Hidden Wonder is a Hotel and Office Complex in Fort Mc Murray, Alberta, Canada. Designed by David Clovers, this mega structure offers a feeling of an indigenous forest draping over the top of an urban hub, in the center of Fort Mc Murray. On further inspection, one discovers that the forest blossoms into a vertical garden of exotic plants, housed in a green house – atrium. The design is a new hybrid of tower and a podium, landscape and architecture. It acts as an active and multidimensional vertical park that anchors the corner of the block and allows for a combination of urban indoor and outdoor activities.

In the podium, hotel guests have their own private balconies which are calmly nestled among the forest, while retail and gastronomical visitors get oblique glimpses of the landscape through the skylights. In the tower, office employees are engulfed in an enchanting environment of plants and rooms that capture the beauty of the merging rivers beyond.

The materiality of the tower is contemporary – it uses a textured concrete and double glass skin to produce spectacular optical illusions. The sculptural massing appears and disappears by day and by night, reflecting the surroundings and glowing as a beacon in the Northern twilight. The textured double skin acts as a mechanical device, augmenting the building systems of the design by conserving heat through passive solar means and ventilating the building naturally. As additional sustainable feature, planted roof serves as an insulating blanket for both the podium and tower, as well as a device for gray water retention.

Expected completion of the complex is scheduled for late 2014.

Heatherwick Studio designed unique river boat as part of ‘Estuaire’ – an innovative project that has brought about the construction of major works of art along the banks of the River Loire, in France. The vessel will travel between the city of Nantes and the port town of Saint-Nazaire, reinforcing the connections between these towns and allowing up to 200 passengers to see the artworks from the river. The boat had to be designed for flexibility since it will be available for general hire, as well as organized art trips, and used as a venue for civic functions and meetings. It also seemed important to allow passengers to look in all directions, instead of facing forward as they do on a bus.

The boat takes the form of a catamaran, a shallow-draft boat with two hulls, which is stable and agile and travels comfortably at both high and low speed. Read the rest of this entry »

“Pollution is nothing but the resources we are not harvesting. We allow them to disperse because we have been ignorant of their value.” Referencing the quote from Buckminster Fuller, Chang Yeob Lee adds that pollution could be seen as another economy; therefore Royal College of Art graduate has developed a concept to transform the BT Tower in London into a pollution-harvesting high rise.

Synth[e]tech[e]cology is Lee’s diploma project from the architecture program at the Royal College of Art in London and he was one of two winners of the Sheppard Robson Student Prize for Architecture at the Royal Academy of Arts ‘ Summer Exhibition.

Named Synth[e]tech[e]cology, the project predicts the eventual redundancy of the 189-meter tower – currently used for telecommunications – and suggests re-purposing it as an eco-skyscraper that collects airborne dirt particles and helps to reduce the level of respiratory illness in London. The process would involve extracting the carbon from petrol fumes and using it to produce sustainable bio-fuel. The exterior of the tower would form a giant eco-catalytic converter, while the interior would house a research facility investigating methods of increasing air movement and maximizing the efficiency of the structure. Read the rest of this entry »

Nanjing Culture and Conference Center by Zaha Hadid Architects is under construction. The center’s master plan expresses continuity, fluidity and connectivity between the urban environment of hexi New Town, the agricultural farmland along the Yangtze River and the rural landscapes. The development consists of two towers – the taller is 68 floors high while the shorter one is 59 floors in height. The towers share a five-level, mixed-use podium.

The towers create rather dynamic transition from the vertical urban topography to the horizontal one of the river. The natural landscapes of the river are connected to the urban streetscape of the new center through the fluid architectural language of the mixed-use podium and conference center. At the interface between the tower and the podium, the glass façade slowly transforms into a grid of rhomboid fiber-concrete panels, therefore giving the large surfaces of podium and conference center almost sculptural appearance which underlines the dynamic character of the form and providing daylight to the building’s interior. Read the rest of this entry »

Graft’s design for the Austrian pavilion ‘Naturally Yours’, in collaboration with Alex Daxböck, has won 1st runner up for the Milan Expo 2015, themed ‘Feeding the planet’. The idea provides visitors with the opportunity to plant seeds and then directly eat the food grown on the pavilion. Based on Austria’s high quality, locally grown food, the concept for the pavilion lies within its structural framework – at the end of the expo it will be fully taken over by organic food.

