Bjarke Ingels Group unveiled their design for a new elementary school in Asminderod, Denmark. A pristine undulating hillside serves as the backdrop for the future Vilhelmsro School and its outdoor facilities. The sloping landscape and the building’s sloping roofs merge into one continuous experience. The surrounding landscape serves as an aesthetic backdrop and as an integral part of the school’s mission which focuses on nature and sustainability. Formed as a sloping landscape bands the building merges with nature and allows daylight into all the class rooms. Read the rest of this entry »

Today FIFA announced that the 2018 World Cup will be held in Russia and the main stadium has been designed by Erick van Egeraat.  Egeraat and Russian partner Mikhail Posokhin, architects of Moscow’s new VTB Arena are thrilled to hear of this decision. “What wonderful news! What a start for this new Russian masterpiece to be the center of the 2018 FIFA World Cup™!”, says architect-director Erick van Egeraat when presented with this latest news. “The VTB arena will be more than a soccer-arena; the multitude of functions will ensure enjoyment for its visitors for decades!” With a 300,000-m2 development surface the VTB Arena Park is one of the largest projects that will be developed in the Russian Federation in the coming years.

VTB Arena Park comprises the redevelopment of the Dynamo Moscow stadium and an articulation of the surrounding park. In contradiction with mono – functional sports arena’s Erick van Egeraat designs multifunctional urban regenerator,that will play a key role in transforming its wider surroundings. Erick van Egeraat’s 300,000-m2 multifunctional culture, health and sports centre will be developed on a 116,000-m2 site and will comprise a 45,000-seat Stadium Arena for Dynamo Moscow, a 10,000-seat Arena Hall, a Retail and Entertainment complex, restaurants, parking and other facilities. This careful mix of functions will ensure a self sustaining character. Read the rest of this entry »

Zaha Hadid Architects unveiled their design for the new Library & Learning Centre (LLC) for the University of Vienna, Austria which rises as a polygonal block from the centre of the new University Campus. The LLC’s design takes the form of a cube with both inclined and straight edges. The straight lines of the building’s exterior separate as they move inward, becoming curvilinear and fluid to generate a free-formed interior canyon that serves as the central public plaza of the centre. All the other facilities of the LLC are housed within a single volume that also divides, becoming two separate ribbons that wind around each other to enclose this glazed gathering space.

Images ©Zaha Hadid Architects

Mirko Daneluzzo unveiled his proposal for a music center to be located on the waterfront in Toronto, an evident part of the city’s skyline, representing the vibrant on growing music scene. The project uses the preexisting Canada Malting Silos industrial building to convert it into the contemporary form of a cultural contamination beacon. The project is defined by a series of layers that have different performative qualities embedded that modify the character of the building as a person flows seamlessly through the space and experiences the curated environment of the building.

The layer system generates a collection of musical experiences, from the strong typology of the theaters characterized by a clean geometry, to the eroded geometry that conforms the spaces in-between, research and education institutions, and knits the project to the surrounding context. The place gives you something to build the script to design something unique: Toronto is characterized by severe winters and hot summers, then the external layer works as a protective skin in winter thanks the slow formation of an artificial ice barrier in between the fissures, and wind catchers to allows a natural ventilation in summer.

The eroded geometry is dealing with the aesthetic idea of “matte”: matte is the finishing of dull and flat, without a shine surfaces. Matte stores the time’s patina, it absorbs the context, it becomes the context.

via suckerPUNCH

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The Cairns Institute, the new hub for tropical research is set to re-define teaching and learning in climatic conditions. Proposing a concept that will celebrate the rainforest setting, and enrich the place experience was a winning formula for Queensland based practices, Woods Bagot and RPA Architects who have been awarded the design of The Cairns Institute, headquartered on the James Cook University (JCU) Cairns campus.

A AUS$25 million project, the Institute, located in the north of Queensland, Australia, will be a research hub, housing specialists in the social sciences, humanities, law and business sectors to examine the issues of importance to people in the tropics.

Putting The Cairns Institute and JCU on the international stage to attract post-graduate students from around the globe; and to enable the university to draw a high calibre of researchers was key to the winning design. “Attracting the best researchers was the central aim of the university – it was crucial that our proposed building design would create an environment that optimises the working experience to a point that people would love engaging with the building,” Mark Damant, Principal, Woods Bagot said.

