The board of Sberbank, the leading bank of Russia, signed a contract with the Dutch Architect Erick van Egeraat for the realization of their new Corporate University, west of Moscow, close to the Novorizhkoye highway.

Sberbank is Russia’s largest and oldest state run bank with over 250.000 employees and 20.000 branch offices in the country. The new Sberbank University will provide education, seminars and team building programs to the company’s top professionals, to continuously improve their performance within the corporate standards. The most prominent Russian bank implies the highest standards for its employees and therefore it aimed for the most ambitious educational project in terms of design and quality. Erick van Egeraat’s design for the 32,000-m2 Corporate University was chosen from 4 other proposals including David Adjaye’s entry.

The site is located in a suburban, almost rural setting, bordered by woods on its southern side, and the Istra river embankment on the northern side. The University will consist of education and conference spaces, dormitories, guest teacher quarters, teacher housing, a club building and sports facilities.

The spacious and picturesque setting allows for a campus model; the program’s distribution on site creates comfortably scaled public spaces that intensifies interaction with the natural surroundings. Education, lodging and sports functions are each clustered in orthogonally defined volumes. Taking into account the climate, all building elements except the teachers’ housing are connected with an elegant and climate controlled colonnade. This colonnade is programmed with recreational, bar, relaxation functions and serves as an identifying backbone of the entire complex. Read the rest of this entry »

Adaptive ecologies explores the emergent logics of adaptation and evolution that are constitutive of ecosystems in nature. Chimera’s vision is to define an urban ecosystem which supports housing and cultural programs and has the ability to adapt, transform, mutate, and adjust according to the specific urban and social character of the site and of Manhattan. This urban ecological system is taking as a model an organism in nature, specifically the mangrove plant. The mangrove plant and its collective the mangal, provide examples of social associative principles as well as structural capacities and hybrid responses to environmental and contextual conditions.

The project’s elevated gymnastics are dealing both with the complex topography of the site and its connectivity to the larger city. The new ground has been defined by creating an elevated plateau  generated by the potential directionality of human fluxes on the newly proposed site. This oriented space is being partitioned following a logic of cellular aggregation, embedding neighbouring relationships at different scales, and is also the ground reference of the urban housing massing negotiation. Models from nature such as phyllotaxis and branching have been the driving paradigms to define a parametric machine which is able to create a responsive urban ecology. Read the rest of this entry »

Designed by Omiros One Architecture (O1A) for Aldar Properties, the Yas Island Yacht Club forms a key part of the Yas Marina precinct, which recently staged its inaugural Formula 1 motor racing event. The recently completed project is the architect’s first significant work in the Middle East. O1A principal and founder Mr Omiros Emmanouilides describes the design as “a composition of dynamic and fluid forms that link the buildings to the nautical theme, the heritage of the location and the new F1 character of Yas Island.” “The Yacht Club is designed to excite, inspire and strengthen the concept that is Yas.”

Incorporating various 5-star club uses including restaurants, bars, lounges, function rooms, outdoor decks and 45-metre observation tower, the Yacht Club (Building 1) is the more expressive and prominent of the two. Building 2, the retail and administration component, features a waist-shaped glass internal courtyard and maintains a quieter profile. Read the rest of this entry »

The TU Delft School of Architecture was burned down during a fire in 2008. The University official held an architectural competition in 2009 to build a new school and architect Sid Wichienkuer was selected among the finalists.

The use of section and topographies become the driving force behind this project. By reconstituting and reconsidering each of the precedents, the resultant project intends to not reinvent but understand how section can foster productive architectural relationships. The gathering/communal spaces are stacked through the core of the building – operating as a central gathering space for offices, studios, and the greater community as a central, unifying element that serves the same purpose for a variety of programs. Read the rest of this entry »

OR² by Orproject is the further development of OR, a single surface roof structure which reacts to sunlight. The polygonal segments of the surface react to ultra-violet light, mapping the position and intensity of solar rays. When in the shade, the segments of OR² are translucent white. However when hit by sunlight they become coloured, flooding the space below with different hues of light. During the day OR² becomes a shading device passively controlling the space below it. At night OR² transforms into an enormous chandelier, disseminating light which has been collected by integrated photovoltaic cells during the day into the surrounding areas.

