Daniel Caven of the Illinois Institute of Technology was featured in the American Institute of Architecture‘s Architect Magazine and was a finalist for Schiff Fellowship Award for his Relief Tower. Caven’s concept is capable of generating active energy outputs as well sustainable mechanical devices that will achieve economic gains for major cities, such as Chicago. Past ideas of towers acting as modern monumental statues in this modern world have become obsolete. Now towers must incorporate adaptive qualities for climate change and environmental conditions to withstand tests of sustainability as well as create a generative life.

The Relief Tower is designed around environmental conditions from a parametric mind-set while using rules of analysis to govern design choices. Located in the River North area of Chicago, the Relief Tower will be able to generate power to several neighboring buildings as well as a triple zero goal for itself. The form was generated by computational fluid dynamic analysis, as well as large physical models that underwent wind tunnel analysis. The animalistic (amphibious) form was manipulated to push wind into the outer, non-habitable, wing like extremities, that house vertical wind turbines. The funneling conditions in the outer extremities, push the wind faster towards the inset turbines, as well as push air towards the atrium. The energy created through this technique not only powers the towers own-self, but many neighboring buildings. Conservation of energy in the Relief Tower is one of the many factors and goals for itself. The outer skin of the tower creates a screening effect that protects itself from outside elements, as well as creating a play with shadows to the people within. The outside skin opens and closes due to sun radiation and changing elevation in relationship to program (using parametric alterations in the metals’ properties). The tower accommodates offices for a third of the tower as well as luxury hotels for the remaining levels, with a rooftop sky bar/pool area for attendees. Read the rest of this entry »

Appareil and the team of Edouard Cabay, Elena Poropat, Julie Soulat, Chartotte Arres, and Alexandre Dubor have introduced “Naves”, to the city of Mons, Belgium, as part of “Mons, Capital of Culture 2015”.

Naves is an investigation into lightness and transparency. The gothic edifice, by reducing the building to its bare bones, shows the perfect correspondence of lightness as manifestation and vision of light itself. It achieves transparency as it allows for light to the point of incorporating it, towards the absolute lightness. The lightest pillars, the lightest arches, the lightest vaults, the lightest structure are all included in producing the lightest building as a glorification of light. A complex meshwork of linear elements based on the ogive (Gothic arch) and tending to maximum permeability and minimum weight, the gothic churches were building belonging to the sky. They are the house of light and allow through the window for its very manifestation.

Located within the center of the historical patrimony of the medieval city of Mons, the project leans on the ogival arch of the neighboring gothic church of Sainte Waudru supporting a construction technology based on curved geometries inherited by the material properties of hollow-sectioned glass fiber tubes. Read the rest of this entry »

Miami Beach is a unique city; It is one of the youngest cities in America—and perhaps right now one of the most vibrant and dynamic. Its streetscape is characterized by a lively, walkable, urban fabric with a friendly human scaled environment under the cool shade of tropical trees and art deco canopies—except at the convention center. It is a dead black hole of asphalt in the heart of one the most beautiful and lively cities in America. BIG‘s mission along with West 8, Fentress, JPA and developers Portman CMC is to bring Miami Beach back to the Convention Center and to imagine an urban space unique to the climate and culture of Miami Beach. They propose Miami Beach Square as the centerpiece of their 52 acre convention center. Read the rest of this entry »

Architect Massimo Guidotti conceived the design of the New Museum for Underwater Antiquities and of the surrounding park ensuring that the design enriches the port of Athens with elements and events able to stimulate the visitors’ senses and curiosity assuring, at the same time, visual continuity and a sense of belonging to a single environment.

The architectural project of the Ex Silos Building originated from the idea of creating an imaginary section level, which cuts the main elevation overlooking the sea, replacing it with an EFTE “liquid” skin, as a tribute to the sea which has preserved and brought back the ancient archeological findings. The shape combined with the technology makes the building evocative of natural scenes, and reflects the sea through the continuous transparencies, both during day and night, merging a natural organism within a monument. Read the rest of this entry »

sparch Sakellaridou / Papanikolaou Architects won the 4th Prize in the architectural competition for redesigning the existing grain stock house building facilities (SILO) and its surrounding open space into a Museum for Underwater Antiquities in the Piraeus Port Authority (OLP) Coastal Zone including in a transformation with an open public space for outdoor activities, in February 2013.

The concept is of a continuous flow of diving and emerging, from the level of the sea to its depths and back again to knowledge. A continuous flow of people, via escalators sculpted to the body of the SILO, gives rise to the “sea level” placed on top. Visitors rise, enjoy the view of the horizon and enter the mysterious world of the museum in order “to dive to the sea-depths.” A large internal void, sculpted through vertical concrete-ribs in reference to the Antikythira Mechanism, becomes the heart of the museological narrative. A continuous belt of ramps winds around the internal void, bringing visitors deeper to the “bottom of the sea.” Natural light enters from above and winds around the shipping-wrecks along with the flow of people and their shadows. Read the rest of this entry »

Feiyu Qi at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna aimed to design a new train station for Vienna by reinterpreting the existing Westbahnhof station. In terms of the aesthetics and the form, there is a psychological disease called Trypophobia which would cause visitors with it to fear the clusters of small, similar shapes and holes. Read the rest of this entry »

Margot Krasojevic presents a a prison located in the Pacific Ocean close to the Canadian coastline. The main program is a sustainable prison which acts as a hydroelectric power station. Constructed of steel reinforced concrete, its vertical structure consists of a floating tension-leg platform tethered to the seabed eliminating most vertical movement, with depths up to 2,000m.

The concrete support is connected to 4-column semi-submersibles further stablized by floating Tyson turbines. The prison consists of a series of cantilevered loops creating an even weight distributed throughout the rig. The contained prison surface is made from a web of reinforced steel elements embedded within holographic filtered glass panels, superimposing views of life inside and views out of the prison, this depth of field creates a surreal environments which gives the illusion of boundary-less architecture, a kaleidoscopic panopticon. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week in Grottammare, Italy, the schematic design for ANIMA was unveiled, the first work in Italy by renowned firm Bernard Tschumi Architects, commissioned by the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Ascoli Piceno and the Municipality of Grottammare.

ANIMA is a cultural center that will be built in Grottammare, a city in the province of Ascoli Piceno, intended to generate stronger ties between the people and the territory. The concept intends to associate its image to the most diverse manifestations of local culture, which find expression through artistic, gastronomic and environmental means. In addition to elaborating with immense precision and originality the theme by which the interior spaces are organized, Tschumi has proposed an artifact that reworks the notion of facade as an indispensable tool with which to reconfigure space. Oscillating between the figuative and the abstract, the building reinforces the identity of the region at even its conceptual stage. Read the rest of this entry »

Cheng Gong of the Southern California Institute of Architecture in Los Angeles designed this edifice while keeping in mind the values preserved in the churches created by Richard Meier, Richard Neutra, and Philip Johnson. As a respect to the existing slope of Meier’s church, the site design extends beyond the landscape and benefits it as the seating area of an “amphitheatre church”; the entrance is also shaped following the slope direction, as visitors are intended to be received at a lower level. As a response to the “drive-in” program of Neutra’s church as well as to preserve this California moto culture, drive-in parking lots are kept at the same location. Comparing to Johnson’s crystal mega church, which stands out isolated from the site, this church chooses a low-profile gesture with the same height of Meier’s building, producing an alternative standpoint with stronger communication with the surroundings.

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