How do we rethink an Opera? There is no lack in ambition.The constant all consuming urge for innovation can be destructive and self serving. But there is no mistaking the impact of creative processes fuelled by these seemingly undesirable traits . To dissect the traditional opera, gnawing away at the foundations of the sacred opera house till that threshold is reached when the hierarchies are disintegrated, when the instrument becomes the artist, and artist the facilitator.

The attempt was to transform the notion of a designed space into that of a designed intent. Performative spaces were achieved through articulations of the skin, the surface and the structure. Starting from a simple module, the articulations rise in complexity and hierarchy to sprout a new opera and concert hall in the middle of the Stadtpark in Vienna. The landscape is a manicured english garden which is transformed by the growth of the bionic music pavilion progressively mutating into an Opera. A relationship fluctuating between symbiotic and parasitic exists between the landscape and the opera in such a way that the boundaries are blurred. Read the rest of this entry »

Designing a gathering point for the city of Timisoara, the main focus for the pavilion conceived by Chris Precht was to stand out as an attractor and fit in the context at the same time. Located within the green lung of the city with direct connection to its surrounding districts and due to its vertical orientation, the highseat‘ has a great potential to serve as a cultural,social, and urban focal point to attract people back to the park.

The goal was not designing a brand new shiny project, but an self-evolving pavilion becoming one with its location in a way that the strongest and most capable plants will impose on the structure. Some time later, there should be a completely unpredictable, wild and unorganized garden taking over the pavilion.

Three centimeters thick and thirty centimeters wide romanian beech timber boards construct a truss system covering a spacial program based on relaxation during the day and activation in the evening. After entering the building the first spacial program is for people resting after physical activities. Read the rest of this entry »

(RE)Configured-Assemblage is a developmental landmark proposal by WE-DESIGNS.ORG in collaboration  with XP& architecture composed of reconfigured traces of shipping containers, through diligently reconnecting, revitalising, and humanizing the accessibility of the City of Long Beach, Long Beach Blvd and Broadway Area. Through proposing three types of innovatively reconstructed modular shipping containers, the overall construct leads to open courtyards, interlocking units, and playfully generated programs that introduce a new innovative topological design that regenerates and reconnects the community.

Bringing together a fusion of technological, economical and cultural entities, and combining a public free space into an interlocked modular construct, which includes an internal courtyard as public landscape, the newly developed (RE)Configured-Assemblage becomes an open playground of hidden gems, which offers the community countless integrated opportunities to develop and harmonise the City of Long Beach, Long Beach Blvd Area. The shifting of the vertical containers on the Intelligent Daylight Façade represents the constant movement of containers in the nation’s busiest container port. Read the rest of this entry »

‘Eleva’, the proposal for the entrances to the new underground of San Sebastian, is based on the idea of the manipulation of the terrain. As the tubes of the metro network are generated by excavating and perforating the ground, the access is created by cutting the pavement in correspondence to the superfitial world.

The concept is to recognize the place to penetrate and – as the Pink Panther would do – cut the surface and elevate it to obtain an access to the subterranean world. Finally the area of intervention is delimited and pointed out by a change of material. As a result the object in sinuos curves emphasizes its strong sculptural character demanding its protagonism in the urban scale. The entrances are conceived as landmarks of the city of San Sebastian, leading the users to recognize them as an inseparable part of the metro and the urban surroundings. Read the rest of this entry »

Moscow Design week – the most important annual design event in Russia, organized by ART TRADING Group, will be starting on October 11, 2011. Intense program of MDW 2011 is dedicated to Design in an extended sense: starting from product-, fashion- and graphic- design to the latest developments in architecture. The project, featuring both Russian and international participants, will occupy the main lecture halls and exhibition spaces of Russian capital. The aim of MDW 2011 is to create a platform for design in Russia and to set international business standards within the industry along with supporting business and friendship worldwide.

«This annual event is overwhelming the entire city. It engages the broadest audience: intellectual elite, art-community, show-business celebrities as well as everybody who is already absorbed by the topic or wants to discover it. Mostly non-profit exhibitions showcase the latest catch-ups in the world of design: visiting them one will explore the unknown sphere, looking, touching and finding things he likes or meeting amazing people» – commented Alexandr Fedotov, the President of organising committee of MDW 2011 and ART TRADING Group.

