A nearly 40-year-old municipal parking garage in downtown Manhattan is getting a remarkable cable façade as part of a $4 million renovation of the structure. Winner of a 2011 design award from the NYC Design Commission, the five-story, concrete Delancey and Essex Municipal Parking Garage is being completely rehabilitated in a project for the NYC Department of Transportation (DOT). The design, by Michielli + Wyetzner Architects, is part of Mayor Bloomberg’s Design + Construction Excellence Program which has been led by the New York City Department of Design and Construction since 2004.

The three-dimensional open façade consists of two layers of 1 1/4” diameter cables, material more commonly seen in DOT road barriers, extended in a continuous weave-like pattern from the second to fifth floors. The front layer folds in and out from the flat-planed one behind, creating large-scale moiré patterns that move across the building as the viewer walks or drives up the street. The cable façade replaces a grill-like concrete covering that had begun to deteriorate. Read the rest of this entry »

The objective in designing the ‘Living Bridge’ was to describe a new type of nonlinear algorithmic architecture through the design of an inhabitable bridge in Tokyo.  The chosen site integrates with the residential neighborhoods of Ginza and Tsukishima.  Through the harnessing and intensification of the discrete flows of the two neighborhoods, and through algorithmic generation of turbulent spatial and programmatic structures, a reinvention of the inhabitable bridge type is achieved.

Creating Living Bridge was a three-step process.  Using Processing, the designers identified the movement patterns of people and vehicles in the city, considered them as agent-based systems of entangled flows, and modeled their interactions as a vector field.  Next, they released decking agents to read the vector field, moving through it and creating walking, cycling, and vehicular paths.  Finally, the designers introduced self-organizing components that changed their shape and connectivity depending on the turbulence of the field.  The components thereby simultaneously create, channel, and enclose the interactions of the circulation and programs inhabiting the bridge, leading to a dynamic space that connects and activates the riverfront. Read the rest of this entry »

Tyler Johnson Johnson

We are pleased to share with you a group of projects developed by students at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University in New York City. The Bad Weather studio was taught by Florian Idenburg and Jing Liu, partners at the award-winning innovative architecture firm SO-IL. The main idea behind the studio was to explore architecture’s potential in relationship with natural forces beyond mankind’s power and reason – being the weather one of the last unpredictable and instable systems. The studio used the typology of the skyscraper as the enabler of the contemporary sublime. Read the rest of this entry »

Cocoon Housing is a highly conceptual housing typology that was designed by John Farrace at the USC School of Architecture for the purpose of exploring techniques of representation. The project is an attempt to reduce both technical and experiential drawings to their essence (at a graphic level), and hybridize them into a homogenous set of drawings that reference the mediated experience of a camera lens (in perspective) and the raw look of black and white technical line drawings.  Each drawing fits into a given category — plan, elevation, perspective, for example — but have specific components of other categories, leaving an “in-between drawing” that represents and speaks to multiple ideas at once. Read the rest of this entry »

This parametric project designed by Dimitrie Stefanescu, Patrick Bedarf, and Bogdan Hambasan started out as an ambitious student-powered endeavor to design and fabricate at a 1:1 scale the flagship pavilion for the ZA11 Speaking Architecture event in Cluj, Romania; while at the same time integrating it into its historically-charged context. The design boasts a strong representational power which was much needed in order to fulfill its main goal: attracting passers-by to the event. At the same time, the object, through its tectonic characteristics, tries to make legible the new ontology which is slowly defined by computational architecture and thus becomes a showcase for the design processes empowered by digital tools. Read the rest of this entry »

Joenniemi Manor in Finalnd was originally built as a large residence before it was converted into a museum with 500 sqm of exhibition spaces. Due to its original planning as a home, large-scale travelling exhibitions cannot be conveniently displayed in the current exhibition facilities. In addition, the service facilities are insufficient, and the collection and office areas are also inadequate. The program, the necessary heights, and its integration with the landscape led to the idea of piling up the functions to minimize the groundfloor area of the building and keep intact as much landscape as possible. Read the rest of this entry »

Super-Stadium is a proposal designed by Alan Lu for an Olympic complex for Harbin’s bid for the 2022 Winter Olympics that seeks to integrate the multitude of Olympic arenas and villages into one continuous entity, allowing for a seamless transition between programs and events. Read the rest of this entry »

Built in 1935, the Joenniemi Manor was the masterpiece of architect Jarl Eklund. The floor plan and design of the building point to the clear influence of Functionalism and English country house architecture. The park and formal garden featuring geometric landscape elements are designed by Paul Olsson in the same year. At that time, this style of landscape was unique in the Mänttä village community. The Joenniemi Manor and its garden are symbols of the architecture in the early 20th century and express the cultural awareness in Finland’s rural surroundings.

The architectural solution by award-winning architects Kubota & Bachmann intends a discrete insertion of the new extension into the site. The horizontality of the glass roof reflects the different seasons and times of the sky. The interior benefits from a panoramic view of the Lake Melasjärvi. Beneath the large roof and taking advantage of an existing depression in the site, the program elements step gently down in sequence: conference and representation facilities, restaurant and kitchen facilities, offices, collection facilities, exhibition facilities, the sequence terminating at the foot of the banks of Lake Melasjärvi. Read the rest of this entry »

Voussoir Cloud by IwamotoScott explores the structural paradigm of pure compression coupled with an ultra-light material system. The design fills the gallery with a system of vaults to be experienced both from within and from above. The edges of the vaults are delimited by the entry soffit and the two long gallery walls. Spatially, they migrate to form greater density at these edges. Structurally, the vaults rely on each other and the three walls to retain their pure compressive form. The fourteen segmented pieces also resolve to make a series of five columns that support the interior and back edge. Read the rest of this entry »

Downtown Los Angeles based design group APHIDoIDEA proposes the eCORRE COMPLEX, The Environmental Center of Regenerative Research & Education, to the City of Long Beach in California. The project takes the ISO container used by the Port of Long Beach (2nd busiest port in the World). Designed and placed as a FINALIST entry for the AIA-LA / USGBC Emerging Talent Design Competition, APHIDoIDEA re-adapts the shipping container as core building elements and implemented sustainable strategies to educate its visitors and users about “green” building practices such as solar energy, water collections, interior daylighting, rooftop gardens, passive cooling techniques, reuse of grey water, to name a few. Read the rest of this entry »