The United States Department of State recently announced  that KieranTimberlake has won the design competition for the new, United States London Embassy. Ambassador to the United Kingdom, Louis B. Susman, and Acting Director of the Bureau of Overseas Buildings Operations, Adam Namm, remarked, “KieranTimberlake’s design meets the goal of creating a modern, welcoming, timeless, safe and energy efficient embassy for the 21st century. Their concept most fully satisfied the requirements outlined in the design competition’s mission statement. The concept holds the greatest potential for developing a truly iconic embassy and is on the leading edge of sustainable design.”

The core design challenge was to bring form to the core beliefs of American democracy – transparency, openness, and equality – and do so in a way that is secure, welcoming, and sustainable.

Located on the Nine Elms site in London, the site is to be transformed into an urban park and garden, designed as a spiraling form and providing strong pedestrian connections to mass transit and the proposed Battersea developments to the west.  The park doubles as a security measure and is a welcome alternative to the walls, fences, and jersey barriers that have come to dominate American government buildings.

The structure itself is a transparent, crystalline cubic form atop a colonnade. It represents the optimum ratio of maximum volume within minimum perimeter  resulting in cost and energy management benefits. The skin is an intriguing interface between a faceted external solar shading and collection system and  blast resistant glazing.

This crystal-like ethylene-tetrafluroethylene (ETFE) scrim has been optimized to shade interiors  while admitting daylight and framing large open view portals. Its pattern visually fragments the façade while it intercepts unwanted solar gain and transforms it into energy by means of thin film photovoltaics positioned in the ETFE foils. The scrim also renders the largely transparent façades visible to migratory birds to discourage bird-strikes.

The top of the building is sheathed with a crystalline photovoltaic array on the entire roof, screening mechanical equipment from view. The total array of crystalline and thin-film photovoltaic on the building measures 8,300 square meters with a significant output of over 345,000 kWh of energy.

Although the price tag for the structure has been estimated to be over $1billion, as reported by the Times of London, the project remains on schedule for a 2017 completion date.

The team included OLIN as Landscape Architect; Arup for Sustainability, MEP/FP and Civil Engineering; Weidlinger Associates for Structural and Blast Engineering; Gensler for workplace design; Davis Langdon for Cost Consulting; and Sako & Associates for Technical Security.

The park bench, much like other public, utilitarian furniture, has too often been regulated to uninspired mediocrity. They seldom have a contextual relationship to their surroundings and they almost never contribute to the story of a place. Ben Thorpe’s Peelback Bench however, manages to do all of the above with grace and elegance.

The bench seems to peel away a layer of history, presenting for the person sitting on the seat, a short explanation of the history of the area. As Thorpe explains “The basic principle of the bench is to give the effect that it has been peeled away from the ground, revealing a typographical story based upon the history of the particular area where the bench would be placed, giving the impression that you were reading from the foundations of the town”.

Ben Thorpe is is an award winning product designer currently based in the North West of the UK.  A core principle of Thorpe’s work is that interdisciplinary collaboration makes for better and more interesting products and the peelback bench is a strong example of the power of interdisciplinary engagement.

The bench was developed through collaboration with the City Brand  project in Preston, UK. The organization works to create design solutions that are aimed at redeveloping the town of Preston, Lancashire, through public art, street furniture and graphic design.

Thorpe worked closely with Jo Bane on this concept and she provided the typography that is found on the base of the bench. The designers are working to apply the basic concept to other street furniture such as bike racks, tram stops, and tree wraps. They are also working with the local Council to find funding so as to introduce the products to the streets of Preston. However, the market for interesting, well designed, story-telling street furniture is universal.

Ecopolis is a global city for the future based on the idea of designing a set of highly differentiated sustainable and habitable cells. These primary units are organized into clusters according to program, habitants, and its relationship with the natural world.

Ecopolis façade is equipped with sustainable systems such as solar panels, wind turbines, and rainwater collectors. It is a modular design that grows according to different requirements in a given period of time.

Project submitted to the 2010 Skyscraper Competition

As the city takes stock in a post-boom era, architect John Beckmann sees this as the time to rethink the tall buildings that have become synonymous with New York City’s identity.  

“Instead of disguising the rich potential of towers that have a mix of uses, we looked for a way to express that diversity,” Beckmann explained. The firm used parametric computer-modeling software to test a wide range of possibilities. Out of this iterative process, Beckmann and his firm, Axis Mundi, propose a new way to organize and express tall buildings: the Vertical Neighborhood. “A more diverse, complex, heterogeneous, and environmentally minded city need no longer be represented on its skyline by one-note architecture that makes a singular visual image and little else,” explained John Beckmann, the founder of Axis Mundi, a Manhattan-based architecture firm. 

