Roland Hagenberg commissioned 10 Japanese architects to design a cube as atmospheric box for Raiding, the birthplace of Franz Liszt. On a predefined surface area of 50cm x 50cm x 50cm each, Jun AOKI, Terunobu FUJIMORI, Sou FUJIMOTO, Hiroshi HARA, Toyo ITO, KDa Astrid Klein/Mark Dytham, Kengo KUMA, SANAA Kazuyo SEJIMA/Ryue NISHIZAWA, Takaharu and Yui TEZUKA, and Yasuhiro YAMASHITA experiment with associations on building in a rural setting.

The exhibition at the Architekturzentrum Wien presents the 10 completed cubes, specifically for the Raiding Projects as well as documentary film shots on video by Roland Hagenberg.

SHoP Architects unveiled their design for the new Barclays Center in New York City. The center achieves a balance between iconic form and per formative engagement with the street. The main public concourse is predominately glazed at the sidewalk level while the civic gesture of the arena is heightened by a spectacular 30 feet high canopy. Views and physical access both into and out of the arena will be plentiful to ensure a strong connection to the surrounding urban environment.

Heatherwick Studio was commissioned to design a café building to replace a seafront kiosk in Littlehampton on England’s south coast. With the post-war rise in cheap package holidays having deprived the English seaside town of investment and downgraded many of them to cheap clichés, the studio’s client saw an opportunity to change this. Mother and daughter team Jane Wood and Sophie Murray, both residents of Littlehampton, were keen to do something different that might begin to re-establish the importance of the English seaside town.

The studio saw the challenge as responding to the constraints of the narrow site by producing a long, thin building without flat, two-dimensional façades. The envelope is sliced diagonally into strips which wrap up and over the building, creating a layered protective shell, open to the seafront. The elevation looking onto the sea is fully glazed, protected at night by roller shutters concealed within the building’s geometry, the 30 centimetre width of the ribbons being the dimension of a shutter mechanism. Read the rest of this entry »

Italian architectural studio Kuadra has announced the opening of one of their most recent projects, The Memorial for Jewish Deportation in Borgo San Dalmazzo in Italy.  The Memorial commemorates the life of 355 Jewish who had escaped from their countries and found refuge in the Alpine valleys until captured in 1943. The prisoners were later sent to Auschwitz and Mathausen – only 20 survived.

The Memorial consists of a concrete slab raised from the ground where the name of the 20 survivors is written in three-dimensional steel letters. On the ground, 335 plaques commemorate the prisoners that did not returned from the concentration camps. Read the rest of this entry »

Foster and Partners in collaboration with d’Unienville and Associates Architects have designed a discreet and environmentally friendly masterplan for a series of residences in Corniche Bay, Mauritius. The main concept was to create a contemporary architecture that blends harmoniously with the lush landscape. Fingers of tropical vegetation are inserted into the buildings that respond to the contours of the landscape and recedes into the green totality. Read the rest of this entry »

A central priority in Zaha Hadid Architect’s urban design concept for a new Beethoven Festival Hall is linking the city of Bonn to the Rhine River promenade and leveraging that idea’s potential to enrich public life on the river’s edge.

Learning from the missed opportunities during the planning of the existing building in the 1950’s, Zaha Hadid Architect’ proposal not only incorporates a high degree of porosity in its site plan, but intensifies the connection by introducing a transparent “Rhine Foyer” into the building mass; a dramatic atrium that stretches from the City to the Rhine. With two main façades, the building presents itself in an open and inviting manner to the River and the City, allowing for deep visual links through its crystalline mass. The light Rhine Foyer will make audiences and performers feel comfortable and relaxed but simultaneously excited by the anticipation of a unique experience. Read the rest of this entry »

Joining creative forces once again, KiBiSi, PUMA and Biomega extending the PUMA Bike portfolio to include a fashionable cargo bike, accommodating true urban lifestyle. Mopion lets you cruise the streets in style, while transporting your daily groceries or bigger loads. The smooth steering provides you with easy maneuvering around the city just like a commuter. Mopion is a unique lightweight and highly practical cargo bike with a fashionable twist that will make heads spin.

