanging, covering the ground, and providing shade as well as moments of discovery, the vegetal elements refer to specific aspects of the site and are oriented by strong urban directives. These elements unite the ensemble, creating a cohesive green ribbon. Read the rest of this entry »
Bad Weather studio at Columbia University / SO-IL
We are pleased to share with you a group of projects developed by students at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University in New York City. The Bad Weather studio was taught by Florian Idenburg and Jing Liu, partners at the award-winning innovative architecture firm SO-IL. The main idea behind the studio was to explore architecture’s potential in relationship with natural forces beyond mankind’s power and reason – being the weather one of the last unpredictable and instable systems. The studio used the typology of the skyscraper as the enabler of the contemporary sublime. Read the rest of this entry »