The Five Senses Lounge Bar designed by Barcelona-based, award-winning architecture firm ON-A was created with a clear premise: a desire to be unique and exclusive treatment for its customers. It was designed and constructed as a single space that is capable of stimulating several senses at once: visual, chromatic, auditory, sensory, etc. Seen from outside during the night, the bar resembles a strange lamp of colours, varying each night, while during the day it is a blue volume of irregular facets.

The idea arose from the existing layout of the space, as well as from the analysis of the different types of customers who frequent the lounge bar. There are several interior spaces: a bar zone, VIP areas, an entrance area and quieter zones of variable configuration, characterised by the central position of the privets.

ON-A began working from an analysis of the clients of the bar, leading to design areas that were, architecturally, inspired by genetics and codification. ON-A sought to use a single material, a single skin that would be able to generate the separate aforementioned spaces without completely segregating them, allowing for a perception of the totality of the space from within each of the individual areas. Read the rest of this entry »

Second Skin is an installation proposal designed to complement the aesthetic and image of the clothing line of the Lake and Stars. Our initial concept was to develop a space that recalled the way in which the designers see lingerie as something that can be playfully exposed and integrated into everyday wear. We developed surfaces of abstracted “skins” that alternately reveal and conceal spaces with varying levels of privacy. Fittingly, our inspiration for the structure comes from the pissoirs that line the banks of canals in Amsterdam. These structures allow very private acts to take place in public through the design of the structure, which is configured as a spiral made of perforated metal mounted on standards above a drain. The spiral shape and relative opacity of the material allows for private acts to take place without doors, though the body is not completely enclosed. Our other inspiration was the spatial sensibility of moving through one of Richard Serra’s torque ellipses, whose canted, curved surfaces propel the visitor into forward movement and sensorial engagement and create an environment of anticipation and delayed revelation. In our proposal, the “skins” curve and curl to create a ruled surface that forms dressing areas and backdrops for hanging and shelving display as well as the checkout counter. The existing perimeter walls are secondary sites for display and storage. Read the rest of this entry »

The proposal by  Moatasem Esmat of the Mataria Engineering School for a new Fine Arts Center in Helwan, Egypt represents a mix of architectural principles that stand for a new age of architectural design and sustainability. The project is designed as series of surfaces that emerge from the ground to create inhabitable spaces. The geometry has been carefully designed according to solar exposure, wind currents, and maximum rainwater collection. The roof is a continuos green park perforated at different areas to create courtyards that provide natural light and ventilation to all interior spaces. Among the different areas there is an exhibition hall, convention center, and academic buildings.  Read the rest of this entry »

Apavisa, one of the world’s finest high-technical porcelain manufacturers for the architectural market, recently unveiled a new concept to showcase their products at the company’s showroom in SoHo, New York City. The main concept is to show all the possibilities that the Apavisa porcelain range can offer to the current home and to customers who want to personalize their space.

Apavisa celebrated the event with distinguished guests, which included official public organizations, media, existing customers, and the general public. The attendees were delighted with the new concept and the wide range of products and architectural possibilities. Read the rest of this entry »

DSSH Bridge is designed by sanzpont [arquitectura] for the Building to Building Pedestrian Bridge International Challenge.

Dynamic Reaction: Being a flexible tensile structure, by applying more tension to different points, a technological dynamic deformation can be achieved in response to the people crossing the bridge. It becomes a living element that responds to its use.

Sustainable Design: The tensile skin incorporates Foldable Photovoltaic Solar Panels capturing energy from the sun to generate and supply electricity from a clean and sustainable energy. This makes the bridge self-sustainable. To go beyond green, the design includes Plants that clean and purify the air, transforming the pollution of the city in pure oxygen. Plants and the Breathable Membrane make a greener environment and a clean pedestrian tunnel. Read the rest of this entry »

Terreform ONE was pleased to announce the semifinalists of: Water as the 6th Borough: Open International Design Competition to Envision the Sixth Borough of New York City. The competition called for ideas for the NYC Blue Network and E3NYC, The World Largest Clean Tech Expo. The propositions ranged from: expanding waterborne transportation, linking the five boroughs with transit hubs, incorporating ferries, water taxis, bike shares, electric car-shares, and electric shuttle buses, as well as providing in-water recreation, educational events, cultural activities, pavilion halls, and climate resilience. Read the rest of this entry »

Mexico’s National Council for Culture and the Arts (CONACULTA) has announced that the “Cineteca Nacional del Siglo XXI” (National Film Archive) project has been awarded to Rojkind Arquitectos.