PUMA Mopion is rock steady for the daily grind. It mixes city bike features, and cargo bike features, making it a sturdy companion. It comes with a super-size innovative front carrier for heavy duty transport of your groceries or other needs. Developed for city dwellers, Mopion features a light aluminum frame, making it a one-of-a-kind lightweight cargo bike weighing only 22 kilos. The geometry holds the body in a slightly inclined, but still heads-up position for navigational ease and exceptional balancing.

The name Mopion derives from an island in the Atlantic Ocean, symbolizing the new Trans-Atlantic approach and balancing PUMA’s European heritage with American popular culture. Mopion will be available in white, black and in the bold color combination magenta/blue/lime. The colors are likewise inspired by vibrant island colors. Mopion defies the expected. Read the rest of this entry »

FC Barcelona’s Camp Nou Stadium, one of the world’s greatest football venues, is to be extensively remodelled by Foster and Partners. The stadium, already the largest in Europe, will be enlarged to accommodate over 106,000 fans, together with extensive new facilities including hospitality and public areas. A new roof will also be created to shelter the fans. The stadium will be enclosed by a brightly coloured mosaic outer skin that wraps around the building and continues over a new roof. The multi-coloured enclosure comprises overlapping translucent tiles in the club colours. The myriad of tiles can be seen as symbolising the loyalty and devotion of FC Barcelona’s fans worldwide.

The remodelled stadium retains the essential elements of the original Camp Nou, designed by architects Francesc Mitjans-Miró, García Barbon and Soteras Mauri, which was inaugurated in 1957. On match nights, the stadium will glow, providing a new architectural icon for the city. In the same way that FC Barcelona is ‘more than a club’, the new Camp Nou will be much more than a stadium.

Zaha Hadid’s design for the Edifici Campus confirms the role of the 22@ area at the very forefront of Barcelona’s changing water edge. The tower’s striking design creates a new presence in a territory of transition.The spiralling tower stitches the border of the municipalities of Barcelona and Besòs, creating a new infrastructure that is a joint-venture of the two cities and two clients: El Consorci, Zona Franca de Barcelona y b –TEC, Consorci del Campus Interuniversitari del Besòs.

The design articulates the transition between the forum and the campus, between the new equipments and parks water-front area, in Barcelona, and the requalification of the delta of the river Besòs area, in Sant Adriá del Besòs. The formal theme of the spiral actively binds the two together with an encompassing movement, stimulating the seamless integration of the city fabric, connecting in a dynamic way, the different surrounding areas. Read the rest of this entry »

Architecture studio Populous has been selected to design a new sports park in the historic city of Datong, in the northern Shanxi Province, near Beijing, China. This is the second major sports hub for Populous in China.

The sports park which includes a 30,000 seat stadium, an 8,000 seat arena, a 1500 seat natatorium and a multiuse training hall, is part of a larger plan by the Datong Mayor to regenerate the historic old city and create a new city centre with other development including a city hall, museum, convention centre.

Inspiration for the new Datong Sports Park has come from both its impressive cultural heritage and the stunning rugged beauty of the surrounding landscape outside the city. The rich valleys, escarpments and weathered mountain faces surrounding the Loess Plateau outside Datong City rival the brutally etched Judean desert as it stretches towards the Dead Sea. The colour and texture of the mountain ranges are comparable to the landscape of the Grand Canyon in America.

The win for Populous, which has its Asian base in Queensland, comes as its first sports park in Nanjing celebrates five years of successful operation. Populous won an IOC/IAKS Gold Award for the design of Nanjing, built for the 2005 China National Games, and the catalyst for a major city centre development. Read the rest of this entry »