The Emperor’s castle designed by Thomas Hillier originates from a mythical and ancient tale hidden within a woodblock landscape scene created by Japanese Ukiyo-e printmaker, Ando Hiroshige. This tale charts the story of two star-crossed lovers, the weaving Princess and the Cowherd who have been separated by the Princess’s father, the Emperor.

The story begins with four acts that explore the relationships between these characters. Act I introduces the characters illustrating the moment the Princess and the Cowherd fall in love. As time passes the happy couple begin to neglect their duties. The Emperor being a stern ruler who does not tolerate idleness decided to punish the lovers, separating them by a deep and swift lake unassailable by any man. In the final act the Princess’s flying friends the magpies form a feathery bridge across the lake allowing the Princess and Cowherd to renew their pledge of eternal love.

These characters have been replaced and transformed into architectonic metaphors creating an Urban Theatre within the grounds of the Imperial Palace in central Tokyo. The Princess, a flexible, diaphanous knitted membrane, envelopes the spaces below and is fabricated using the surrounding Igusa rush to knit itself ever larger in aim to reach the grass parkland perimeter representing the Cowherd. Linked within this skin is a series of enormous folded plate lung structures. These origami lungs of the Emperor expand and contract creating the sensation of life. The lungs, deployed around the site act as physical barriers that manipulate the knitted skin as it extends towards the outer parkland, these manipulations are controlled and articulated by the Emperor’s army using a series of complex pulley systems which pull back the lungs and the surrounding skin. Read the rest of this entry »

Award-winning Mexican firm BNKR Arquitectura just completed a stunning chapel that overlooks the famous Acapulco Bay in Mexico.

“Our first religious commission was a wedding chapel conceived to celebrate the first day of a couple’s new life. Our second religious commission had a diametrically opposite purpose: to mourn the passing of loved ones. This premise was the main driving force behind the design, the two had to be complete opposites, they were natural antagonists. While the former praised life, the latter grieved death. Through this game of contrasts all the decisions were made: Glass vs. Concrete, Transparency vs. Solidity, Ethereal vs. Heavy, Classical Proportions vs. Apparent Chaos, Vulnerable vs. Indestructible, Ephemeral vs. Lasting…

The client brief was pretty simple, almost naïve: First, the chapel had to take full advantage of the spectacular views. Second, the sun had to set exactly behind the altar cross (of course, this is only possible twice a year at the equinoxes). And last but not least, a section with the first phase of crypts had to be included outside and around the chapel. Metaphorically speaking, the mausoleum would be in perfect utopian synchrony with a celestial cycle of continuous renovation. Read the rest of this entry »

The Antarctic Observatory is a small project designed by Borja Abellán, a member of Tada Studio. The project was designed to control Antarctic Icebergs. The form of the observatory allows snow to provide thermal insulation and water supply. It is half-buried and the facade is translucent, because there are 6 months of daylight.

All modeling has been done with Grasshopper through parametric production and to be able to calculate its adaptation to different solutions and facilitate the analysis of structural elements -using CAD-CAM methods the construction is planned to be easier than normal. Read the rest of this entry »

The Cultural Campus designed byKadri Kerge, Jelena Vukmirovic, and Melanie Kotz is to be located near Ismailia, 80km north-east of Cairo, is a self sustainable organism, dealing with extreme climate. The campus consists of a School of Performing Arts (Music, Dance), a School of Visual Arts, a Residence Complex to house students and staff, a Performance Center for Music and Dance and a Contemporary Art Exhibition Gallery. The project is seeking for a new way of creating a modern campus by rediscovering typologies of private and public spaces, and connections between them. Read the rest of this entry »

Art has a great role in showing what happens in human beings’ life. Soul, intelligence and the emotions are the reflections of the community, and Art forms the social identities of communities. It also shows us the difference between the various social identities. Global influences effect the types of knowledge acquisitions or the social values in the art, and the artists determine the standards of modern life.

Thus, art centers have many roles beside their fundamental functions that should be participant, shared with society and create a modern level in connection between the citizens and the artists’ works. This concept is the key criteria for the Izmir Opera House Project designed by Emrah Cetinkaya. The project should be reflecting the history, the culture and the modern life in Izmir, furthermore it should be an identity for the city of Izmir.

And competition area also allows us to create an identification or a symbol for a city that because the area can be seen clearly from near surroundings and specially from sea side areas. This situation came to the forefront. So we considered important in it.

Izmir opera house has been designed for being a symbol for izmir. In this way, we thought that izmir will be a center of attraction and also first recognizable preparation place for all domestic and foreign tourists. Read the rest of this entry »

The new Headquarters will be one of Sweden’s most modern and innovative office buildings – focusing on transparency, Scandinavian simplicity and dynamic social environments. Behind the project is the Danish Architect 3XN in collaboration with Humlegården Fastigheter, representing the property owner Länsförsäkringar Liv.

