UNStudio’s Youturn Pavilion is one of six ‘terrieros’ created for the 29th Art Biennale in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Located at the heart of the biennale, the pavilion operates primarily as a venue; a nodal point within the biennale’s context which provides a forum for communication by diverse means and on different scales. Programmatically the pavilion invites the public to meet, orientate and observe. It provokes interaction between both participants and visitors to the biennale, creating a place for display, discussion, and debate. The UNStudio Pavilion places itself between artwork, installation and architecture; operating as both a form and a functional structure performing as an activator of events.

Ben van Berkel: “It is a wonderful quality in architecture today; that it can perform on so many levels and that there is cultural acceptance again for this richness of meanings and readings. Architecture can have its cultural expression in a similar way to how art is perceived or interpreted. The metaphorical interpretation of spaces can be similar to the reading of a piece of art, so the mechanics and the approach can be similar, but the outcomes are of course different.” Read the rest of this entry »

Hong Kong-based designer Michael Young has been commissioned to develop building project strategies for Wanchai Cultural District. The first concept PSi Tower has been developed as an office complex with luxury apartments for business users and executives overlooking Kowloon district. Conceptually the project, based visually on the essence of ancient Chinese building techniques, has been carried forward into the 21st Century with its multi facetted surfaces that change according to weather and light conditions.

The 5-hectare site will include a ground level internal atrium for public art and pedestrian use, containing outdoor restaurants with outdoor seating. The upper central interior section also boasts a native plantation that encloses an outdoor theatre area. Read the rest of this entry »

Taking lead from the hilly terrain, a series of deliberate terracing and ramps are employed to usher the landscape into the heart of the villas designed by Zaha Hadid Architects in Singapore. The groundscape weaves the site into the building and in doing so, affords an intimate interaction between the garden and the home. The form of the villas is designed to meld with the dynamism of the topography and coalesce into the landscape. Compositionally, there are two adjacent and overlapping volumes in each villa, forming the basis of the division of social and familial programs yet allowing these programs to progress fluently into one another. With a singular and fl uent stroke, a dramatic cantilever extends the topography into the sky; as well as reducing sun exposure at the western façade. The cantilever doubles as a rooftop terrace, wherein one can soak in an elevated and unobstructed view of the botanical gardens. The roof then drapes supplely down on its sides, touching the ground, embracing and sheltering the spaces within. Read the rest of this entry »

Nakheel Tower
Dubai, UAE.  2020
200+ floors
1400 m (4593 ft)

Pingan International Finance Center Tower 1
Shenzhen, China.  2014
115 floors
646 m (2119 ft)

Shanghai Tower
Shanghai, China.  2014
128 floors
632 m (2074 ft)

Chicago Spire
Chicago, USA.  2014
150 floors
610 m (2000 ft)

Goldin Finance 117
Tianjin, China.  2014
117 floors
597 m (1959 ft)

Makkah Royal Clock Tower Hotel
Mecca, Saudi Arabia.  2011
85 floors
591 m (1939 ft)

Doha Convention Center Tower
Doha, Qatar.  2013
112 floors
551 m (1808 ft)

World Trade Center One
New York, USA.  2013
105 floors
541 m (1776 ft)

Pentominium
Dubai, UAE. 2013
112 floors
516m (1692 ft)

Burj Al Alam
Dubai, UAE. 2013
108 floors
510 m (1674 ft)

The Zeppelin Park and Tower is a proposal by French architects Fabrice Quemeneur and Etienne Rouverand to bring back to life the golden era of Zeppelins as means of transportation. Highly used during the first half of the 20^th century for commercial and military purposes, the blimps rapidly disappeared after the Hinderburg disaster in Lakehurst. Airplanes become the norm of transportation.

The main concept behind this proposal is to create Zeppelin Towers in major global cities. These skyscrapers would embrace their full potential of becoming modern transportation nodes and reduce green house gases emissions linked to airplanes. The towers’ plinth is fully equipped with commercial and recreational areas for the city. Read the rest of this entry »

New York architects Axis Mundi have re-imagined the Whitney Downtown Museum with a self-initiated proposal that is raw and provocative, and as bold in spirit as the original Breuer building on Madison Avenue.