Special software components have been developed in order to create the shapes and to generate the cutting schedules. The individual elements were then automatically numbered and water jet cut. OR structures are the first ones to employ photo-reactive technology at an architectural scale, exploring its applicability to the fields of construction and design. The beauty of OR² is its constant interaction with the elements, at each moment of the day OR’s appearance is unique. Read the rest of this entry »

The starting point of this project designed by Patrick Bedarf evolved during the research of the ongoing conflict between different social groups and their interest in one of the most attractive pieces of  land in the heart of Berlin: the Spree Riversides located between Friedrichshain and Kreuzberg.

Through iteratively distributing programmatic layers  from the surrounding city fabric into the site and systematically mixing volumes of different social characteristics, the geometry of the project adopted the shape of foam clusters. The quality of formal variety as a consequence of the heterogeneity of the overall system is implied by the design methodology of functional aesthetics. The project focuses on a spatial partitioning strategy of voronoi regions featuring a gradient-driven diversity with highly functional orthogonal structures as well as distorted and geometrically complex volumes. Pointclouds, generated from early studies of programmatic foam structures, are therefore manipulated locally depending on programmatic attributes. Read the rest of this entry »

The new pavilion for the Hakone Open-Air Museum designed by Tezuka Architects is comprised of a structure entirely assembled with timber logs without any metal parts. Cutting-edge structural analysis has been employed to overcome the loads resistance variability that characterizes timber. The structure used traditional wood joints even though Tezuka Architects conceived a futuristic form.

In the interior of the pavilion a series of nets create an artificial topography for children. Nets are configured at different levels to create platforms, resting and playground areas.

The pavilion was designed to be permanent and dismountable with 100% recyclable materials. Since its completion at the end of 2009, the pavilion has gained the recognition among critics for its unconventional use of traditional materials and responsibility towards the natural environment. Read the rest of this entry »

Paul Preissner Architects conceived the new Museum of Polish History as a sculptural volume designed along conceptual terms of fluidity, velocity, and lightness in order to produce a seductive and progressive artifact within the historic context of Warsaw. The building appears like a mystical object floating above the extensive artificial landscape, spanning the Trasa Lazienkowska at the edge of the embankment. This museum defies gravity by exposing dramatic undercuts towards surrounding entrance plazas, it does not sit as a barrier to the site, but as another viewing point to the historic and modern city.

Paul Preissner Architects designed the park site specifically to maximize the excitement, energy and functionality of all forms of urban transit, including automobile, bus, truck, bicycle, and pedestrian pathways.  New commercial, retail, residential, and cultural facilities can be accessed and serviced through park decks that connect the entire site with a network of pedestrian paths. Read the rest of this entry »

Graham Thompson, a recent graduate from The Bartlett School of Architecture in the United Kingdom proposed a new type of green urbanism based on synthetic hyper-structures. The aim of the project was the exploration of the integration of architecture and technology for creating a new kind of urbanism that rethinks urban density, personal spaces, and communal areas.

The proposal consists of urban farming zones, undulated surface towers, solar recharging zones, and recreational areas. The farming zones are designed as planes in multiple levels with its own watering and nutrient monitoring systems.

The towers stretch themselves vertically under the premise of a bionic tower to relocate a new urban biotope for the local flora and fauna and recreating a food production which is automatically managed by the inhabitants.  The distribution of flow is made around a spreading spine in the loop of numerous elevators. The use of truncated and elongated curvatures throughout the buildings calls for a better circulatory fluidity and accessibility by being able to mediate the environmental flows. Read the rest of this entry »

UNStudio’s recently completed design for an existing loft located in Greenwich Village in Manhattan explores the interaction between a gallery and living space. The main walls in the loft flow through the space, and together with articulated ceilings create hybrid conditions in which exhibition areas merge into living areas.

The existing loft space was characterized by challenging proportions: the space is long and wide, but also rather low. Gently flowing curved walls were introduced to virtually divide the main space into proportionally balanced spaces. This created zones of comfortable proportions for domestic use, while simultaneously generating a large amount of wall space for the display of art.

Ben van Berkel: “The loft really is a hybrid space; as much a private museum as a living space. Because of that, flexibility is all; few rooms are actually fixed and most are interchangeable, so that in the end the areas devoted to living and to art are completely merged.”

While the walls form a calm and controlled backdrop for the works of art, the ceiling is more articulated in its expression of this transition. By interchanging luminous and opaque, the ceiling creates a field of ambient and local lighting conditions, forming an organizational element in the exhibition and the living areas. Read the rest of this entry »