Cradled on three sides by rain-forested slopes, the landscape setting was inherent to the idea of a tropical campus – drawing the rainforest into the campus, enriching the urban campus heart, and in turn stimulating thought leadership from the students. “Intrinsic to our design proposition, was a concept that celebrated the rainforest setting and enriched the place experience. The proposed facade is layered and evolutionary – landscape is encouraged by shape – the building is blurred into the landscape itself,” David Derbyshire, Director RPA Architects said. Read the rest of this entry »

Daniel Simmons unveiled his design for a series of structures small enough to be collected as artworks. They can be disassembled and transported to a variety of venues for exhibition, both outdoors and in gallery spaces. As new structures are acquired, they can be clustered together in configurations freely decided by their owner, forming the fragment of a laneway or small courtyard. Read the rest of this entry »

Foster and Partners unveiled their design for Qatar’s 2022 World Cup bid, the Lusail Iconic Stadium which will provide a world-class football facility for 86,250 spectators during the opening ceremony, group games and final. Reflecting Doha’s culture and heritage, the stadium is designed to be highly energy efficient and capable of performing in extreme summer climatic conditions.

The stadium has a near-circular footprint and sits on the masterplan’s primary axis, which divides the stadium precinct into two halves. Encircled by a reflective pool of water, spectators cross the ‘moat’ to enter the building via six bridges. An outer pedestrian concourse extends from the water towards an array of smaller amenity buildings and a hotel at the stadium’s perimeter.

The saddle-form roof appears to float above the concrete seating bowl, discreetly supported by a ring of arching columns. Its central section can be retracted to allow the pitch to be either open to the sky or fully covered. The concave profile of the stadium’s outer enclosure evokes the sails of a traditional dhow boat and incorporates a system of operable louvres. Inside, the seating bowl is designed to enhance the experience and atmosphere for spectators: VIP and hospitality accommodation is concentrated along the sides of the pitch to create a continuous sea of fans behind each goal. Read the rest of this entry »

UNStudio, in collaboration with DP Architects, has been selected from a shortlist of five practices to design Plot A of the SUTD (Singapore University of Technology and Design) campus.

Located on a site of 76,846 m2 and close to both Changi airport – Singapore’s principal airport – and the Changi Business Park, the SUTD will be Singapore’s fourth and most prestigious university. The Singapore University of Technology and Design will offer four key academic pillars: Architecture and Sustainable Design (ASD), Engineering Product Development (EPD), Engineering Systems and Design (ESD) and Information Systems Technology and Design (ISTD). The SUTD will be a driver of technological innovation and economic growth, with the new campus acting as both a catalyst and a conveyor for advancement, bringing together people, ideas and innovation.

UNStudio’s design for the new campus directly reflects SUTD’s curriculum, using the creative enterprise of the school to facilitate a cross-disciplinary interface; interaction is established between the professional world, the campus, and the community at large. The design for the campus offers an opportunity to embrace innovation and creativity through a non-linear connective relationship between students, faculty, professionals and the spaces they interact with. Read the rest of this entry »

Zaha Hadid and Lemghari Essakl, Managing Director of The Bouregreg Valley Development Agency signed an agreement for the architectural design of the Rabat Grand Theatre at a ceremony held in Rabat on November 5. During the event, Mr. Essakl also signed the project financing agreement with Mr. Salaheddine Mezouar, Moroccan Minister of Economy & Finance, Mr. Taieb Cherkaoui, Minister of the Interior, and Mr. Abdelouahed Kabbaj, Chairman of the Executive Board of the Hassan II Fund for Economic & Social Development.

With a dedicated land area of 47 000 sqm and a gross floor area of 27 000 sqm, the Rabat Grand Theatre is a cultural venue of the highest standards. It will include a 2,050-seat theatre, a smaller 520-seat theatre, creative studios and a fully-equipped outdoor amphitheatre with a capacity of up to 7,000 people. Read the rest of this entry »

Chris Bosse of Laboratory for Visionary Architecture [LAVA] has created a window installation for the famous Italian department store la Rinascente for its Contemporary Christmas Art windows. LAVA’s window installation is an origami coral reef using 1500 recycled and recyclable cardboard molecules that explores the intelligence of natural and architectural systems.

The sculpture plays with space by climbing up walls and arching over to create coral caves. Based on the geometrical structures of sea foam and corals, the colourful reef comes to life through dynamic lighting and sound. Bosse, director of multinational LAVA, is one of seven designers from around the world to be commissioned to create a window – others are Kirsten Hassenfeld, Gyngy Laky, Andrea Mastrovito, Satsuki Oishi, Richard Sweeney, Margherita Marchioni and Tjep.

The store windows are at la Rinascente’s Piazza Duomo store, in the centre of Milan, design capital of the world. This is the first time la Rinascente have commissioned artists to do Christmas windows. The installation shows how a particular module, copied from nature, can generate architectural space, and how the intelligence of the smallest unit dictates the intelligence of the overall system.

Ecosystems such as coral reefs act as a metaphor for an architecture where the individual components interact in symbiosis to create an environment. Bosse says: “In urban terms, the smallest homes, the spaces they create, the energy they use, the heat and moisture they absorb, multiply into a bigger organisational system, whose sustainabilty depends on their intelligence”. Current trends in parametric modeling, digital fabrication and material-science were applied to the space-filling installation.