For the week Moscow will turn into design cluster, bringing up such professionals in contemporary design domain as Maarten Baas, Giulio Cappellini, Luigi Colani, Paola Navone, Li Edelkoort and other stars. Read the rest of this entry »

The design for a modular, deployable, and adaptable bridge using parametric strategies and digital fabrication methods was developed by studio BÄNG. The design was conceived using the following rules:  Four data points were established at the beginning, middle, and the end of the bridge. These 12 parametrized points give the opportunity to steer the crosssection of the bridge at three important areas. Based on these points the defi nition creates three frames one for each end of the bridge and one in the middle.

All frames get connected and the resulting four-point polylines triangulated to get the base of the load bearing framework for each side of the bridge. The triangles get offsetted according to the sun and then moved in direction of their normals. By lofting the two resulting curves a rigid and complex looking shape occurs.

The most important benefit of parametric design and digital fabrication is the optimization of the whole design process. Modularity, the optimization of the construction time as well as saving material were the main goals.  Read the rest of this entry »

Proposal made by the twin brothers of sanzpont [arquitectura] for Busan Opera House Competition. The concept of design is based on the philosophy of Korea, the balance of opposites, the Um-Yang. The fundamental idea is to create an iconic building that represents the culture in which it is immersed, to remind the native people where they come from in order to promote this philosophy to the outside world. Materializing this ancient philosophy in a cutting edge building connects the past with the present, giving long life to a culture that must be projected into the future. The vision of this building is the integration with its natural and urban environment, besides being spectacular, create public spaces and nature, respecting and helping the environment, a sustainable design that promote a city to the world. Read the rest of this entry »

Toxicity/contamination/mutation/distortion is a hybride which synthesizes a library and garden into a one spacial continuum. The project designed by Kadri Kerge at the University of Applied Arts Vienna is located in the Burggarten, Vienna – which served as a private royal garden for the Habsburg family. It is situated between the Austrian National Library and a large greenhouse called Palmenhaus that sits at a right angle to it. The roots of the plants from the greenhouse grow out of the container, break the sealed ground and as a mutants combine nature and building. They overlap with the context in housing part of the program of institutions nearby like The Austrian Film Museum, the National Library, and the Albertina Museum.

Toxic Garden is a self-sustainable building generating heat and power through the plants which are growing in the building. The energy design concept provides a range of microclimatic conditions as interfaces between user, information and nature. The building of the Austrian National library is an opulent baroque structure that has housed the Imperial book collection between 1721 and 1918, that was then nationalized. Read the rest of this entry »

Hong Kong’s urban furniture contains multiple functional objects. Each of them belongs to a different set of formal expression or is part of a different style.

While variation is obvious in the style mix of Hong Kong’s public furniture, there is a lack of uniformity in the formal expression that could foster a unique Hong Kong identity. This design proposal by Rocker-Lange Architects for a contemporary city bench seeks to understand the concept of street furniture as a holistic design problem. Instead of offering only one single static design, this scheme suggests multiple varying solutions that meet specific fitness criteria.

The project “Urban Adapter” is based on a digital parametric model. At its core the model utilizes explicit site information and programmatic data to react and interact with its environment. That way the model’s DNA structure is capable of producing a variety of unique furniture results. Read the rest of this entry »

In China, the number of young bachelors is drastically raising because of the skyrocketing housing prices and women are unwilling to marry men without a property. As a result, young graduates spend most of their time working hard but remain single until they can afford a property. In order to cater for this trend, developers start launching smaller housing units to the market. This project designed by Kellen Qiaolun Huang from Cornell University aims at exploring different ways of how these bachelor housing units can be designed other than just being smaller.

Home activities can be divided into two categories: private activities (sleeping, bathing, etc.) and public activities (cooking, eating, reading, relaxing, etc.). Researching and remapping the topological relationship between these two categories are the keys to this project. An X-shaped pattern is generated as result: a private space is being placed in the center with four quarters of public spaces in the corners. The pattern may seem meaningless to individuals until all units are aggregated to form a large interconnecting social network. This network becomes the prototype of X-House. Read the rest of this entry »