Finalist
2011 Skyscraper Competition

Park soon young, Lee chang hee, Lee ki joon
South Korea

The idea behind this skyscraper proposal is to harvest the energy within clouds in regions where more than 200 days per year are cloudy and rainy such as Scotland, North western United States, and South American rain forests.

According to studies, a single lightning produces comparable energy to 100,000 household bulbs for an hour. It is estimated that the world’s population currently needs 14 trillion of kilowatts per year but almost 33% of the electricity is lost during its distribution.

The Cloud and Electricity Generator Skyscraper seeks to tackle these problems by collecting the cloud’s electricity at heights that surpass more than 1 kilometer. The skyscraper is designed with a series of super-tall antennas that collect lightning and stores the energy in a series of battery-like structures distributed along the entire building. Read the rest of this entry »

Finalist
2011 Skyscraper Competition

Julie Defourneaux, Irène Galante, Jean Paillard, Laetitia Paneta, Guillaume Pele, Charles Murzeau
France

The Up to You Skyscraper is a floating city based on the natural principles of trees that feed and transform the environment. This cluster of skyscrapers adapts to the climate and adjusts its temperature. It collects water and harvests wind and solar energy while providing a new set of programs for the city. Each box welcomes program such as research laboratories, energy transforming industries, offices, and leisure facilities. Read the rest of this entry »

Finalist
2011 Skyscraper Competition

Forrest Fulton Architecture
United States

Instead of a towering Iconic image, disconnected from historic, horizontal Yerevan, Lace Hill stitches the adjacent city and landscape together to support a holistic, ultra-green lifestyle, somewhere between rural hillside living and dense cultured urbanity. To create a new, firmly rooted architecture-urbanism-landscape, the 85,000 square meter project morphs the common urban element of Yerevan, the superblock, to the site, a truncated hill along the natural amphitheater of Yerevan. This act extends the amphitheater and completes the hill, creating more capacity or “seats” for the viewing of Yerevan and Mt. Ararat, the eternal icon of Armenia. Native plants irrigated with recycled gray water cover the hill. Intricate perforations recalling traditional Armenian lace needlework provide terraced exterior space, natural ventilation, and amazing views for the promenade, hotel rooms, residences, and office space.

Unlike a singular object tower that one simply views from the city below, the lacy, living hill seduces visitors inside to a promenade and a succession of tower-voids. Tower-voids act as dramatic cooling towers in Yerevan’s semi-arid climate. As one moves toward the cooler center, the hill opens to the sky. With the feel of a cathedral or basilica in size and light, pools and tree-topped hills fill these flowing-nodal public spaces. These are spatial monuments to Armenia, carved from the hill like the ancient Armenian Monastery of Gerhard.

Lace Hill not only conserves its own resources within, but also gives back to Yerevan, passively cooling portions of Yerevan during the summer. As north breezes pass over the tower-voids’ ponds, the project acts as a giant evaporative cooling mechanism for the semi-arid city below. Window walls set deep within the terraces shade summer sun. Planted surfaces absorb solar heat, filter air and water-borne toxins, and supports insect and animal life. Geothermal wells and radiant floors efficiently heat and cool spaces. Read the rest of this entry »

LAVA has unveiled their EVOLUTION lamp in collaboration with Philips, the global leader in lighting. The lamp is on display at Handmade during the fair.

Chris Bosse, Asia Pacific Director of LAVA says: ‘the challenge was to re-imagine an object that everybody knows, to break up preconceived ideas. The playful reinterpretation of a sculptural table lamp resembles a plant rather than a desk light’.

Rogier van der Heide, Chief Design Officer at Philips Lighting, says: “With the EVOLUTION desk light, Chris Bosse of LAVA has created a new design language in luminaire design. The desk light is also a great representation of Philips’ people-focused approach to lighting: a friendly product, based on a humanistic design concept while delivering state of the art LED technology, all of this in a very attractive way. The design posed many technical challenges such as thermal management and a complex double curved shape – however, close collaboration between LAVA and Philips has ensured that the EVOLUTION lamp exceeded our expectations in terms of design and engineering.”

EVOLUTION is inspired by the growth in plants. LAVA’s design and architectural concepts emulate the structural principles of nature such as cells and leaves in order to be more efficient – lighter, stronger, and ultimately more beautiful. Read the rest of this entry »

The Coliseum was completed in only 18 months for the 2010 South American Games in Medellín, Colombia by Mazzanti Arquitectos and plan:b arquitectos. The green ribbons of roof lines create a distinctive character and utilitarian design for the complex which echoes the surrounding topography of the mountainous countryside. Six types of layered roof trusses are repeated in different patterns over four separate spans simplifying fabrication and installation. The undulating roofs extend beyond the inner volume to create public outdoor space.

