The high-rise, named Elevator B, is an urban habitat for a colony of honeybees, designed by architecture students from the University at Buffalo. The tower is a winning entry of the university’s Hive City competition, which asked students to design a habitat for the bees. This unique skyscraper has generated great public curiosity, due to its residents and bold design. It is located in Silo City – a group of abandoned grain elevators and silos on the river. The project acts as a symbol of the site’s economic and environmental regeneration.

Clad in perforated stainless steel panels, parametrically designed to protect the hive and the visitors from the wind, while allowing solar gain in winter and shading in summer, the 22 feet tall tower is a steel structure, build using standard steel angle and tube sections. The internal layer of the bees’ house is done as a cypress box, with a laminated glass bottom, through which the bees can be observed. The box is attached to a system of pulleys so the beekeepers can bring it safely down to ground for maintenance. The project is named Elevator B, due to this mechanism. Read the rest of this entry »

This uniquely shaped private residence by Tom Wiscombe Design consists of two main components – the crystal figure and the pedestal. The crystal figure is a strong statement design, containing semi-public functions of the house, such as living, dining and kitchen area. The pedestal is supporting figure and contains private functions – bedrooms and studios. Inspired by two-part Brancusi sculptures, two shapes inter-operate, but retain their own character. However, the connection seems weak at the first glance, therefore allowing the crystal figure to appear to float.

The very fragile relation between transparent and opaque is a critical site of speculation in this project – it had to be investigated how to retain the mass effect despite the significant change in material. For that purpose, 2d unfolded drawings were used as an operative base, in order to find a way to smoothly blur the edges. The solution was in pattern of loops and lines on opaque surfaces become patterns of standing seams and deep black channels, like tattoos, which are carved into the skin with chisels rather than drawn on smooth skin with needles. Therefore, views out from inside the living room are not pure but heavily mediated. Read the rest of this entry »

Successful collaboration between US firms SO-IL and Bohlin Cywinski Jackson resulted with a winning proposal – Grand Canopy was awarded first prize on a competition to design an art museum at the University of California’s Davis campus. Their design envisions uniting indoor and outdoor spaces beneath a large steel roof – the canopy. Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art is therefore conceived as a landscape of galleries and workshops, referencing the flat plains of California’s Central Valley.

In the words of Florian Idenburg, of SO-IL, the museum of the future will be the one that needs to be able to accommodate a lot of change, therefore a museum on campus should be seen as a testing ground for new ideas. Their aim was to propose a building that would act as a platform, offering a stage on which different things can happen.

Their design proposes 50,000 square-foot permeable cover, named “Grand Canopy”, over both the site and the building. This distinct shape is predestined to become a new symbol for the campus. Extending over the site, the roof blurs the edges of both natural and artificial landscape, creating a new, sensory one, of activities and scales. The Canopy works in two important ways – it generates a field of experimentation, an infrastructure and stage for the events, while acts as an urban device, creating a new locus of activity and center of gravity on campus. At night, canopy is illuminated and becomes a beacon within the campus and to the city beyond. Read the rest of this entry »

Olafur Eliasson, in charge for the building’s radiant façade, together with Olafur Eliasson team, Henning Larsen Architects, and Baterii∂ Architects wins 2013 Mies Van Der Rohe Award for the collaboration on the design of Harpa – Reykjavik Concert Hall and Conference Centre in Reykjavik, Iceland. The Mies van der Rohe Prize is reserved for excellence in the field of architecture and recognizes important contribution of European professionals in the development of the new concepts and technologies.

Harpa stands out as a radiant sculpture on the border between land and the sea, reflecting harbor space and the vibrant life of the city. The facades are spectacular – Eliasson’s works are usually inspired by his visible obsession with atmosphere and light. This particular, variegated glass façade of the concert hall was inspired by Iceland’s dramatic scenery and famous Northern Lights. Since its opening two years ago, this mountain-like massif building has become central cultural destination for the city and it has welcomed more than 1.7 million guests. Read the rest of this entry »

Cataclysm, research project done at the University in Bologna, is a disaster caused by natural phenomenon, but in this particular case shows the fatal outcome of man-kind action in order to warn about serious consequences of humans acting as a geological factor, able to pour out the events that used to exclusively belong to nature.

The participants in an experiment used bottom-up methodology and studied paradigm of rivers creation and weather erosion process in order to develop the new approach to sustainable housing. The project is developed for the mountain area in Slovenia, south of Maribor – the future location of an urban complex.

