GSI Tower is designed by Sanzpont Arquitectura, and will be located in Cancun, Mexico. This 20-storey building will house a shopping mall, hotel and offices, and consists of 2 vertical bodies that meet at the top by 2 habitable bridges with an interior garden to form a large frame of the natural landscape.

The Building is protected from the sun on the western face with a ventilated façade made of alucobond in the form of fish scales, indirect natural light is filtered inside between the horizontal louvers of its perimeter. In the eastern façade, the building skin is designed with a set of serigraph, sandblasted and transparent glass that take advantage of the natural views of the Golf Course and the Caribbean Sea. It gives the city an elevated public square that generates an urban green balcony. As an added value, the building allows the public to continue to rise even more, because it has a restaurant lounge at the top level. With all this, the vertical infrastructure integrates with the city life and urban environment. Read the rest of this entry »

The Olympic Velodrome designed by Hopkins Architects, one of the four permanent venues on the Olympic Park and designed for the indoor track cycling events at the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games won the Architects’ Journal Building of the Year award. The facility was unilaterally agreed upon by judges for the prize due to its “near perfect synthesis of form and function”, as described by jury member Patrik Schumacher of Zaha Hadid Architects.

The jury, which also comprised Frank Duffy (DEGW) and Christine Murray (AJ editor), were particularly impressed by the beauty of the cedar cladding, the ingenious lightweight double cable-net roof, the dominance of natural light and the Velodrome’s beauty in section.

Last year, Hopkins’ Kroon Hall at Yale University received the Building of the Year award. Read the rest of this entry »

The stunning design by Japanese-based architects Kengo Kuma and Associates was selected by an international jury as the choice for the V&A at Dundee following an extensive process of consultation and evaluation, including meeting with all the architects and their teams, visiting their existing buildings, and establishing the feasibility of the project to meet the tight timescales and budget.

The public’s views were given serious attention in the process after thousands of individuals completed questionnaires and commented on the proposals. 15,000-plus people visited the exhibition and many more viewed it online.

Reaction to the six shortlisted proposals was not confined to the world of design but went right back to the man on the street – on the same day that Vogue.com ran an article on Kengo Kuma & Associates, the Dundee United Football Club supporters blog buzzed with positive opinion on the winning design.

The chosen design (which references the V&A at Dundee’s celebrated neighbour, the RRS Discovery) is a striking building that will come to represent Dundee and has the potential to be one of Europe’s most iconic buildings. Once built, the building itself will appear to ‘float’ on the water. Read the rest of this entry »

The Museum of Ocean and Turf designed by Steven Holl and Solange Fabiao is ready to open its doors in June 2011.

The building form derives from the spatial concept “under the sky”/“under the sea”. A concave “under the sky” shape forms the character of the main exterior space, the “Place de l’Océan.” The convex structural ceiling forms the “under the sea” exhibition spaces. The building’s spatial qualities are experienced already at the entrance where the lobby and ramps give a broad aerial view of the exhibition areas, as they pass along the dynamic curved surface that is animated by moving image and light.

The precise integration of concept and topography gives the building a unique profile. Towards the ocean, the concave form of the building plaza is extended through the landscape. With slightly cupped edges, the landscape, a mix of field and local vegetation, is a continuation of the building and will host festivals and daily events that are integrated with the museum facilities. Read the rest of this entry »

Winnipeg is a city of 600,000 residents located on the Canadian prairie. It is the coldest city of its size outside of Siberia. Winter can last six months. So learning to celebrate winter – learning to take advantage of the opportunities that winter provides – makes sense.

The Red and the Assiniboine Rivers meet in the centre of the city, and in winter, when plowed of snow, skating trails many miles long are created. But with temperatures that drop to minus 30 and 40 for long periods of time, and winds that can make minus 30 feel like minus 50, creating opportunities to find shelter from the wind greatly enhances the ability to use the river skating trails. Therefore, a program has developed to sponsor the design and construction of temporary shelters located along the skating trails. Our proposal consists of a cluster of intimate shelters, each accommodating only a few people at a time. They are grouped in a small ‘village’ (or ‘herd’, or ‘school’, or ’flock’, or ‘flotilla’) to form a collective … of ‘something’ … irreducible to a single interpretation. They stand with their backs to the wind like buffalo, seeming to have life and purpose as they huddle together shielding each other from the elements.

Each shelter designed by award-winning Patkau Architects is formed of thin, flexible plywood which is given both structure and spatial character through bending/deformation. Skins, made of 2 layers of 3/16th inch thick flexible plywood, are cut in patterns and attached to a timber armature which consists of a triangular base, and wedge shaped spine and ridge members (the ridge is a line to negate the gravity loads of snow). Experiments in our workshop with a full-scale prototype mapped the stresses of bending. Stress points were relieved by a series of cuts and openings. The form of the shelter is a resultant of this process of stressing/deforming and then releasing stress. Read the rest of this entry »

Proposal by Sanzpont Arquitectura for the Beton Hala Waterfront. Arches of the Belgrade Fortress have been reinterpreted to form a modern and iconic arcade linking the past with the present and future. The Green Slopes from Kalemegdan Park have been the main inspiration for creating a green building to expand the city’s natural landscape. Sava River Waveforms spread inland to create an elevated panoramic walkway integrated with the existing building.

