The interest of creating this project was to provoke opposing forces of beauty and darkness – the idea of immersing survivors into their environment of global flooding through an elegant and energetic fusion of floating architecture.

The project has the appearance of a glamorous water cube emerging from billowing cloudscapes to flood location by a hot air dirigible. The Water Capsule is a simple form constructed of highly engineered, gleaming white fiberglass-reinforced panels. The structure folds into a sequence of spaces illuminated by two skylights and a window to the sea below. The project’s overall organization follows the drift of its curving form floating experientially through air and water giving freedom to “one’s” imagination from their loss. Read the rest of this entry »

The outstanding natural environment: the sea and the mountains are features that are reflected in this project by Ayrat Khusnutdinov, and Alexey Bychkov/ADM. These natural features, not architecture, are the prime actors in the scene; here the architecture is just a frame.

The notion that a building can be a musical instrument itself being a magnet of public activity is one of the steering wheels of the proposal. The undulating structure behaves like a ballet dancer creating different scenic effects, closing the space and opening it in its climax on the shoreline. Its dramatic pleats are synonymous with behavior of the stormy sea and crescendos of opera music. Read the rest of this entry »

Comfort Confrontation is a project designed by Johan Tali, Marte Ringseth-Helgeland and Daniel Prost at the Studio Wolf D. Prix of the Die Angewandte in Vienna. It researches the possibilities of living in a desert environment, further more creating an off-grid self-sustainable university campus for 2500 students.

The actual building mass is hovering above the desert surface and is used as an apparatus to organize the public space that is the desert itself. The endless sand horizon is considered as an open field, where shade, brightness, and moisture are the variables to create a diverse public space. As the desert surface expands into the public buildings it becomes more shaded, creating a landscape of oasis like condition and manifests a forum contition for the academic buildings. The massing is developed simulating a field of connected focal points. The fieldlines are manifested as the main arteries and are represented as surfaces that organize the shading shells for housing and as the surfaces meet at a focal point, the bundling surfaces turn into a study of surface contitions like surface-to-volume (and the relation of different volumes to each other) and transparency in relation to sun conditions. Read the rest of this entry »

Aleppo is one of the oldest cities in the world. It has always been perceived as one of the most important and influential cultural centres far beyond Syria and the arabic world. To live up to this fame the city has decided to open an international competition about the design of a cultural center whose main program is to comprise in addition to a library also an opera and a theatre.

Unfortunately, perhaps due to the political turbulences in the country, the outcome of the competition was never decided and the future of the project is still open.

The volume of each of the three main functions, opera, theatre, and library, is optimally tailored to the specific demands of the respective utilisation and clearly visible from the outside. The position of each function within the context depends on its interfaces with the other functions in the building as well as on the interfaces with the surrounding city and the visual contact with its important historic sites. Accordingly, all important transparent parts of the outer shell, as for instance, the background of the stage of the theatre and parts of the facade of the large reading hall, refer to the nearby world-famous citadel of Aleppo. This several thousand years old landmark therefore serves as the main cultural scenery for the new centre. Read the rest of this entry »

LAVA’s Digital Origami Emergency Shelter is a concept for an inhabited molecule. The design is based on a water-molecule, referencing the Japanese Metabolist movement’s idea of prefabricated capsules as living space.

The base molecule can be shipped as a flat pack, cut out of local plywood, or dropped off by a helicopter. The interior can then be carved out of wood, cardboard, newspapers or other locally available materials.

Chris Bosse said: ‘the project plays with ideas of prefabrication and personalised inhabitation, as well as stacking of multiple units, while giving an opportunity for individual expression’.

Each unit contains a sleeping space for two adults and one child as well as a little space for eating and reading. Battery or solar operated LED light brings the shelter to life, turning it into a lantern, a sign of hope.

The Emergency Shelter exhibition features shelters by local and international architects and will be on display on the Customs House forecourt Sydney, Australia from 1-3 September 2011. Read the rest of this entry »

Located in the North Port area of Busan, second largest city in the Republic of Korea, the New Opera House proposal by Architectures David Tajchman aims to bring the new maritime culture island a landmark character both at the city scale and at the international level. Surrounded by the sea, the city buildings and the mountains, ‘operascope’ is conceptualized as a musical instrument and an observation machine. Read the rest of this entry »

Studio Mode / modeLab is pleased to announce the next installment of the coLab workshop series: Hybrid Prototypes. As a follow-up workshop to the coLab workshop held in January 2011, Hybrid Prototypes is a two-day intensive design and prototyping workshop to be held in New York City during the weekend of September 24-25, 2011.

As architects and designers, we make things and build objects that interact with other objects, people, and networks.  We’re constantly seeking faster and more inexpensive methods to build prototypes, yet we are frequently hindered by practical and time consuming factors that arise in the process of bringing our ideas to life. Firefly is the new paradigm for interactive hybrid prototyping; offering a comprehensive set of software tools dedicated to bridging the gap between Grasshopper (a free plug-in for Rhino) and the Arduino micro-controller.  It allows near real-time data flow between the digital and physical worlds – enabling the possibility to explore virtual and physical prototypes with unprecedented fluidity. Read the rest of this entry »

This building proposal for the Taipei Museum of Contemporary Art by OTA+ challenges the traditional definition of a museum and the conventional relationship between building and site. The ground floor of the building is reduced to a nominal footprint, enclosing only enough space for basic services, structure and ticketing functions. The ground plane is primarily reserved for exterior public space, including an art park, Hall of Fame, and garden walk. The bulk of the program and building mass are split by the open ground floor. Half of the building is coupled with the earth while the other half hovers in the air. The purpose is two-fold; to minimize the damaging effects of extreme local weather by harnessing environmental flows toward productive outcomes and to re-conceptualize the identity of a modern art museum. The manicured roof plane of the below ground program is pocketed with water absorbing vegetation and catchment systems, while the hovering museum above expands to form open atriums, allowing diffuse light to brighten the space and passive airflow to comfortably condition the building.

The program of the museum is interconnected. The Contemporary Museum of Art, Children’s Museum of Art and Administration are located within the floating mass. The lecture hall, parking, art resource center, library and classrooms are located below ground. The programs below ground are easily accessible and directly connected through vertical circulation tubes, providing both structural support for the floating mass above and space for movement systems, such as escalators, stairs and elevators between levels. All of the below ground programs are flooded with diffuse light passing through skylights that penetrate the landscape. Read the rest of this entry »

A new paradigm of design based on three concepts from the Korean way of life: abstractness, life, and human nature is the main concept for TASK Architects’ proposal for the Busan Opera House.

TASK started working on the project to create great memorable moments for the visitors from the minute they approach the site. The architects designed three main exterior spaces, the entrance space as the visitors paths under the huge cantilever, the main exterior plaza, designed to be completely isolated, an escape from the city life; and the sky terrace which visitors can easily access from the exterior plaza. Read the rest of this entry »

Designed by Benjamin Ferns at the University of Nottingham, UK, St. Mary’s Church is an entropic product, dealing with a series of interrelating networks in a dynamic, fluctuating and self-augmenting system. Mechanisms maintain the coastal balance, whilst the architectures of Happisburgh are continually consumed through a cycle of 200 years. Elements from previous systems become reclaimed devices, suspended for eternity in the sunken courtyard of the time arena, a metamorphosis of energy. The architecture seeks to establish a new legacy of St. Mary, one of saviour and recollection, sacrificing the graves of HMS Invinsible to the storms, in exchange for the salt lines that inform the scavenging mechanisms of the impending loss.

A system of petrification and archive, these lands may be re-augmented but they will never be forgotten.