Award-winning architectural firm REX designed  a residential complex in Songdo Landmark City, Korea in which every apartment offers direct southern exposure, cross-ventilation, and views. However, Korean zoning guidelines and local building practices typically produce towers that fail to provide these three locally-prized amenities. Furthermore, prevailing site strategies carve up the open space such that the result is not the often-advertised “Towers in a Park,” but anemic “Towers in a Yard” instead.

Block A4 challenges conventional Korean development practices to provide the three key amenities within each unit and a true publicly-accessible park at grade. Korean towers typically have four or more units per floor. As a result, many apartments have limited direct light, no southern exposure and poor cross-ventilation. By splitting a single tower with four units per floor into four separate towers with only one unit per floor, the resulting super-slim building type. Read the rest of this entry »

Solus4 recently unveiled  a 2,500 sm Marine Research Center Located 100 meters away, parallel to the shore of Kuta Beach, Bali, Indonesia. The program is composed of three main components: public, semipublic and private. The spaces vary from underwater labs, scientist bedrooms and aquatic garden to sea water pool, swimming pool terrace, bar and an auditorium. The spaces are located above and under water and allow the visitors and scientist to take full advantage of the amazing landscape that surrounds the project.

This project represents a new typology for stationary in-water based projects reached by boat, which in the past have been mostly relegated as merely work, non-destination platforms which do not take into account the design possibilities that the in-water sites present. Read the rest of this entry »

The new Antwerp Port Authority headquarters designed by Zaha Hadid Architects will house approximately 500 staff (currently working in separate buildings) in a single new location that comprises a former fire station and the new extension.

Staff and visitors arrive in the central atrium which also operates as an exhibition space, from where public counters, offices and meeting rooms in the existing building are directly accessible. The offices, meeting rooms, auditorium and panoramic restaurant in the new extension are accessible via panoramic lifts just off the central courtyard. In total the new Port House design is 12,800 m² (gross): 6,600 m² in the refurbished Fire Station, and 6,200 m² in the extension. The maximum dimensions of the new building extension are 114 m long, 24 m wide and 46 m high, providing an additional 4 floors. Read the rest of this entry »

OFIS Arhitekti unveiled a mixed-use development for Ljubljana, Slovenia to be completed in 2011. The project is located in the city’s main pedestrian street and its program is a mixture of boutique shops, café, and residences. The street and the park will be connected with a public passage perforating the building  in different levels.

The lower 4 floors are shops connected with a mall while the top three floors are reserved for apartments. The building has terraces between the low-rise historical line and the park, towards the recent extension of the Post Office on the north border of the site. These terraces offer beautiful views towards the old city and the castle. A lower terrace forms an open air café while higher terraces are designed as apartments. 
Some are enclosed with “green pillows”- an organic layered metal mesh with implanted greenery inside.

Similar to fashion, the building changes through seasons: the fall / winter appearance is  silver and sometimes covered in snow. On the other hand, during spring and summer, it is green and covered with flowers. Read the rest of this entry »

Award-winning New York studio Asymptote Architecture unveiled a proposal for a new master plan for an area south of Orio al Serio International Airport, located near the historic and majestic city of Bergamo in Northern Italy, calls for an intricate complex inspired by the rolling planar aspects of the region’s countryside. The master plan is a meandering and intriguingly articulated collection of surfaces that seem to have evolved naturally from the adjacent farmlands. The manifestation of the Italian rural landscape in built form is an elegant solution to the real and commercial need for mid- to large-scale development projects such as this one. The scheme calls for powerful, yet subtle, new architectural works placed on an urban plinth and pursues a quasi-urban notion of occupancy where the interior and exterior spaces are fluid and transitional from one another. Overall, the Azzano-San Paolo Master Plan is a signal for the possibility of such developments to be aesthetically compelling and architecturally dynamic. Read the rest of this entry »