Urban Design: A Park that brings together Visitors and Locals

Kalemegdan Park Expansion to the River Sava by a green roof building that extends the garden and recreational areas of the city. The green skin minimizes environmental impact, preserving the natural landscape of the site. Urban Connections to the City’s Past and Present where pedestrians can move freely in all directions without crossing with cars and trains. Through a central plaza, the project creates an urban node and a reference point that connects all the spaces. Scenic viewpoints at different levels that take advantage of views of the river and the city, making the journey a pleasant walk. Read the rest of this entry »

With a relaxed, yet stylish interior strategy for the Bella Sky Hotel’s rooms, reception and conference rooms, 3XNs design aims were to give guests the impression of arriving at a tasteful Scandinavian home.

The Best from Nordic traditions

‘Although Bella Sky is the Nordic region’s largest hotel, we have done everything to ensure that the hotel doesn’t give the typical impersonal and formal feeling that so often defines large hotels,’ says 3XN Architects’ founder and partner, Kim Herforth Nielsen. ‘Therefore, we decided to interpret the overall theme as New Nordic Cool. We looked at how Scandinavians approach the design of their homes, how they live – and then chose the best of our design tradition for the Bella Sky Hotel. Key words for us were simplicity, functionality and high quality, both in design and materials.’

Therefore anything synthetic was banned in the selection of materials for the hotel’s 814 rooms. Carpets are in wool, bed sheets in high thread count cottons, and there is a prevailing use of natural materials such as smoked oak and leather found throughout the décor. The smokey colour palette gives the rooms warmth and at the same time creates references to the Nordic nature, which is evident from the hotel views over the nature park, ‘Amager Common.’ Read the rest of this entry »

Rock and Roll culture has always had an uncanny relationship with death. The death of a rock star creates a cult(ure), marking an unyielding mnemonic point where personality, musical genre and event combine to produce myth. (Think of Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Sid Vicious and Kurt Cobain to name a few; their individuality, unique musical contributions and the particular way in which each died are forever fused together in our collective memory). If Rock and Roll culture is exclusively within the domain of youth, a premature death is the event that insures it will always remain so. (Pete Townsend never got his wish)

The death of a rock star is culturally transformative, creating the moment for a larger, shared and collective experience. It is almost as if the death-story competes with the life-story, eventually to become one story. This phenomenon is unique to Western Culture; like a war hero, the way one died is forever bound to the one who died. From purple hearts to purple haze, the iconic rock star lives like a character within a Greek myth. Taken down by the iconoclastic forces of Rock and Roll, our hero re-emerges larger than life within the pantheon of dead rock stars, forever eternal.

Death by Rock and Roll is an opportunity to reconceive the crematory urn on terms gleaned from the cultural practice of Rock and Roll. In this case, the urn takes on the role of noting the particular rituals of these heroes, (always stranger than fiction) and leverages them as drivers for a new expression altogether different from the conventional urn typology and practice.

This urn for Kurt Cobain is not a singular vessel, nor will it simply hold his ashes in the conventional sense. Instead, a retroactive urn for Kurt Cobain will be made in multiple pieces, as a family of parts, and will be synthesized from his ashes. Composed as a series of geometric figures and made from his ashes suspended in a substrate, we imagine they will inspire new forms of sharing and distribution rituals enabled by their multiplicity. Read the rest of this entry »

Metropolitan Magazine’s The Next Generation 2011 Design Competition winner is a team of emerging architects and engineers who propose bringing an existing GSA building office building in downtown Los Angeles to net-zero energy. The design team, consisting of members from Vanderweil and HOK, used the design principles of the Living Building Challenge 2.0 to radically modify the building’s infrastructure and program.

Process Zero: Retrofit Resolution uses bio-engineering processes to create energy onsite, process all waste water and clean polluted air. The southern façade is retrofitted with tubes to farm algae which will be feed carbon rich air from the freeway. The algae will then be feed into a bio-reactor to create lipids than can be stored and burned in a combined cycle generator. Much of the building’s waste water will be used in the process and finally filtered in ponds adjacent to the office.

A full arsenal of technologies are proposed to reduce the building’s energy needs including ground source heat pump powered chillers connected to chilled beams, Energy Recovery Ventilation, waste heat coils, natural ventilation and radiant floors along with energy producing and harvesting solar technologies. The technologies are highly organized to use natural energy and systems before relying on conventional means. Read the rest of this entry »

Beton Hala is today an open and spontaneous cultural hub. The new building designed by Erik Giudice Architects assumes this identity and provides more space for spontaneity and creativity.

The layout for the Waterfront Center takes it’s departing point from the linear structure of the existing Beton Hala. By concentrating the program on a linear strip, a park is created towards the Castle and a large multi activity promenade along the river.

The new structure is highly transparent, letting through views from the river towards the Castel and from the Castel towards the river. The structure becomes a transparent filter between two complementary urban public spaces: the park and the river promenade. On ground level several outdoor pedestrian passages connect the park and the promenade. The building adds a vertical dimension to the horizontality of the site, reflecting the multifaceted and diverse identity of Belgrad and its cultural life. The building becomes a stage for multiple expressions.

Through its linear layout the building leaves a generous space for open-air activities in particular for exhibitions, concerts, events. The buildings elevations become the visual and acoustical backdrop for the open-air stages that can be located on its two sides. The building is designed as a vertical public space, with large open air ramps that makes it possible to reach the top level, the viewing platforms and the connecting bridge to the castle without entering the commercial functions.

Two outdoor promenades goes through the building, while the urban landscape progressively unveils. The promenades culminates on the top terrace with a spectacular view on the river and the Belgrade skyline. Read the rest of this entry »