The importance of the project lays in fact that it is researching inevitable ground transformations, as consequences of weather erosion, which bring favorable conditions and new spaces for a wide biodiversity. The project also exploits ground’s splits, caused by river formation dynamics simulated through agent-based algorithms, developing itself on the inside and making use of the outline as a boundary. Read the rest of this entry »

Cais das Artes, new museum located on the waterfront of Vitória, north of Rio de Janeiro, has successfully transformed Suá Bay area of the city into cultural host of national importance. Designed in collaboration between Brazilian architects Paulo Mendes da Rocha and Martin Corullon of local practice Metro Arquitetos Associados, this sprawling museum complex was designed with the aim to preserve the character of the historic environment. 3,000 square meter exhibition area and the 1300 seats-theater are wrapped into raw concrete façade and the building floats above the ground. The volume is broken up by a void which frames the view of surrounding.

Equipped to host large scale events, this museum development configures the plain field as an open square for the entire city – new public space on the ocean. With the facilities such as bookstores and spaces that can host theatrical shows and open-air exhibitions, the new square is an attraction, a spectacle forming the continuity of city’s cultural life. Furthermore, due to its spatial characteristics, the place allows the public to unveil the overwhelming landscape form a privileged standpoint.

The structure of the Museum building is consisted of two large beams of parallel, pre-stressed reinforced concrete, 7 meters high, with only 3 points of support, on every 20 meters. The exhibition halls are located between main beams, and are open and communicating visually to each other and to the square. The Theater is suspended just like the Museum with only the technical areas under the stage located on the ground. Read the rest of this entry »

Originally a police station, at the end of the summer in French city of Madeleine the renovated place will re-open as a Médiathèque – public library and visitor center, deeply integrated with the city. The new place will reactivate cultural scene of the city, offering newly designed public spaces and an envelope for social gatherings.

Tank Architects, French practice, did a project of restructuring and extension of a former police station, aiming to connect the future public space to the urban environment. In order to provide true integration, the public facility designed as an extension of the public square and walk-runs.

The library is divided into two programmatic entities – the visitor center and the reading room, whose schedules vary. The place of the existing station is now converted into a reading room and is covered with cellular, porous timber roof – faceted canopy controls the indirect light that comes into the space. The roof is therefore a tool for regulating the light and acoustic qualities of the space and acts as an active sheet. The interior ambiance refers to both the warm inside reading rooms of the mansions and the qualities of the great outdoors manufactures bathed in diffuse light. Read the rest of this entry »

3Gatti Architecture Studio will add a facade of opening and closing steel umbrellas to Foreign Office Architects’ Madrid Pavilion from the 2010 Shanghai Expo. The new cladding, designed by 3Gatti Architecture Studio of Rome and Shanghai will replace bamboo louvers that currently surround the glazed walls of the building, which was originally designed by the Foreign Office Architects, to accommodate an exhibition about low-cost housing for the world fair. The new façade of opening and closing steel umbrellas will be added to the pavilion instead of the old one that started to rot. In the words of the architects they came up with the idea because of the very sunny weather in Shanghai which forces lot of people to use umbrellas all the time, as a most common object used for sun shading.

The same as with the existing bamboo shutters, occupants will be able to adjust the shades to control the light levels within the building – the previous solution of the Madrid Pavilion was a system controlled by the users. They moved the folding shades horizontally. 3Gatti’s intervention has changed the present shades into a more familiar object. Read the rest of this entry »

Another impressive proposal for Prishtina Central Mosque comes from Iran-based office TARH O AMAYESH Consultant Architects & Town Planners. Their design is funded on a belief that the mosque is a place for praying and going from body to soul. In their understanding, the prayer connects the earth to the sky and the mosque is a space for be becoming. As the becoming is a symbol of movement and movement is a source of mosque, the building is done in this theoretical framework – they designed a space that symbolizes ascending spirit from soil to the sky, from the city to the KIBLAH.

Due to its central location in the urban area, the surrounding gives the immediate identity to the project which acts as a link for different levels of the city.  The very concept of the mosque is defined by the composition of open and closed spaces. Several plazas are designed in south, north and east, therefore supporting the access from the city to the mosque. The green plaza with the inevitable water is a symbol of close relation with the nature, having in mind that the order of nature is a sign of God. Read the rest of this entry »

Designed by FR-EE Fernando Romero Enterprise,  building for MADU – small museum for a collection of Art, Design and Urbanism,  is situated in a park in Mexico City and is a piece of art itself. Due to the fact that the building is shaped as a deformed sphere it perfectly fits into surrounding, co-existing with it in pure harmony.

The form of the Museum is derived from the construction strategy: undulating concrete slabs are stacked so that the peaks of the lower curves connect with the valleys of the upper, opening organic spaces in a helicoidal organization. The characteristics of the construction strategy forms a fluid path of circulation that increases vertically as it winds around the periphery of the building.

The building is designed in recycled materials and reused objects; therefore defining a new destination for objects in the end of their lives. The façade openings actively react to its solar orientation and the amount of light for each room is optimized. The façade openings react to its solar orientation as well has the ideal amount of light for each room’s content. The building sits in the perimeter of a park and the spatial pocket are oriented radially so each room has a particular view over the park or the city. Read the rest of this entry »