To confront with the sea level rising of New York, Tingwei Xu and Xie Zhang from the University of Pennsylvania designed an idea for protecting certain areas against water by wearing a “membrane’. Deriving from the intelligent components, we created a surface system that can reveal a continually changing expression. The transforming surface can combine the multiple functions such as waterproof, lighting and agricultural planting. Rather than a traditional hierarchy design thinking, each component on the surface has equal essentiality. It is a irreducible integrity. Read the rest of this entry »

This is an innovative residential building designed by Philipp Ohnesorge in Vienna. The plot is situated between the 16th, the 17th and the 8th district in Vienna, next to one of the main traffic axis, the Guertel. It is in proximity to the city center with its historical buildings and attractions. The situation today is that the whole plot is empty and leaves a hole in the urban fabric. The block is not closed, the empty gap is now used for parking and is a waste of precious space within the city context. It has an outstanding value and must be reactivated.

The first measure to be taken is the widening of the inner courtyard by slicing the existing buildings, to create a spacious yard that allows public use and increases daylight exposure to the apartments.

By expanding the given roof shape and twisting it around the center until reaching the maximum allowed building height, we created a volume that extends the given geometry and context with maximized usage of allowed building height. A gap between existing and new building mass allows access to the inner courtyard that also provides the entrances to the apartments. Read the rest of this entry »

The Urban Lounge designed by Patrick Vogel from the Wismar University is a small urban furniture project for the Hafencity Hamburg. The concept is to generate a modern interpretation of a conventional bench or city lounge in the heart of a new city quarter. The lounge is made out of a traditional vertical lamella facade system that transforms into an aesthetic, contemporary communication and chillout spot, directly next to the Elbe riverside. Read the rest of this entry »

The Snail Pavilion is a competition entry for the Ceramic Tiles of Italy trade show pavilion. The purpose of the pavilion is for the trade association to represent its member companies’ products at a series of shows over a three-year term. Instead of selecting just a few sample products to feature, the scheme uses hundreds of tiles from Ceramic Tiles of Italy member companies to create giant “creatures” that bristle with the range and depth of Italian ceramic products. In this way the pavilion is more like a library with tiles stacked on shelves than it is a surface against which tiles are set in a rigid grout bed. Visitors can literally occupy the entire history and product catalog of the member companies. An innovative stacking system uses a simple assembly method to produce the appearance of feathers or scales – arraying tiles in a variety of sizes and colors into complex, visual seductive plumage, bristles, and whorls. The tiles are organized into loose color groupings that anticipate different sizes and tones, so the system can accommodate a broad diversity of sample products. Read the rest of this entry »

Prickly Pear is an installation proposal for the work of Nicola Formichetti designed by Barker Freeman Design Office that proposes an immersive sensory environment with changing color tones that can correspond to changing music, body movement, or merchandise within the space. Our concept was to insert an enveloping volume of stretchy translucent netting that would capture and reflect the shifting light spectrum emitted from the system of custom LED fixtures. The lighting could be programmed on a pre-set script or it could be set to respond to environmental changes. Read the rest of this entry »

Cheap, dull, unattractive and unpleasant spaces – that’s the reputation of school ‘relocatables’. They’re the decades old, utilitarian solution to changing school demographics, remote community needs and disasters such as fires, floods and cyclones.

But a new plan by the Laboratory For Visionary Architecture [LAVA] turns these unpleasant spaces into smart buildings, the design an education in itself. In sustainability, social interaction, nature and adaptive technology. Chris Bosse, Asia Pacific director of LAVA says: ‘we wanted to turn this idea upside down and create spaces that are sustainable, practical, cost-effective whilst fun and exciting to be in’. Read the rest of this entry »

Agent Forms is a two-day intensive design and programming workshop by modeLab to be held in Brooklyn during the weekend of February 04-05, 2012. In a fast-paced and hands-on learning environment, this workshop will interrogate agent-based simulation and strategies for simple, low-level objects to generate higher order, dynamic, and visually rich forms. We will cover technical programming concepts including Control, Modularity, and Development while incrementally building the complexity of our objects and the relationships established across class contexts. Furthermore, we will utilize the power of the Processing environment and its to capacity to compute, visualize, and capture the behavior of large populations of agents. Read the rest of this entry »

A home for two plus a dog. The house itself is comprised of three shells of progressive size nested inside one another. The outermost shell covers the entire premises, creating a covered, semi-indoor garden. Second shell encloses a limited space inside the covered outdoor space. Third shell creates a smaller interior space. Residents build their life inside this gradation of domain.

I have always had doubts about streets and houses being separated by a single wall, and wondered that a gradation of rich domain accompanied by various senses of distance between streets and houses might be a possibility, such as: a place inside the house that is fairly near the street; a place that is a bit far from the street, and a place far off the street, in secure privacy. Read the rest of this entry »

It is understood that cities and buildings are largely shaped by a dynamic flow of interrelated cultural, social, political and economic forces – the nature of possible interfaces between architecture and its various settings within the contemporary city. Rather, Vernon’s Vectors is a re-interpretation conceived by Daniel Cheng Lee and Jae Hwan Lee of how a building may deal with architecture on an urban scale. Rather than relying on the surrounding context of the city to begin addressing the project’s behavior, a singular yet versatile design system is implemented to influence the surrounding context to create an iconic image for the city – an inside out approach to urban systems. Read the rest of this entry »

This project designed by Surasuk Pattanapanitchakul at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco intends to illustrate the synthesis between nature, urban and architecture, which supports and collaborate to each other, showing the soul of interconnection which increasingly synthesize with the space, in order to show how architecture can act as an instrument.Traditionally, music defined as aural element expressed through time. architecture as instrument explores the idea of music as defined by visual expressed through time, specificially shadows cast as the sun traverse the sky visual representation of temporal experience-thecycle of the day.Structure as instrument explores the idea that the structure itself is an orchestra and the ever-changing and continual shadows that fall across it and beside it are music experience by users. Read the rest of this entry »