“To intervene and expand the National Film Archive involves understanding a substantial change in film, as suggested in the term “moving pictures”.Today, images move not only on a screen, the screens move with us; they go where we go, and the movies, have gone from being a gathering space for the masses, to also reaching us wherever we might be.

The new National Film Archive and Film Institute must understand this condition, both to ensure and protect the wealth of our country’s moving pictures as well as those of the rest of the world and to make them accessible, in all their various forms, to the general public. A place which will have movies, but which will also offer other recreational spaces, taking advantage of the latest technologies. Common spaces and spaces to promote communication. The idea is in part to remove film from its classic exhibition site: movies in the park, in the café, in the square, to transform those spaces to become more than just services related to the experience of the movies, but rather to become part of the experience itself: the park itself as a movie, or the café, or the square.

In this way, the National Film Archive becomes a space of physical and virtual connections between media and people. An interface with two key elements: the continuous ground that connects the different elements that make up the National Film Archive and the roof, that connects them in its own way.” – Alejandro Hernández Read the rest of this entry »

The recent “ArchiSUR” competition was held among the architect and designer members of the Russian social network, Vkontakte. Supported by GRAPHISOFT Russia, the objective of the “Architectural design in ArchiCAD” contest was to implement fresh visions in architecture and design using ArchiCAD. The contestants were not limited to traditional notions of reality and were free to implement the most fantastic architectural design ideas, inspired by the works of surrealistic masterpieces.

The contest received more than 100 projects by architects and designers from across Russia, Belorussia, and Ukraine. The participants competed in three categories: SUR interior, SUR exterior, and SUR idea. Voters identified three of the winning projects in each of the categories; six projects were awarded incentive prizes. Read the rest of this entry »

(c) Philip Hanforth

The new Museum of Liverpool, opening on July 19th will not only tell the story of its importance as one of the World’s great ports or about its cultural influence, such as with the Beatles phenomenon. It will also serve as a meeting point for History, the People of Liverpool and visitors from around the globe. Therefore, according to the Architect, Kim Herforth Nielsen, the structure functions as much more than just a Building or a Museum.

As the largest National Museum to be built in the UK in over 100 years, and situated on a UNESCO World Heritage Site next to Liverpool’s famous ’Three Graces,’ Principal Architect and Creative Director at 3XN Kim Herforth Nielsen was fully aware of the magnitude of the challenge, when it came to designing the new Museum of Liverpool. Read the rest of this entry »

0RN8 is interested in pursuing the creation of novel interiorities through the articulated elaboration of experimental and existing structural systems. The development and differentiation of each tectonic system experiment that is under analysis occurs within the defining parameters of the system’s own inherent logic. The team’s design research work commenced with a variety of parametric design studies, where the issues of frame and fabric were investigated, along with the notion of generating multilayered, tectonic systems, where each of the layers was generated in an autopoietic manner.

After experimenting with generic parametric systems, the filigree interiors of the Gothic tectonic systems were chosen, as historical precedents that are the most efficient, in terms of aesthetic richness, qualitative differentiation, piecemeal construction and part-to-whole relationship intensities. Using the Gothic vault bay tectonic system as a starting point, an analysis of arch, rib and profile curvatures, as well as variable thicknesses and depths takes place, in an attempt to parameterize the entire vault bay structural system. This parameterization will eventually lead to the creation of a novel, autopoietic and parametric, proto-design system, which will give birth to a variety of inherently multi-systematic and adaptive interiorities. Read the rest of this entry »