Exhibition Road is changing. AL_A’s project will unlock the potential to bring new audiences into the V&A, breaking down the separation between street and museum, and taking the V&A onto Exhibition Road and Exhibition Road into the V&A.

Visitors will be drawn in from Exhibition Road by a large, light-filled public courtyard – South Kensington’s Drawing Room – where their experience of the V&A will begin. This will be a place for major installations, events and appropriation by the public. In the area of sun, there will be a fabulous café. AL_A’s design places visitors at the centre of this experience and from here they will be able to see through to the heart of the Museum, to the Hintze galleries and the Madejski Gardens.

On entering the museum visitors will be struck by the dramatic interplay between new and old. This entrance is not just for the new gallery, it is for the entire V&A collection. The route to the gallery below is woven into the fabric of the museum and the visitor is drawn down by a pool of natural light. Read the rest of this entry »

The aim of the project, named Habit Makes Us Blind, is to draw attention to the problem of unused spaces in urban environments. The conceptual Lego structures designed by Espai MGR are imaginative spatial exercises reminiscent of the childlike ease and playfulness of the act of creation. The surrealistic installations fill vacant plots in Valencia and act as an incentive for keeping the issue of underdeveloped neighborhoods in the public eye.

“Day by day we pass by vacant lots downtown. Just like an invisible metastasis generated in the heart of the city and extending to all its arteries. Neighborhoods that, although having a huge potential, have more and more unused spaces, a fact that does not at all promote a correct sustainable development. Years have made us immune to this problem. It’s a landscape we already recognize as typical of the central neighborhoods in Valencia.

Sometimes, the tourists are the ones who open our eyes by mentioning or questioning whether this situation is normal. On other occasions, we pay attention to it for a moment only because the secondary problems that those spaces imply affect us directly. But in most of the cases, they are only a part of our way. Like a gruyere cheese where the rats block any possibilities of reconstruction, while staring at us, far away from its holes. Read the rest of this entry »

Slovenian-based firm OFIS Arhitekti designed the proposal for Mercedes Benz Hotel Competition in Yerevan, Armenia. The concept is based on two terraced cylindrical towers connected in the ground level. The towering structures are enveloped with a green tent-shaped layer acting as a full-structural element, directing the building’s overall appearance. The position of the volumes creates remarkable views of the surroundings. The entire structure assumes the role of a landmark, with optimal views from the Teryan Street.

The higher of the towers would accommodate a restaurant, pool, spa, fitness center and bar. It would also house a hotel and apartments along with a business center, shops and a garage. The lower structure which extends outwards from the main tower would serve as housing and exhibition space as well as garage.

The structural system of the building is devised according to high seismic activity in the region. While two cores on the inner perimeter of the taller tower are required to ensure structural stability, one is sufficient in case of the lower one. At the base the outer walls of the cores are 160cm thick. Three concentric sets of composite columns are foreseen. Structural facade skin is predicted to support the gravity load of the slabs. Read the rest of this entry »