The central and direct goal of the Kaohsiung Marine Culture and Pop Music Center competition, hosted by the municipal government of Kaohsiung, Taiwan, was to highlight the unique character of Kaohsiung City while satisfying the needs of the local people, the industries and future trends. This was to be achieved by focusing the design and planning on the cultural assets of the city, the specific conditions of the project site and the characteristics of the pop music and marine culture industries – the design program required two live music venues, coupled with a maritime museum.

Studio Gang’s design proposal employed the concept of the “knot” on various levels. Tubular structure of the building houses maritime museum and the rest of the program is organized in a series of strands. They are wrapped around the two main performance venues – the indoor and outdoor, while articulating them as nicely shaped voids. Due to building’s organization, it is possible to explore each program both independently or in sequence, or to experience the overlapping events all at once. Read the rest of this entry »

The competition entry for the Hercules monument visitor center in Bergpark Wilhelmshöhe, Germany, designed by Achim Menges and Scheffler + Partner Architects, is located at the 515 meters high peak of a major baroque sight axis, between Kassel Wilhelmshöhe Palace, a 250m long water cascade and the 71m tall Hercules monument designed by Francesco Guerniero.

As the historical background of the site is very complex, it suggested an in-folding of the park, in order to articulate the interior landscape, an artificial underground substitute for nature which enables smooth transition from the natural surroundings of Habichtswald to the baroque park and monument. However, architects in charge for the design, instead or directly relating the competition brief to specific spatial entities that would more easily answer the programmatic and volumetric requirements, decided to provide an interior environment that consists of various micro-ambients. Read the rest of this entry »

CACA, the Center for Aerial and Circus Arts, is located on the Northern portion of Goose Island. Situated in a busy upcoming business area of the Near North Side of Chicago, the center takes on a new symbolism of architecture, orchestrating a new typology for performers and the public realm as conceived by Daniel Caven of Illinois Institute of Technology.

The exterior form and programmatic layouts coincide with each other with rationale towards fluidity and movement. This new type of language is developed and decomposed through formal and spacial studies of the performers. CACA’s program incorporates several practice studio spaces that offer a superior aspect of visionary dynamics in aerial performance. In short, this allows for the floor to not only be the single surface for performances. Walls become apart of the performance and training. Read the rest of this entry »

Completed in Septermber 2012, the 62,000-square-meter Star complex, designed by Andrew Bromberg of Aedas, houses the largest auditorium of its kind in Singapore. Comprising the Star Performing Arts Centre and STAR Vista, the complex provides a premier entertainment, lifestyle, and retail experience for the Singapore community.

The civic and public components of the Star are paramount and outwardly expressed. The south elevation is completely opened up, presenting the inner workings of the facility as a visible section. The mass of the theatre floating above is faceted, cut with glass and utilizes titanium cladding. All of these help dissolve and break down the mass, playing with a composition of positive and negative readings. Read the rest of this entry »

Aedas is the designer for the Mapletree Minhang Development Project, Mapletree Investments Pte Ltd’s largest single investment in China to date. A ground breaking ceremony was recently held to kick start construction.

The project involves two sites— Mapletree Business City and VivoCity, with a site area of approximately 119,000 square meters and a gross floor area of about 297,000 square meters in total. Read the rest of this entry »

Madrid based studio Herreros Arquitectos designed Headquarters and satellite control center for Hispasat – Spanish company in charge of managing communication satellites. The project is a renovation of an old building from the 1970’s and the architects had to deal with the complicated issue of overcoming the gaps in use and operation of an existing structure and the specific and demanding requirements of the new one, as well as to solve the internal problems of radiation and illumination, generated by the old façade.

The building had to be re-designed for the headquarters and that demanded re-use of the space and re-distribution of the operational areas, district offices as well as its institutional zones. The architects resolved the issue by using th glass screens which vary in opacity, colors and designs and the diversity creates a new artificial landscape of outer space, which is rendered differently from every zone. Read the rest of this entry »

The winners or international design competition in Brazil – [RIO DE JANEIRO] Symbolic World Cup Structure – have been recently announced – first prize went to Mekene Architecture for their Wing of Glory. The aim of the competition was to design a free standing World Cup Structure in Lapa square, in the very heart of Rio de Janeiro, during the 2014 FIFA World Cup. That will be the second time Brazil hosts the competition with the first being in 1950. The competition aimed to encourage the employment of sustainable design in all aspects of the proposal, research in respond to unique aspects of designing and to ingrate function, structure, details and the spirit of the World Cup.

The winning structure, in the words of its architects, doesn’t stand somewhere in the middle of the square. On contrary, it seeks to establish strong relationship with the structuring spine and main landmark of the site, the Arcos de Lapa. The aqueduct is the supporting structure for the wings and it shelters various spaces, defining the initial profile. The profiles of the wings vary from the regular and semi-circular to more freely shape. Read the rest of this entry »