The environmental design is an act of democratization and participation.The venue hosting sporting events for the cities residences is skinned in open air brise soleil wall partitions to allow passer-bys to witness events from the exterior.  The open skin also allows the local temperate breezes to provide natural cooling. The various relative heights of the roof truss ribbons allow room for vertical polycarbonate panels to provide natural lighting conditions. Orientation of the fenestration is north-south to reduce solar heat buildup and collect northern prevailing breezes. Read the rest of this entry »

Combining green consciousness with sleek and sustainable ultra-modern design, the Solarflora from Nectar is a fully functional solar generator that, in addition to providing green power at public spaces, pays elegant and stylized tribute to nature’s simple beauty. Suggestive of a giant flower, with lines that are simultaneously clean and slightly curvilinear rising to petal-like forms at its apex, the Solarflora is capable of holding one, two, three, or four solar panels and supplying up to 1.2 kilowatt-hours of electricity per day of depending on leaf configurations.

An artistic and enjoyable addition to parks, shopping malls, museums, fairgrounds, convention centers, bus stops, and wide variety of other locales, the Solarflora includes up to three modular leaves which feature a soft light for dramatic effect and are attached to a plant-like stalk. Each Solarflora is adjusted to the local geographic latitude so that it is angled towards the sun to capture the maximum available energy. The Solarflora has been tested to withstand hurricane force winds. Read the rest of this entry »

Studio Mode/modeLab is pleased to announce the upcoming Material Matters Workshop in New York City. During the weekend of May 14-15/16, 2011, the workshop will focus on parametric design to fabrication strategies and iterative development of prototypes on a 3-Axis CNC Mill.

Material Matters will examine the procedural distinctions between two modes of design production: the first relying primarily on cerebral processing (a conceptual domain isolated from the wildness of matter and energy) and the second motivated by material’s capacity to act as an agent in the discovery of form. The workshop will operate through a framework of computational, parametric, and fabrication strategies that hinge on the peculiarities of material and the emergent set of knowledge associated with the work of the hand. Participants will develop multiple instances of parametric prototypes to be represented in digital as well as fabricated output. Read the rest of this entry »

Gustafson Guthrie Nichol (GGN) has broken ground on the CityCenterDC development by Hines|Archstone in downtown Washington, DC. A new mixed-use development located on the 10-acre site of the former convention center, CityCenterDC is one of the largest downtown development projects currently underway in any U.S. city. Gustafson Guthrie Nichol participated in developing the master plan for the site with lead architect Foster + Partners, and acted as lead landscape architect, working with DC-based Lee and Associates. Additional members of the design team include DC-based Shalom Baranes Associates, serving as associate master plan architect, project Architect of Record, and lead designer of the residential rental buildings.Construction commenced on March 23, 2011, and is expected to reach completion by the fourth quarter of 2013. The project includes the development of Northwest Park, a lively addition to downtown DC, the creation of a Central Plaza, aswell as dramatic terraces with green roofs and gardens incorporated into all the buildings. Read the rest of this entry »

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Kundalini inaugurates the first collaboration with AquiliAlberg, presenting Evita, an innovative floor and wall lamps with an intense visual impact and strong poetic expression. As in a sartorial artwork, the metal is wrapped around the luminous body of Evita in a garment stitched together by a single continuous gesture, forming a spiral rotation of 90 degrees. It is characterized by a strong graphic style and a clean and refined image that easily becomes imprinted in one’s memory, as it unwinds in space and traces out curved lines and surfaces, lightness and dynamism.

With its fine lines, Evita clothes the light with its physical elusiveness, delicate elegance and stylistic cogency. Its name recalls the gracefulness and strength of far-reaching feminine figures such Evita Peron, whose character evoked the imagination of the whole world, inspiring writers, musicians and directors. Read the rest of this entry »

As urban densities continue to intensify, architects are seeing an increased demand for designs that must fit within the preexisting frame of large, vertical buildings that are both designed and constructed by other architects. More often than not, the projects that evolve out of this situation end up manifesting images of fragmentation and flatness – disparate spaces that act as featureless framing devices for life. Complexity becomes embodied in what is impermanent, with the cohesion and dynamism of place being contained within the user, not the architecture. Tregunter, a recent project by Davidclovers, inverts this condition through the harnessing of precisely what typically hinders this type of project: the architectural constraints created by the encasing building.

From the architect: “Nestled amongst a forest of towers on Old Peak Road above Central Hong Kong, the Tregunter tower holds unique layered views of Victoria Harbor.  The abundance of bay windows, structural walls and beams that are common to residential towers would appear to constrain the possibilities of the apartment. However, by turning constraints into opportunities, davidclovers re-works the volumes of this apartment by using the ceiling and the floor.  Subtly elongating, pressing upward, and sloping downward, the ceiling produces variable sensations of compression and expansion – making the apartment seem larger than it is, drawing delicate lines that separate dining from living. Skillfully dodging and maneuvering around air-conditioning units and structural beams, the ceiling integrates artificial light and various materials – re-orienting the apartment toward the exterior. Read the rest of this entry »