The project attempts to integrate rural landscape and the city. Located in the fast growing city of Shenzhen, in China’s Guangdong Province, the Galaxy Yabao Hi-Tech Enterprises Headquarter Park covers an area of about 65 ha. It is a complex comprised of 18 high-rise towers, a 5 star hotel, 3 service apartment towers, 3 residential towers, a shopping mall and a 32 ha park. In order to introduce nature as a strong element in space, the architects at 10 design decided to pull off the tower facades to allow for vegetation to grow up the sides of the buildings. Mounted on the western facades are the algae tubes. The strips of vegetation, climbing up the towers are transformed into rooftop gardens, reducing the heat-island effect. Read the rest of this entry »
Galaxy Yabao Hi-Tech Enterprises Headquater Park / 10 design
Parametric Designed Pavilion: The Swarm
After five months of intensive design work and two weeks of building-up, on 29th of March the exhibition of THE SWARM – a Parametric Pavilion – took place in the outdoor area of the Bavarian Chamber of Architects in Munich. The main exhibit is a sculpture out of Alucobond which is 4 meters high and 15 meters long. Its shape describes an abstract swarm of birds.
The idea of THE SWARM was born on the new chair of Emerging Technologies at the faculty of architecture of the Technical University of Munich. The first concept made by Magnus Möschel was selected within an intern competition in the summer semester 2011 while the time of visiting professor Charles Walker. In the following semester, the students Sabrina Appel, Max Langwieder and Sascha Posanski developed the project and transformed it into a real building. They were supervised by the assistents Nadine Zinser – Junghanns, Moritz Mungenast and Wieland Schmidt. Read the rest of this entry »
Free City is a conceptual prototype for the XXI century city, conceived by FREE Fernando Romero EnterprisE in response to global issues brought forth by population growth and urban transition in the developing world. It proposes the design of a new urban infrastructure that integrates a sustainable and systematic framework into the grain of the urban fabric, stimulating innovation, production, services and growth. Read the rest of this entry »
Design House Prechtek Unveils S.Deer’s Headquarters in Nanjing, China
The design house prechteck was invited to design a corporate headquater for s.deer, a chinese retail-clothing company based in Nanjing.
The main idea behind the design for the building was to create world of fashion underlining the lifestyle s.deer stands for. As fashion is not just about clothing, the new s.deer headquater should not just be about administration. At fashion shows, photo shootings or previous store designs, cubes in different size and configurations are omnipresent and have been a key object and an unofficial logo for representing s.deer. Inspired by s.deer’s appearance design, rotated cubes were also the formal element for prechteck’s proposal. Read the rest of this entry »
Urban Vertical Farming: Generative System for a Vegetable Growing Infrastructure
The population of the world is expected to double by 2050. This fact does not only raise interrogations for the future of food production and the increasing necessity of land cultivation, it also creates concerns towards endangering the future of natural resources and biodiversity.
Today, food is longer being produced where it is being consumed. Vegetables sometimes travel to other continents to be processed or even simply packed before returning for consumption. The transport infrastructure for refrigerated food products, besides being costly, is strongly energy un-efficient and is an important contribution to global warming.
Can agriculture make its way into the city? Can it integrate our urban fabric despite its apparent necessity to occupy large horizontal surfaces little available in the economically-driven metropolitan densities? Read the rest of this entry »
Opening of the Thematic Pavilion for the EXPO 2012, Yeosu, South-Korea / SOMA
The Thematic Pavilion for the EXPO 2012 planned by the Austrian architecture office SOMA will be opened in Yeosu on 11th of May. Soma’s design proposal One Ocean was selected as the first prize winner in an open international competition in 2009.
The main design intent was to embody the Expo’s theme The Living Ocean and Coast and transform it into a multi-layered architectural experience. Therefore the Expo’s agenda, namely the responsible use of natural resources was not visually represented, but actually embedded into the building, e.g. through the sustainable climate design or the biomimetic approach of the kinetic façade. The cutting-edge façade system was developed together with Knippers Helbig Advanced Engineering and supports the aim of the world exhibition to introduce forward-looking innovations to the public. Read the rest of this entry »
Fovea’s Secret Garden / Co-de-iT + Mirco Bianchini + Alessandro Zomparelli
The project deals with the occularcentric nature of contemporary culture, by manipulating and unmasking its deceptive mechanisms. The design process starts with the fact that our ability to perceive the details is limited to the narrow fovea (the only part of the retina that permits 100% visual acuity) in the eye’s retina. Vision is then a matter of unconscious inferences: making assumptions and conclusions from incomplete data, based on previous experiences.
This inference and the inability to perceive the details trigger an attractive process, but the complexity of the component detail can be appreciated only at a scale where the perception of the whole is lost; rolling backwards, it becomes clear that the effect of the whole is more than just the sum of the constituent parts. It is an experiment (or proof of concept) on how morphology, organization, material systems and patterns have the ability to trigger dynamic behavioral effects and interaction in space and time. Read the rest of this entry »
Vinaròs Sea Pavillion / Guallart Architects
The design philosophy behind the Vinaròs Sea Pavillion is based on the idea that members of any family of geometric elements originating from nature have, all at the same time, a similarity in their basic geometric characteristics and a certain formal diversity. Having an origin in nature means being of, both similar and diverse characteristics. By geometrizing a family of elements, it is possible to define their properties that permit a certain degree of formal variability.
The structure is made of 3 mm painted galvanized steel, thin enough to be easily cut and folded to create a continuous hollow structural element. The openings are filled with glazed and opaque surfaces, on which LED lights are mounted. The entire structure has a hexagonal pattern that is deformed on a regular basis on the side facing the coast. It is an arboreal system in which all of the units are self-similar: both the structures that rest on the ground and those that rise up to expel fumes or take in light. Read the rest of this entry »
Light-Form is a Modular Lighting System
Integrated into the wall, the lighting system consists of a variable number of identical modules. Linked to create a dynamic mosaic that interacts with the user, the modules can be manipulated to achieve a game of light, shapes and contrasts. As the user starts opening the modules, the light is unveiled through bright emitting, or reflecting surfaces. The light can be integrated into the existing construction material, and becomes a variation of it. The manipulation of the structure creates shades of different qualities. Read the rest of this entry »
ENI Foundation Headquarters Inspired by the Renaissance Palazzo / UNStudio
UNStudio’s competition proposal for the ENI Foundation Headquarters takes cues from the company’s tradition. The ENI Foundation is a non-profit organization, operating in the field of sustainable development and global governance. With offices in several Italian cities, it is organized as a research center, providing analysis on a wide range of environmental issues. The design proposal draws inspiration from the traditional form of the renaissance “palazzo”, historically close to the organization, extending the concept of horizontal looped systems to the contemporary issues of communication and energy preservation. Read the rest of this entry »