Due to Austria’s size, no other country has more organic food from local farmers in shops and food markets. Being a small country means short distances from locally produced food to its customers. At the beginning of the Expo, the 3.6m structural grid will be fully exposed, its timber frames eventually filled with seeds of vegetables, fruits or herbs. The pavilion is organized as a modular grid system, which enables it to flexibly adapt to increasing numbers of visitors and also easily deconstructed and reused afterwards. Read the rest of this entry »

BIG+Allard Architecture, along with three other international firms, has unveiled their proposal for ArtA, a cultural hub on the edge of the Rhine in Arnhem, the Netherlands. ArtA will house the Museum Arnhem and the Focus Film Theater and reconnect the City with its waterfront. BIG proposes the two programs to be merged with a public Art Plaza – making ArtA a vibrant public building for art, public life, education and recreation.

ArtA brings together creative professionals, entrepreneurs, artists and visitors locally and regionally. Attractively located at the waterfront, the axis of the site forms a symbolic connection between the historic city center and the Rhine River. The architects propose a simple building volume with two poles: The Film Theater, facing the city, and the Art Museum – facing the river. Combining a contemporary exhibition facility with a film theater in a vibrant public building is paradoxical challenge – most successful contemporary art galleries are characterized by the spatial qualities of industrial warehouses – large open floor plans with generous ceiling heights and great flexibility for internal division and daylight control. The film theater is inherently a black box – an introvert space for contemplation and focus. Read the rest of this entry »

La Trobe Institute for Molecular Science has got a new building which will meet University’s long-term needs. The cell façade edifice is designed by Lyons won the competition sponsored by the Australian Institute of Architects and the brief was for the project to have a transformative effect on the overall architecture and identity of the campus, previously built within the strict guidelines for heights and materials employed.

The building offers an environment where students can develop their research needs to the end; therefore it is designed around the University’s specific model for creating a pathway for students in scientific fields. Read the rest of this entry »

Oyler Wu Collaborative designed the winning entry for Beijing Biennale competition. The Cube, a 3-dimensional solid object bounded by six square faces, is exhibited with ten other pavilions at the Beijing Olympic Park. This iconic piece installation is combines basic geometries while presents the successful synergy of art, design and science. At Oyler Wu Collaborative they were interested in challenging the traditional notion of a cube as a solid object, a cube as a space that can lose its distinct boundary once occupied, and the fundamental way a cube sits on the ground. The aim was to create an experience that is optically stimulating and spatially rich through the design of an abstract geometric figure.

The tree-dimensional spatial experience is designed to activate the urban environment, one that capitalizes directly on the inherent spatial characteristics of line. In Collaborative they used semi-repetitious field of twisting “surfaces” and the proposal moves back and forth between complex field and coherent geometric pattern. They were interested in the transcendence of line into a completely engulfing experience that could be occupied as a kind of three-dimensional drawing. Therefore the level of curiosity about the piece is created – the trajectories form the dynamic field while shifting while producing a sense of enclosure. Read the rest of this entry »

The Verlan dress is 3d printed by MarkerBot, now commercially available machine. The dress is the final result of the three-week digital fashion workshop held by fashion designer Fransis Bitonti, in New York. The theme of the project was not to design a piece of clothes but to design a method of making form using computers. Students therefore experimented with form-building software and created samples, using 3d printers. The workshop took place at the Digital Arts and Humanities Research Center of the Pratt Institute in New York.

By employing the MakerBot, which is sold in US by Microsoft, the students were in a direct relation with the material world, unlike the process which would end in the computer only, limited to complex computer simulations without getting tactile, physical results. In Bitonti’s words, the main idea was to create a landscape of geometric effects, things that would have different material behaviors in different parts of the body. Read the rest of this entry »

Studio 505 developed a strategic solution for the façade which encloses and identifies the massive Suzhou Science and Cultural Arts Center. The façade is intricate yet simple and it wraps the base building designed by Paul Andreu. The continuously curved perimeter of the main building, which in plan is shaped like a parabolic half moon crescent, is more than 1.5 km long and consists of an inner weather proofing layer an outer ornamental metal screen, which provides shading but also gives the building its unique external appearance and identity.

It was very important to develop a system which would appear as a continuous and infinite surface, in order to emphasis the seemingly endless extent of the exterior. To achieve this, the designers at Studio505 had to depart from a rectilinear panel grid and to adopt the matrix of three hexagons, superimposed at 60 degrees relative to each other. The hexagonal matrix consists of straight lines, similar to the classical Suzhou window screen made from timber. Read the rest of this entry »