New York based architects SO-IL conceived the “Flockr” pavilion as a structure that responds to its environment while also creating a sense of place through its basic form. Covered with thousands of tinted mirrored panels, the skin reflects its surroundings and makes the changing contexts of this temporary and mobile installation—the cityscapes of Beijing and Shanghai— an integral part of its expression. In SO-IL’s experimental façade, only the top of each panel is attached to the structure, allowing the individual pieces to respond to wind and creating a kinetic skin that is permeable by light and air. The pavilion’s structure is made out of 56 thin, flexible steel rods that connect at the bottom and the top into two large steel rings. The larger bottom ring frames the interior perimeter of the structure while the smaller top ring creates a skylight; the relationship between the two results in the pavilion’s curvilinear womb-like shape. The activities that take place within are gently enclosed by a dynamic pattern of thousands of flickering reflections. Because it is circular in plan and curvilinear in section, the pavilion does not discriminate any direction; once passing through the entryway, the interior is generous and encompassing. Read the rest of this entry »

Dutch studio Wiel Arets Architects won the first prize to design the Ijhal – the pedestrian portion of the Amsterdam’s Central Station which is currently undergoing a drastic transformation to become the centrepiece of the city’s plan to reconnect neighbourhood clusters through the restructuring of its public transportation systems. The IJhal, to be located in the rear of Amsterdam’s Centraal Station, on the waterfront of the river IJ, will be the main pedestrian centric portion of the renewed station, adding gastronomic, leisure and service areas to the station’s program.

Historically, the neighbourhood of Amsterdam North has been separated from the rest of the city by the river IJ. With the opening of the IJhal at Centraal Station – and later, the North-South Metro line that will travel under the IJ and physically connect Amsterdam North with the rest of the city – this barrier will be broken down. Read the rest of this entry »

Italian architectural studio OFL architecture received the first prize in the international competition “New Silk Road Map” that aims for the recovery, reinterpretation, and reconfiguration of the Silk Road – a network of commercial, cultural, and religious paths that connected the Eastern and Western civilizations for more than 2000 years.

OFL’s project description:

Silk Road Map Evolution (SRME) is a project born out of the will to revive and regenerate the current layout of the silk road. This is to be accomplished by means of a social, economic, political and architectonic redevelopment of the historic stretch of the road that once belonged to Marco Polo.

The project deeply integrates infrastructure with architecture and by means of a new railway system functioning on gravitational platforms follows the trail from Venice to Xian, Shanghai and Tokyo, extending its “arms” to create new infrastructures, commercial services and residences. A wiry MOTOR CITY extends itself to help out urban realities and struggling economies. The (linearly) diffused city runs into other micro-cities in such a way that the greater entity hooks onto the smaller ones to help them survive and, like an economic pump, extends life from the greater nodes to the smaller and poorer extremities. The 15,000 km of the silk road shall be broken up by bionic towers which will represent the centers of new urban sprawls. The new silk road line will also serve as the GENERATOR of other paths that will branch off of the main course of the road to develop a larger economic armature. Read the rest of this entry »

French architectural studio Complex City unveiled their design for a mixed-use hall to be located in the small city of Prégny-Chambésy, Switzerland. The project is based on intimate relationship between exterior and interior areas where each space is codependent of another. The outer skin is inspired on traditional embroidery and plant cell patterns allowing an interesting play of light and shadow. The new hall to be completed by the end of 2010 will contain exhibition and performing spaces and serve as a cultural destination for the city and region. Read the rest of this entry »

The design for the Lusall Iconic Stadium in Doha, Qatar was recently unveiled in a ceremony in London as part of Qatar’s bid for the 2022 World Cup. The energy efficient stadium was conceived by Foster and Partners as a floating bowl with a retractable roof. It will seat over 86,000 spectators which will be protected from the extreme hot by an innovative canopy that allows light while blocking the heat. The stadium’s parking is covered by photovoltaic cells that will provide sufficient energy during matches and will power a large portion of the neighborhood when not in use.

via Inhabitat Read the rest of this entry »