In the early 1960’s, when Marcel Breuer received the commission for the Whitney, he asked “What should a museum look like, a museum in Manhattan? Surely it should work, it should fulfill its requirements, but what is its relationship to the New York landscape? What does it express, what is its architectural message?” He stated “It is easier to say first what it should not look like. It should not look like a business or office building, nor should it look like a place of light entertainment. Its form and its material should have identity and weight. It should be an independent and self-relying unit, exposed to history, and at the same time it should transform the vitality of the street into the sincerity and profundity of art.” Read the rest of this entry »

In Petaling Jaya, west of Kuala Lumpur, a great urban development designed by Studio Nicoletti Associati is underway for the establishment of a new urban centre. As a landmark for this area, the developer wanted to host his onsite offices and sales showroom in an ‘iconic pavilion’ that would reflect the spirit and the architectural style of the whole development.

Natural water droplets were the inspiration for ‘The Pod’ pavilion structure creating a dynamic spherical form resulting in a primitive building archetype with a modern twist. The round and soft shape of The Pod is formed as a series of elliptical sections of variable widths and heights.

Slithers of window bring natural daylight into the spaces below. Internally the pavilion is divided into two parts: one zone dedicated to the office area and the other containing the main showroom. The building appears to be sliced diagonally into a series of ribbons which wrap up and over the building creating an animated space within, forming a layered protective shell. Read the rest of this entry »

Tel Aviv’s real estate is rapidly recovering from the economic crisis and the Skinless tower designed by architect Shoval Omer proposes a new type of residential high-rise where highly customizable living units attach to a steel exoskeleton. This innovative geometry derives from the analysis of the anatomy of shell patterns in nature.

The building is conceived as an aggregation of small volumes with a large number of open spaces that allow light to filter to the city. It is also predominately white to blend with the existing urban fabric. The development also includes commercial areas at the lower levels and recreational parks intertwined with the residences. Some of the “pods” are designed as vertical farms and water collectors with photovoltaic cells. Read the rest of this entry »

Zaha Hadid’s design for Sunrise Tower in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, engages with the city in multiple ways. By exploring potential synergies at different levels and anchoring itself to the existing urban fabric, it creates a platform of services that engage with neighbouring developments, sustaining critical mass and a sense of community. The scheme merges all programmes into one building, distancing itself from the traditional tower and podium typology. Through a detailed landscape strategy the design interweaves tower and ground, extending and connecting the different parts of the site, integrating the new pedestrian routes and internal road system, structuring the fabric of the new development.

The building is designed through a series of independent flows that map the tower and organize different routes for different programmes. Along these routes the lobby and shared facilities floors work as communication hubs, like intersections that enable flexible itineraries and changes between uses. Similarly to the skin, the circulation materializes as a multi dimensional spatial grid, inclusive of the program, treating interior and exterior in a seamless way, thus maximizing the clarity of the scheme and the perception of the different levels. The design of a clear navigation system for lobbies, atria and common areas, enables visual communication as well as access through the cores, ensuring fully accessible environment for all users. The building’s complex programme is distributed through 66 floors in total, 4 bellow ground and 62 above ground, with an absolute height of 280m. The ground lobby is the primary hub of the tower, defining 4 different dedicated lobbies for residential, hotel, offices and general public. Read the rest of this entry »

Twenty-seven Billion tons of CO₂ are released into the atmosphere every year. This has resulted in a one-degree-centigrade rise in global temperature since the Industrial Revolution.  Carbon emissions are causing Climate Change across the globe, resulting in hurricanes, rising sea levels, spreading deserts, and the loss of arable land.

SKYGLOW is a 200 meter-long helium filled airship that is solar powered and enveloped in a flexible OLED lighting membrane. SKYGLOW will be flown into major population centers on any continent and docked at these locations. Multiple smaller replicas of SKYGLOW, fitted with touch screen questionnaires, will form an interactive night park at its base. The public will be invited to answer these questionnaires on carbon related issues in our homes, transport choices, and recycling levels. In turn this information will feed into the lighting of the small SKYGLOWS. The colors range from red, where the results are poor, to blue, which shows a change for the better. Targets can be advised and the public can revisit the Night Park to recalculate their carbon footprint. All this information will then be fed into the main SKYGLOW, along with national grid energy consumption levels and air quality information.

The intention is that within a short period of time the impact of positive choices will make a visible difference to the OLED output of the SKYGLOW.

The project was designed  by Ross Orr, Gary Dubary, Andy Kiely and Adam Lauri who took part in a back to work scheme called Greenshoots. Greenshoots gave unemployed professionals in the construction industry the opportunity to work on a eVolo Competition in a live work environment which was kindly provided by FHP Architects.

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