Ground will be broken today for Maggie’s Centre Gartnavel, a facility in Glasgow providing emotional and practical support for people living with cancer, their families and friends. Designed by OMA, the building, which is located on the grounds of Gartnavel hospital and close to the Beatson West of Scotland Cancer Centre, is one of several Maggie’s Centres in the UK and part of a pioneering project using thoughtful architecture and innovative spaces as tools for solace and healing.

OMA’s single-level, 534m2 building is a ring of interlocking, carefully composed spaces that provide moments of comfort and relief. With a flat roof and floor levels that respond to the natural topography, the rooms vary in height, with the more intimate areas programmed for personal uses such as counseling, and more open and spacious zones providing areas to gather and creating a sense of community. Read the rest of this entry »

Michael Graves & Associates, architects of more than 350 major buildings around the world, have just finished work on The Louwman Collection, the National Automobile Museum of the Netherlands. The project was designed by MGA Principal and Studio Head Gary Lapera, AIA.

Speaking of the firm’s interest in museum design, Founding Principal Michael Graves remarks, “For an architect, museums are certainly among the most gratifying commissions one can receive—they give you a chance to contribute to cultural history and to the public’s shared experience of that history. We’ve been fortunate to have designed a variety of museums over the years.” Says Gary Lapera, “In designing this particular museum, we were greatly influenced by the character of the historical and physical context, and endeavored to give this institution a presence with a unique sense of place.”

The 185,000-square-foot building contains temporary and permanent exhibition galleries, a reception hall, conference facilities, an auditorium, food service facilities, and workshops for conservation and repair of cars. A gift to the people of the Netherlands, the Louwman Collection is a public showcase of selections from collector Evert Louwman’s extraordinary vintage automobile collection. In addition, the National Automobile Museum of the Netherlands is home to the world’s largest collection of automotive art. Read the rest of this entry »

Zaha Hadid Architects designed a new museum of contemporary art for the Kingdom of Bahrain. The new complex will house exhibition spaces for permanent and temporary collections, multi-event auditorium, education facilities, studios for artists at residence, and retail areas. The project is estimated to be completed by 2012 and was funded by the Cultural and National Heritage Sector of Bahrain.

The enigmatic volume emerges from a narrow coastal land stripe at the Gulf of Bahrain. Describing a gentle curve while gradually rising from the ground a volume is formed that bends slightly and reaches over the water towards Manama. The building appears mystically floating above a coastal landscape. Public fields flow around the sculptural mass of the museum, underlining its presence with curvy-linear lines echoing the contours of the volume. The overall dynamism and fluidity of the elongated form support the emphasis on movement through and around the museum. Read the rest of this entry »

A project for a centre for contemporary arts in Rome is now officially the best new building in the world. MAXXI, National Museum of XXI Century Arts, Italy, designed by Zaha Hadid Architects, UK, has won global architecture’s most coveted accolade of ‘World Building of the Year’ at the prestigious World Architecture Festival Awards (WAF) 2010.

The presentation of the WAF Awards took place during a special ceremony, which marked the conclusion of the biggest global celebration of architecture – the World Architecture Festival, held at the Centre Convencions International Barcelona (CCIB) this week.

The winning design was selected from a shortlist of 15 projects from around the world by the WAF ‘Super Jury’. The ‘Super Jury’ consisted of Arata Isozaki, Barry Bergdoll, who is the Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Enrique Norten, founder of TEN Arquitectos, and Hanif Kara of engineer Adams Kara Taylor.

Speaking at WAF 2010 Paul Finch, WAF Programme Director, said: “The clarity required for architects to present their work in ten minutes often underlines the clarity of thought itself. There were a number of buildings that the judges admired, but the winning building had a certain inevitability to win the overall award. This is a building which is a volume, which takes its place in a very happy way, inside the volume of a city – an unwound Guggenheim, with ribbons of connectivity. It is a building which will still be talked about in the history of architecture in 50 years time.” Read the rest of this entry »

The Tour de la Porte Chapelle is a new mixed-use development in Paris, France designed by award-winning architectural firm Abalos Sentkiewicz to be completed in 2012. The project was commissioned by the City of Paris as a new urban hub for the area; the innovative building is composed of three main towers that peel off from a multi-purpose plinth with civic, retail, and recreational areas. The towers are divided according to program including housing, offices, and hotel – a very interesting aspect of the proposal is the weaving of programs at the lower floors creating interstitial hybrid spaces. Read the rest of this entry »

The display category at the World Architecture Festival this year was not only about displaying objects, but even more about telling stories. Many of the display nominees were more like exquisite small museums. In the category we also found two of the pavilions from the Shanghai-Expo, where architecture itself is supposed to tell the story of a country. The category winner the Spanish pavilion by Miralles Tagliabue EMBT, is as much a piece of art as it is architecture.