By the end of 2013 no less than 2.500 co-workers will move into the innovative building at Sundbyberg Stad near Stockholm. The Headquarters is designed by the Danish studio 3XN with direct reference to Swedbank’s core values; openness, simplicity, care and durability.

3XNs Principal Kim Herforth Nielsen explains: “The building is conceived and designed from the inside out. We have literally translated Swedbank’s core values into the creation of a modern and groundbreaking head office. Swedbank has conveyed the importance it places on creating an open social environment, which happens to coincide with 3XNs design beliefs and ideology. It has been a very interesting process and we look forward to getting to work on the project.”

With its innovative and transparent expression formed in an unconventional triple-v structure the building will become a landmark among Swedish office buildings. The large volume is broken up to create spaces on a human scale. This makes the building inviting on the inside as well as on the outside. Read the rest of this entry »

This project designed by Arthur Azoulai and Melody Rees is a morphological study that assumes an extended field of movement and circulating forces. It is designed by simulating self-organizing biological systems where selective decision making is used to sculpt innate yet deliberate spatial relationships and formal qualities. At its pure essence, this project is an infrastructural system that acts as a receiver and link-up for formal architectural systems. The inherent continuity of the overall form as a topological surface allows for the emergence of roadways, interstitial interior space, and landscape.

With imbricating structural support systems, the collective tectonics provide a network of circulation paths for pedestrians, cars and trams in addition to an emphasis on temporary pavilion spaces such as transitory food markets, pop-up retail shops and time-share housing. With a temporal and ephemeral program the local culture of Santurce in San Juan becomes active. Correspondingly, the adaptive qualities of the infrastructural surface allow the building and site form an organic semiotic relationship where the building seamvlessly emerges from the land below. This is emphasized as the ecologically evasive character of Puerto Rico’s environment merges into the architecture. Thus this project articulates new formal relationships and interstitial space while also reflecting the contingencies of the current moment in San Juan, Puerto Rico.

via suckerPUNCH

This project by Neri Oxman from the MIT Media Lab explores the notion of material organization as it is informed by structural and environmental performance. A continuous tiling system is differentiated across its entire surface area to accommodate a range of physical conditions of light transmission, heat flux, stored energy modulation and structural support. The surface is thickened locally where it is structurally required to support itself, and modulates its transparency according to the light conditions of its hosting environment. 20 tiles are assembled as a continuum comprised of multiple resin types – rigid and/or flexible. Each tile is designed as a structural composite representing the local performance criteria as manifested in the mixtures of liquid resin. A single 3-D milled semi adjustable mold made of machinable wax is used to generate multiple tiles. Each tile is cast with high temperature curing plastic deforming the original mold with each casting procedure by controlling the temperature gradient across the surface area of the mold. These processes speculate about light and/or heat sensitive environmental-specific construction techniques. Read the rest of this entry »

This speculative proposal by SERVO for a 4,000 sqm bioscience innovation center with a hydrodynamic vegetated roof, located in the Albano region of Stockholm, reconsiders the extensive green roof typology to produce an occupiable roofscape characterized by immersive depth. The green roof is designed to be experienced from several vantage points: from above—walking amidst a dense landscape of indigenous vegetation intertwined with protuberant forms that emit water, air or light; from below—as a suspended ceiling system that pulls down to close proximity with the floor; or from within—in the interior of the auditorium space and specialized laboratory areas designed for the cultivation of vegetation in semi climatically-controlled microclimates. Read the rest of this entry »

Called “The Pearl of West Indies”, Haiti was during a long time the most visited country of the Greater Antilles representing the occidental third of Hispaniola Island. Devastated in 2010 by an earthquake measuring 7.0 on the Richter scale, the country has now to be rebuilt from new innovative architectural and town-planning concepts.

The Coral Reef project designed by Vincent Callebaut Architects plans a matrix to build a three dimensional and energy self-sufficient village from one and only standardised and prefabricated module in order to rehouse the refugees from such humanitarian catastrophes. This basic module is simply made of two passive houses (with metallic structure and tropical wood facades) interlocked in duplex around a transversal horizontal circulation linking every unit.

Inspired from a Coral reef with fluid and organic shapes, the overall project presents itself as a great living structure made of two waves dedicated to accommodate more than one thousand Haitian families. These two inhabited waves undulate along the water on an artificial pier built on seismic piles in the Caribbean Sea. From concave curves to convex curves, the housing modules are aligned and piled up by successive stratums such as a great origami. Between the two inhabited waves is created a sumptuous interior canyon in pixels with terraces and cascades of food gardens.

Actually, the laying-out in staggered rows of the plane-parallel base modules enables to superimpose the passive houses in cantilever and to multiply the vision axes towards an endless number of perspectives. Each roof of each module becomes then an organic suspended garden enabling to each Creole family to cultivate its own food and to use themselves their own wastage as compost. Read the rest of this entry »