Designed by Aedas, Chongqing Xinhua Bookstore Group Jiefangbei Book City Mixed-use Project is a dynamic complex that encompasses a sky cultural plaza, retails, apartments, offices and a boutique hotel in the Jiefangbei Central Business District, the heart of downtown Chongqing. Aedas draws design inspiration from an ancient Chinese prose ‘Knowledge brings wealth’ to integrate book with the cultural elements of Chongqing, creating an interactive commercial complex with Xinhua Bookstore sitting at the core of the podium.

The building unfolds stepping terraces in an elegant form of a rolling book scroll implying the spirit of wisdom and knowledge. The stepped architecture not only reveals the well known geographic beauty of Chongqing which is also named ‘Mountain City’, but also interacts with the surroundings and rejuvenates the city landscape. Read the rest of this entry »

inFORMation is interested in animating architecture with information through form. Enriching information within the architectural forms has the ability to enhance the user’s ability to engage with the space. Our proposal has a series of agents operating at different scales that communicate to each other as well as to the users through postural changes. Encoded in each character’s posture is a formalised provocation that the user observes and interprets in order to respond to. Our agents invite responsive behaviours through coordination of agent-to-agent actions in order to promote coordination and facilitate activity of users to the architectural environment as well as to the users themselves. Read the rest of this entry »

Fibro.City was designed by a team of architects: Aikaterini Papadimitriou (Greece) Esteban Castro (Costa Rica) Marcin Komar (Poland) and Yilin Yao (China) at The Bartlett, University College London, as part of the March Graduate Architectural Design, RC1. Fibro.City is a project based on fibrous formations on the architectural scale with the use of carbon fibres. The design, and the fabrication methods create a new language of expressing architecture, by having in mind structural elements and performance. Reconfiguring these parameters, high resolution results, unique and aesthetically advanced are being achieved and given the opportunity to explore and define the architectural future a chance to reconfigure the potentials of the materiality of the structure arise. The behaviour of our structure is being programmed and includes optimizing algorithmic configurations for the design itself and the structural ability of the project. Read the rest of this entry »

The conceptual design for Lexicon Shanghai is a theoretical exercise in thematic processes, an investigation into architectural language as a lexical device governed by thematic parameters and syntactical structures. The lexicon is rather a series of architectural devices and tectonics composed as an interface for a subject and object experiencer. These tectonics thread through an arrangement of digital art and light sculptures as a syntax of meaning and definition to the overarching architecture. The correlation between lexical properties and syntactic structures are modes of operation in which the architecture emerges. Meaning and experience are not limited by surface and material association; but when art and technology are introduced, the system of thematic structure becomes visible in its lexical and syntax relationship. The art work in the form of digital projection, light sculpture, and diverse mediums perform as aspectual properties, unlike the thematic tectonic shapes and form. They become interface entities; these entities are mediators between spaces and the architectural body. The subject experiencer correlates the differences in the art and tectonic expression, but the event in which these entities project are undefined allowing emergence in activity to develop and operate. Read the rest of this entry »