The idea of taking wicker, even though not solely a Spanish material, shows what architecture can do when Expos like this send architects off doing the unthinkable. It stands out as a building, and a story, that the visitors to the event will remember. The container of the exhibition becomes an ephemeral poetic and strongly memorable image of the creativity of Spain. The connection of the Chinese visitors to the craft of wicker making encourages a level of sympathy with Spanish craftspeople of past times. Read the rest of this entry »

The project for the World War Museum in Gdansk designed by Chicago-based architect Sean Lally is organized around two straightforward principles. The first is to create a central exhibition core, a “jewel box” that contains the permanent and temporary exhibition space, continuously accessible from all sides along a “loop lobby” that encircles it: the second is the location of the public programs associated with the museum’s urban context–conference, restaurant, hotel, library, and education facilites as well as an urban park–on the upper level rooftop, initiating a “new city floor” with views to the surrounding city, accessible year-round. Making these outdoor public spaces attractive to visitors regardless of season requires the design of a “climatic wash’ that can produce artificial micro-climates and extend seasonal activities throughout the year.

This wash is made possible by harnessing the energy dumps that inevitably occur in a building of this scale (36,000 m²), which requires 900 m² of mechanical space and 11,000 m² of parking garage, both of which vent large amounts of heat and moisture, as well as the combined body heat of several thousand visitors a day. This climatically elastic and unique ‘new city floor’ is the resource for the museum and the city of Gdansk as a whole. Read the rest of this entry »

Award-winning firm Studio SHIFT unveiled their proposal for mixed-use housing in the periphery of Milan, Italy. Mario Cipresso is the founder of the Santa Monica-based studio and commented on the project: “The project is one of twelve proposals located on the periphery of the historic city center offering conceptual solutions for the densification of Milano. Each proposal injects 25,000 inhabitants into the existing fabric of Milano for a total population increase of 300,000.

The radical nature of this undertaking, specifically the insertion of twenty-five thousand new inhabitants at the site, on the periphery of the cultural and economic center of the city, requires an equally radical response. The population increase will most certainly impose enormous demands on existing infrastructure and the social and economic well-being of the population will face new strains.

In order to address this situation, our proposal employs a comprehensive strategy that simultaneously establishes a self-sustaining community and one that seeks to integrate programmatically and physically with the existing city. Read the rest of this entry »

Creative director Byung Ju Lee of Planning Korea announced a new paradigm in bridge called ‘Paik Nam June Media Bridge’ in Seoul, Korea. Connecting Dangi-li Power Plant (which has a plan to be redeveloped into public cultural space) in the north and The National Assembly Building in the south, this bridge shows the first example of ‘a city expanded to the river’.

As a futuristic and aesthetic sculptor over the Han River, Paik Nam June Media Bridge shows how to use spaces over the bridge efficiently and eco-friendly. Inspired by the water strider, the overall shape is organic with sleek, streamlined outline. With the total length of 1080m, this mega structure bridge is covered with solar panel to generate energy by itself. Read the rest of this entry »

Massimiliano and Doriana Fuksas won the “International Schematic Design Competition of Shenzhen Guosen Securities Tower” After the Shenzhen Bao’an International Airport Terminal 3 won by Studio Fuksas in March 2008, on October 18th 2010 Massimiliano and Doriana Fuksas won the “International Schematic Design Competition of Shenzhen Guosen Securities Tower”.

The project by Studio Fuksas is born from the intention to create a new concept of vertical public space for the tower. A three-dimensional void will be arranged along the facades giving a dynamic image to the building and creating different public scenarios for the offices. The design of the void shape explores the relation between the podium and the vertical section of the tower with diagonals spaces and fluxes that create a vertical tension in the full height of the tower. Read the rest of this entry »