Recently Maxthreads Architectural Design and Planning from Edinburgh entered an international architecture competition for the design of a new City Cultural Centre in Taichung, Taiwan. The Taichung City Cultural Centre, Public Library & Fine Arts Museum will define the northern arrival gateway to Taichung Gateway Park, providing a public hub to the overall master plan.

As the entry sequence into urban fabric, their proposal reflects the New City’s philosophy of combining nature and innovative technology. The Taichung City Cultural Centre portrays their vision as the threshold for Taichung Gateway Park. An iconic visual corridor connects local and international arrivals (Transportation Centre) to the main cultural district of the city through a revived, vibrant pubic space. Read the rest of this entry »

Trifold Madang is an entry for the Busan Opera House competition, by IwamotoScott Architecture, which addresses the sponsors’ aim to create a new icon of the North Port area, establishing an international gateway while fostering maritime tourism for the new Maritime Culture District. Their design tries to significantly dramatize the experience of going to the opera. The sculptural form at the water edge maximizes the connection between the city, the water and the surrounding landscape.

Three large programmed pedestals support the building which is lifted above the surrounding site and the space flows beneath the opera, up onto a landscaped podium, culminating in a mound at the development center. The center space evokes the memory of the traditional Korean Opera, performed in outdoor courtyards – the madang.

As visitors approach the building of the Opera, they ascend one of three exterior Grand Stairs. A large central triangular skylight anchors the space where three staircases meet. Read the rest of this entry »

Zaha Hadid Architects’s design for the Dorobanti Tower in Bucharest, Romania, aims to provide an iconic presence in the very center of the city. The architecture of this high-rise is progressive – the distinctive form and ingenious structure of the skyscraper set new parameters for sky-high living. The form of the building is a chamfered diamond and its exterior is wrapped in irregular meandering structural lattice.

Building’s profile was generated by urban parameters, site constraints and program requirements – the outcome is and elegant, tapering tower which dynamically changes surface profile. As it is tapering inwards, the skyscraper maximizes views and the incoming daylight for its users. The tower is offset at the ground level, therefore providing a generous and spacious public space and the entrance plaza.

Regarding its solid structure, the Dorobanti Tower had to be conceived to maximize strength and resilience to earthquakes, due to Bucharest’s highly vulnerable seismic zone.

The public realm adjacent to the tower is magnificent and first of its kind in Bucharest – it represents major attraction within the city, offering new meeting space and urban spot, conceived as a wrapped carpet made in concrete. The surface of that urban carpet connects three surrounding streets, linking seating areas, water basins, fountains and green spaces into one urban entity. Read the rest of this entry »

Cheng Gong and Kiem Ho of the Southern California Institute of Architecture in Los Angeles researched scripted panelizing systems and sought a script that would maximize control of visual and spatial effects without sacrificing variation and complexity. Ultimately they would come to call their findings “Tiling Within Tiling.” They favored scripts that allowed them to build in a higher level of variation while also creating vague, unpredictable relationships between a large multitude of panels.

The concept tries to analyze the physical impact of NTICs on our territory and especially our relationship to the city. Today there are nearly 619 data center facilities in 33 countries in the world. These places generate a new geography of virtual media. As a new territo

ry the project is based on the premise that identity is no longer considered through traditional, physical or administrative boundaries but linked to a server and consolidate under a domain name as each European country has its unique online identity. In practice, this means that data centers are directly associated to an urban structure and gather all information related to this structure. Read the rest of this entry »

Siivet aurora, the Aurora Borealis Arctic Observatory is an architectural project situated in argument between the historic mystic of the northern lights and the urban landmark of Rovaniemi. This proposal by designers Jensen Liu and Sally Hsu explores the awakening moment of the Eos (the goddess of dawn), enhancing a natural phenomenon that continues to amaze audiences. The aurora is signifying the goddess of dawn splitting open the night sky breaking free of the dark skyline. The architectural design symbolizes Eos’s wings responding to the natural aurora phenomenon; as the magnetic field and wind undulates, it follows throughout echoing nature’s best painting. Read the rest of this entry »

Taichung Cultural Center by BAT (Bilbao Architecture Team) grows from the ground – it represents the final oeuvre of sculptural forces of nature, showing the real Taiwan and its magnificent landscape. The design is a proposal for the new city cultural center in the land of mountains, sea and amazing coast. The view from the Taichung Gateway Park shows how the land rises, configuring unique and impressive shapes.

The structure of this astonishing landscape architecture is managed by laminated wood beams of great dept, disposed on a meter distance and joined with lateral connectors. These connectors primarily act as substructure, but they also carry some of the building systems. The roof coverings vary, depending on the functions featured in the interior and their specific requirements. However, the green carpet is the covering for the most of the roof surface, but there are also spaces which demanded great amount of light in the interior, therefore they are covered with glass panels. Solar panels and wood paves areas were also required. Read the rest of this entry »

The largest private museum in Asia, the Pingtan Art Museum, designed by MAD Architects, has just begun its construction preparation phase. Upon its completion, this ambitious private project will display over a thousand pieces of national treasures within its debut exhibition.

In 2010, the “Comprehensive Experimental Zone” project in Pingtan, the largest island in the Fujian province, was launched and the island has been decided to become the primary location for trade and cultural communication between Taiwan and the mainland. The island, currently a military base and a fisheries paradise will quickly be transformed into a large urban development zone.

However, the museum itself acts like a small island on the island, and is connected to land only by an undulating pier, bridging the gap between artificial and natural, city and culture, tradition and future. The building of the museum is an icon and represents a long-lasting earthscape in water.

In the words of the author, the island is firstly a public space, turned into a museum. All the components of its magnificent natural landscape interconnect with each other, forming a harmonious space, with the mountains in the distance. The building of this island museum is constructed in concrete, blended with the local sea shells. The interior space, formed around the movements of its visitors, resembles the ancient caves. Read the rest of this entry »

Mario Cucinella Architects won a competition to design Algeria’s telecommunication agency headquarters. Exquisitely bold, the proposal is rooted in the traditional Mediterranean architecture and it is a re-interpretation of the Algerian landscape and the sand dunes. The building is an icon, and the place where modernity and tradition melt, in form – derived from the Mediterranean tradition and the solar diagram, and in the treatment of the surface of its body.

The dunes in the Algerian desert landscape seem like natural buildings, therefore the architects aimed to mimic the natural environment, avoiding the greater impact of the built structure. However, building had to be highly visible and representative, due to its purpose and the fact that it is situated on a lot along the highway of great importance and is very near to the new urban park Bab Ezzouar. As an institutional building, new ARPT headquarters are designed as a reference point within the neighborhood and a city, a point where tradition merges with modernity in order to create new and unexpected symbolic and cultural scenarios. Therefore, the proposal for the Headquarters is highly iconic, far from traditional aesthetics of the built surroundings, and it exploits the direct contact with the new park area. Read the rest of this entry »