The Peace Pentagon is an initiative in New York City that promotes Peace through food. Chefs from war torn areas around the globe are invited to share their food and culture with New Yorkers. “Thirty-two Tents” is the winning proposal by Austrian studio Sphere Architecture to design the Peace Pentagon Building in lower Manhattan.

Architects vision:

A new shape for this building can succeed only as a visible restatement of its most basic assumptions. But a building embodies basic assumptions best when it effectively restructures its entire environment— even as economically, socially, and architecturally diverse environment as lower Manhattan! The original building will double in size. The white superstructure amplifies its dimensions, both transforming the impression it makes and reconfiguring its surroundings. Read the rest of this entry »

This project is the postgraduate thesis designed by Liu Chien Sheng. It is a cathedral proposal for Vienna as a new idea for societal multi-function, and the development of sanctity and form. The site is located in St. Stephen’s Cathedral which is the center of economy, culture, and traffic for the city.

New cathedrals integrates the surrounding societal functions, such as religious, art, commercial activities, tourism and traffic system. The church of this project is placed on the ground floor, theaters and department store on the upper floor of the basement. All the layers are divided by glass floor, and thus, the activities in different level generate visual overlap by the transparence of glass floor. People can experience the new cathedral through variety of spaces. This design is more appropriate style for the cathedral which is required to have multiple functions in modern human life.

The form of architecture comes from the reserved altar structure of St. Stephen’s Cathedral. After defining the principle of the transformation, the basic column structure was reformed into various types and generates the spaces in different parts of columns to accomplish the catalogs of typologies. Read the rest of this entry »

Out of over 715 submissions from 55 countries, a jury consisting of architects Daniel Liebeskind, Richard Meier, Wendy Evans Joseph, and holocaust scholars James E. Young, Paul B. Winkler, and Clifford Chanin, selected Julian King architect as one of six finalists for the Atlantic City Boardwalk Holocaust Memorial – winner will be announced in November.

An ethereal wall of over 100,000 glass bottles representing those who survived the Nazi death camps, each with a personal message, rises out of the sand as a glimmering beacon of hope and testament to human resilience in the face of atrocity.

A call is put out for letters and photographs of the survivors, their words and images to be etched into solid bottles cast from recycled glass. Local students participate in the preliminary assembly of the bottle walls, which are then bound together in an innovative post tensioned design. Built by the community and the world, the memorial attests to the fragile but enduring bonds of humanity. Read the rest of this entry »

SOMA Architects and Park51 developer Sharif el-Gamal just unveiled a new set of renderings of the controversial Mosque proposal near Ground Zero in New York City. The project is planned to be a 15-story Islamic community center estimated to cost around $140 million -investment would come from various real-estate companies in Dubai.

The mosque will include a $17 million prayer space in the basement, a memorial, and recreational facilities. Gamal’s idea is to recover the investment by offering high-end amenities including swimming pool, gym, and spa to affluent New Yorkers – memberships would start at $2,700 per year.

SOMA’s design features a structural façade based on Arabic geometric patterns that create an interesting play between solids and voids. Read the rest of this entry »

List of the world’s 10 tallest building proposals.

Burj Mubarak Al Kabir
Madinat Al Hareer, Kuwait
234 floors
1001 meters (3284 ft)

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The Seoul Tea Service is the latest product design by Zaha Hadid Architects, which was commissioned by NY Projects in 2009. The service is made out of ceramic while the textured case that resembles a spaceship is carbon fiber. The fluid and dynamic form of the set is based on the exploration of movement through space. Read the rest of this entry »

Polish architectural firm Studio Architektoniczne Kwadrat won the first place in the international competition to design the World War II Museum in Gdansk, Poland.

Architect’s description:

To fit in the historic part of the city, and creating a form that may become its icon at the same time, we had to make a compromise between its forma and monumentality, being careful with its impudence and aggressiveness. We wanted the architecture to be a delicate suggestion rather than strong quotation for the World War II tragedy. That is how the idea of dynamic, expressive form had been brought to live, tearing apart the symbolic and dramatic shell covering the world, created by the war. The design of the form is to be undefined by one literally meaning. It may be discovered in many ways by each and every individual viewer. Read the rest of this entry »

The Diamond Tower is a skyscraper proposal for New York City designed by Mexican architect Luis Durazo. The complex geometry of the building is inspired on the chemical structure of a Diamond with an exoskeleton acting as a steel lattice where habitable cells or units can be arranged. The 300 meter high tower allows for daylight to enter into every unit through the ingenious placement of openings according to solar studies. Twenty percent of the steel lattice will remain unoccupied and will be used as vertical recreational areas for the city. That is the case of the plinth where New Yorkers will have the opportunity to enjoy a variety of amenities including a museum and art galleries. Among the various green technologies, the tower counts with wind turbines located through out the top levels and solar panels in the entire façade. Read the rest of this entry »

Due to a lack of integrated social, cultural, and urban systems, downtown Los Angeles lacks continuous human activity. This project designed by architects Yang Wang and Stephen Silva explored the human muscular system and applied it to an architectural vision. One of the most interesting parts of the muscular systems is how each muscle has its own identity, yet they work in a choreographed way. In a similar fashion, each program in this tower has its own volume but they are interlocked to work together. Each program supports the next one and sustains continuous activities for 24 hours. The idea is infuse downtown Los Angeles with nightlife when it is normally deserted. Read the rest of this entry »

The board of KARA/Noveren, Denmark’s leading waste to energy supplier, signed a contract with the Dutch Architect Erick van Egeraat for the realization of their new inceneration line at Roskilde [DK].

Erick van Egeraat won the design-competition for this incinerator in 2008 with his challeging and highy praised proposal to embrace both the historic and industrial heritage. It is a contempoprary Cathedral, close to the ground we shaped the building to reflect the angular factory roofs of the immediate surroundings”, says Erick van Egeraat. “We then let the building culminate in a 100 meter tall spire, which is an articulation of a fascinating and sustainable process in creating energy”

The large, outspoken, amber-colored design is likely to become a new icon for the wide and open landscape of the Roskilde area. After its completion in 2013, the facility is not only processing a large part of the local waste. This process produces both electricity and heating for the Roskilde district. Read the rest of this entry »