Rethinking Hines Tower Site
Beckmann proposes a conceptual alternative to business-as-usual, choosing the site of the proposed 53W53rd, among the city’s largest skyscraper proposals in one of the most overbuilt parts of Midtown. Hines, the developer, engaged Paris architect Jean Nouvel, who designed an 82-story hotel and residential tower higher than the Chrysler Building. 

Flexible Floors, Open to Views
The architectural diversity Beckmann envisions starts with a double-ring, multi-level floor-plan unit, anchored by two cores that run the full height of the building, containing elevators, stairs and other vertical services.  

The ring units called “SmartBlocks” make possible a wide variety of floor plans. Single-unit layouts can mix with duplex, or triplex layouts. The units can shift in and out, adding rich texture to the surface, creating vertical garden space, and linking the units in unique ways. The malleability of the ring units accommodates living and working, extended families, and new forms of tenancy and ownership. Any grouping of these could be purposed for a hotel. The building is enriched by the multiplicity of forms and textures people create within their vertical neighborhoods. 

By varying the mix of the floor plan units, the Axis Mundi design leaves space for vertical fissures that move irregularly up the tower. These bring light and breezes into the open centers of the double-ring units and frame spectacular, theatrical vistas to the city through the building’s own structure. 

Fitting In With Porous, Richly Variegated Surface
“Historically, the skyscraper was a unitary, homogeneous form that reflected the generic office space it contained,” Beckmann says. “The Vertical Neighborhood is more organic and more flexible — an assemblage of disparate architectural languages. It reflects an emerging reality for tall buildings as collections of domestic elements: dwellings, neighborhoods, streets.” 

Axis Mundi has conceived the tower at a scale akin to, rather than dramatically exceeding, the heights of this very densely built-up Midtown neighborhood. The richly modeled surface and the fissures of space help to reduce the structure’s apparent scale and join it more seamlessly to a neighborhood that mixes offices and residential towers, brownstones, apartment buildings, hotels, and clubs. A dramatic through-block public arcade connects W. 53rd and W. 54th streets, offering access to new MoMA galleries up to three levels above. Contiguous with the museums’ existing exhibit space, the galleries twine back on themselves, like a Möbius strip. Above that, Axis Mundi sets aside a three-story-high volume that can be developed as a community-gathering space.

“The design reinforces the urban identity of tall buildings,” observes Beckmann. “It suggests new expressive possibilities in an urbanism of difference rather than of homogeneity. In a city where more than 300 languages are spoken, architecture can celebrate that diversity rather than see it as a problem that must be solved.” 

Design Credits:
Concept and Lead Designer: John Beckmann
Design Team: John Beckmann, CarloMaria Ciampoli and James Coleman (LAN), Nick Messerlian, Pauline Marie d’Avigneau, and Taina Pichon
Parametric modeling: CarloMaria Ciampoli, James Coleman (LAN)
Renderings: Orchid 3D
Illustration: Michael Wartella

Project submitted to the 2010 Skyscraper Competition

While the majority of skyscrapers focus on height, the concept behind this proposal is its fragmentation in a series of buildings around a central courtyard for recreational activities. The different fragments are configured according to program and orientation. The result is a cluster of crystals linked by promenades, gardens, and plazas.

Architect Vincent Callebaut designed a sustainable tower in Paris to filter air particles and harvest wind and solar power. The project would be located in the 19th Parisian district which characterizes for being an extremely polluted area surrounded by old factories.

The project is divided in two; a “Solar Drop” located on top of abandoned railway tracks and a “Wind tower”. The Solar Drop is designed to transform polluted into clean air through a system of filters covered with titanium dioxide which break the pollutant particles. Along with the green technologies, the building is equipped with recreational areas for the city such as gardens, pools, galleries, and commerce. The Wind Tower equipped with turbines in its entire façade produces enough energy for the neighborhood and houses a museum and learning center on renewable energies.

SOFTlab’s latest installation, CHROMAesthesiae, arrives at Devotion just in time for spring. CHROMAesthesiae is a flourishing landscape of color, blooming across the ceiling in high contrast-gradated clusters. This installation is an investigation on the spatial and chromatic perception of space. SOFTlab uses modularity as a core modality in order to generate complexity from repetitive form, allowing for rapid expansion or contraction of every piece created. With the motto, “everything changes,” the ability to adapt and grow conceptually underpins their entire body of work. This customizable installation is made of discrete, laser cut paper structures held together with binder clips: everyday objects are repurposed and precisely recombined. Forms evolve and shift color throughout the exhibition.

SOFTlab is a design studio based in New York City. The studio was created by Jose Gonzalez and Michael Szivos shortly after receiving graduate degrees in architecture from the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University. The studio has since been involved in the design and production of projects across almost every medium, from digitally fabricated large-scale sculpture, to interactive design, to large-scale digital video installations. As the studio adjusted to a wide range of projects, it began to focus less on medium and style and more on ideas.

