The design for the new Petersen Automotive Museum has been finally revealed. The announcement that the 20th anniversary of the company will be marked by complete exterior transformation and significant redesign of the interior followed the controversy. However, New York based office Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates is behind the cutting edge design for the new Petersen Museum. Undulating metal façade followed by stunning interior characterizes their proposal for the corner of Wilshire Boulevard at Fairfax in Los Angeles, showing California’s rich automotive heritage.

The new design for the Museum will transform the building into a landmark. Ribbons of stainless steel wrap the structure from three sides and over the top evoking the notion of speed and the organic form of the coach-built automobile. At night, the Museum is lit and transforms into an attraction for the neighborhood, known as The Miracle Mile. Read the rest of this entry »

Grown out of self-modifying patterns of vectors, based on electro-magnetic fields, Seoussi Pavillion by Biothing is the final act of computational design. The trajectories were computed in plan, via logics of attraction, further lifted through a series of structural micro-arching sections. Additional feature built into script allows for local adaptation to the site in regards to the section – pavilion is implanted into a steep hill.

Six different geometrical systems were used for the design of this pavilion and they are all steaming out of primary trajectories. The plan of the pavilion doesn’t have much in common with the traditional notion of architectural plan drawing – the dynamic blueprint of this piece of art is closer to musical notations – deep ecology of imbedded algorithmic and parametric relationships are the seed for possible materialization procedures and adaptation to the site conditions.

Programming of the views and distribution of lighting and shading in the pavilion is achieved through parametric differentiation of the angle, orientation and the size of the aperture, together with the relationship of metal and glass components within each cell. Read the rest of this entry »

KAMJZ presents this innovative concept wich focuses on creating an earthquake resistant building by making a sustainable design. This idea for the Water Damper Towers for the Taichung City Cultural Center in Taiwan would gather water to perform as a mass damper to regulate the seismic forces. The Taichung City Cultural Center is a project which aims to present the possibility of using local features to protect from the very location itself, turning limiting factors into a project feature. Read the rest of this entry »

SP+A’s design for Indigo Deli at Palladium in Mumbai was conceptualized to subvert the trappings of its mall context and the danger of repetitive manifestation of the brand architecture. The primary aim Mumbai-based architects within the design process was to combine the intimacy and warmth of traditional wine cellars with the program of retail shelving and the juxtaposition of program was derived from this aim and spatial intent.

The outcome of this desire is an insert into the raw space completely obliterating its rigid geometries. The project is quasi-dome, or quasi-surface and rejects the formal structure of both models as a hybrid that actually networks the structural prowess of both.

However, the main idea was to monologue the design intervention as a performative background for the variance of the multitude of products and events it contains. Read the rest of this entry »

Herzog & de Meuron’s design for Hong Kong Museum won the competition – they will design new museum for visual culture in Victoria Harbor. The M+, as it is called, will not be just another museum, in the words of its architects – it will aim to be a cultural center for 20^th and 21^st century art, design, architecture and the moving image. The various museum spaces range from conventional white cube, reconfigurable spaces and rooms for screenings, multipurpose facilities and industrial space. The industrial space was particularly requested and it has the purpose to investigate and show how the post-industrial space can be created from vacant land.

The site for the museum is specific – the building will be anchored to the land that was once reclaimed from the sea and founded on the underground tunnel of the Airport Express. Seen as an obstacle at first, the situation later became the “raison d’être” for the project and demanded raw, rough, large-scale exhibition universe.

Quite spectacular space for art and design exhibitions as well as the large scale installation and performance was created by uncovering the tunnel – the “found space” is actually a challenge to artist and curators and it represents the space of un-investigated potential. Read the rest of this entry »

Tirana Flux Exchange (FL-EX) by Barker Freeman Design Office is a proposal for a multimodal transportation hub and new urban landscape model for the Albanian capital positioned to greatly expand the scope and connectivity of the city’s infrastructural networks.  FL-EX connects the existing HSH Railway and intercity bus lines with a new airport transit, bike, and pedestrian paths linking the historic urban center to international transportation systems. This hub also acts as a nexus of commerce where strands of retail, office, and housing blocks thread across the landscape to create a new constructed ground that supports urban agricultural production, community recreational and entertainment spaces, and sustainable roof systems. Read the rest of this entry »

This interdisciplinary project of the new research pavilion is conducted by researchers of Institute for Computational Design (ICD) together with the Institute of Building Structures and Structural Design (ITKE) at the University of Stuttgart. The pavilion is entirely robotically fabricated, from glass and carbon fiber composites and it investigates the eventual co-relation between bio-mimetic design strategies and new processes of robotic production. The new composite construction paradigm in architecture is rooted in morphological principles of arthropods’ exoskeletons.

A key point researched through the project of this pavilion was the possibility of transferring the fibrous morphology of the biological model to fiber-reinforced composite materials, which would lead to new tectonic possibilities in architecture. The high performance structure was therefore manufactured – pavilion’s shell is four millimeters thick and is spanning eight meters.

The researchers followed a “bottom-up” approach, therefore wide range of different sub-types of invertebrates were investigated in regards to the material anisotropy and functional morphology of arthropods. The observed principles were further analyzed and abstracted in order to be subsequently transferred into viable design principles for architectural applications. Read the rest of this entry »