SOFTlab has produced a wide range of design projects and collaborated with various artists, designers, publications and institutions including MoMA, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The New York Times, eVolo Magazine, Surface Magazine, Columbia University and Pratt Institute. The studio has also exhibited work in galleries throughout New York City.

Opening: 7 p.m., Friday, March 19th, 2010 Until April 5th, 2010
Location: Devotion Gallery - 54 Maujer St, Brooklyn, NY, 11206

eVolo Magazine is pleased to announce the winners of the 2010 Skyscraper Competition. Established in 2006, the annual Skyscraper Competition recognizes outstanding ideas that redefine skyscraper design through the use of new technologies, materials, programs, aesthetics, and spatial organization. The award seeks to discover young talents whose ideas will change the way we understand architecture and its relationship with the natural and built environments.

The Jury of the 2010 edition was formed by leaders of the architecture and design fields including: Mario Cipresso, Kyu Ho Chun, Kenta Fukunishi, Elie Gamburg, Mitchell Joachim, JaeYoung Lee, Adelaïde Marchi, Nicola Marchi and Eric Vergne. The Jury selected 3 winners and 27 special mentions among 430 entries from 42 countries.

Globalization, sustainability, flexibility, adaptability, and the digital revolution, were some of the multi-layered elements taken into consideration.  The first place was awarded to a project for a vertical prison designed by architecture students Chow Khoon Toong, Ong Tien Yee, and Beh Ssi Cze, from Malaysia. Their project examines the possibility of creating a prison-city in the sky, where the inmates would live in a “free” and productive community with agricultural fields and factories that would support the host city below.

The recipients of the second place are Rezza Rahdian, Erwin Setiawan, Ayu Diah Shanti, and Leonardus Chrisnantyo, from Indonesia, whose project ‘Ciliwung Recovery Program’ aims to purify and repair the Ciliwung River habitat. The building is designed as an ingenious habitable machine that would collect garbage, purify water, and provide housing to thousands of people that live in the slums along the river.

The third place was awarded to Ryohei Koike and Jarod Poenisch, from the United States, for their project ‘Nested Skyscraper’ that explores robotic construction techniques for a novel structure of carbon sleeves and fiber-laced concrete. The building is a system of multiple layers of composite louvers which thicken and rotate according to solar exposure, ventilation, and materials performance.

Among the special mentions there are skyscrapers used as bridges that link different territories, cities in the sky powered by renewable energies, instant deployable buildings for disaster zones, skyscrapers that purify and desalinate sea water, or high-rises that commemorate historic dates. Other proposals create new pedestrian layers for existing cities. Some use the latest building technologies and parametric design to configure environmentally conscious self-sufficient buildings, while others create city-like buildings where different programs are mixed in one structure.

eVolo Magazine would like to acknowledge all the competitors for their effort, vision, and passion for architectural innovation.

2 0 1 0   S K Y S C R A P E R   C O M P E T I T I O N   W I N N E R S

Chow Khoon Toong, Ong Tien Yee, Beh Ssi Cze
Malaysia

Some studies reveal that post-release offenses are very high and that criminal’s imprisonment is just a temporal solution because they do not have the opportunity to rehabilitate in a desirable community.

This project examines the possibility of creating a vertical prison in the sky where inmates will have to work and live in a community that will contribute to the host city below. The prison will have agricultural fields, factories, and recyclable plants that will be operated by the offenders as a way to give back to the community. They will live “free” until they have completed their sentence and are prepared to rejoin their communities.

The vertical prison has its own transportation system which consists of different “pods” for officers, prisoners, firefighters, and other workers.

Rezza Rahdian, Erwin Setiawan, Ayu Diah Shanti, Leonardus Chrisnantyo
Indonesia

The city of Jakarta, Indonesia, was originally designed in the confluence of thirteen rivers which were used for transportation and agriculture. The largest of its rivers is The Ciliwung River, which has been extremely polluted during the last couple of decades, characterizes by hundreds of slums inhabited by thousands of people in marginal conditions.

The Ciliwung Recovery Program (CRP) is a project that aims to collect the garbage of the riverbank and purify its water through an ingenious system of mega-filters that operate in three different phases. The first one separates the different types of garbage and utilizes the organic one to fertilize its soil. The second phase purifies the water by removing dangerous chemicals and adding important minerals to it. The clean water is then fed to the river and to the nearby agricultural fields through a system of capillary tubes.  Finally in the third phase all the recyclable waste is processed.

One of the most important aspects of this proposal is the elimination of the slums along the river. The majority of the people will live and work at the CRP which could be understood as new city within Jakarta. The CRP project will be a 100 percent sustainable building that will produce energy through wind, solar, and hydroelectric systems.