Umicor, a materials manufacturer for clean technologies, built their new offices in the middle of their manufacturing campus which is part of a much larger industrial park in Hoboken, Belgium. The design by Conix Architects is intended to integrate the plant better with its surroundings, adding a fresh scale and materiality to the site and create a sense of place amongst the brick industrial buildings. The project is also a retrofit of a mid-century 8 story brick office, with a fresh wing unrolling from one end, an interesting design narrative connecting with the plant’s mission to recycle and reclaim raw materials. Read the rest of this entry »
Umicore Industrial Office Building / Conix Architects
Apocalyptic Resort for the 2012 Doomsday / Manuel Ocaña Arquitectos
Architects at Manuel Ocaña Architecture and Thought Production Office were asked to design a rather unusual spatial concept, one that would ensure the survival of 20 families and thousands of books for three years after the 2012 Apocalypse. The design was commissioned and promoted by a Belgian foundation and would be located at a mountain slope in Sierra Nevada, Spain. It is conceived as a “culture ark”, after a suddenly precipitated climate change with tsunamis, earthquakes, and a global chain of disasters, nuclear or otherwise.
The initial idea for the project was to use a more organic approach of atomization and circulation strategies. Several dome-shaped areas are interconnected and manifest the underground configuration of the system upon the landscape. In the light of ever-rising number of religious beliefs and, as the architects put it, “the “scientificisim” religious looking for immortality”, the project can also function as an Apocalyptic Resort. Read the rest of this entry »
Alternative Car Park Tower / Mozhao Studio
Winning the Hong Kong Alternative Car Park Tower Competition, the proposal attempts to integrate the Hong Kong City hall, the second-floor pedestrian system and the streets on the second floor. It provides a network of public spaces with atriums and multifunctional areas placed at the top floor, along with great views of the Victoria Harbor and Kowloon. Designed by Mozhao Studio, the Car Park Tower is a public building, transforming the typical parking facility into an urban landmark. Read the rest of this entry »
Parametric Designed Transformative Facade for Mumbai School / Sanjay Puri
The building is located in a densely populated residential part of Mumbai, with hight desity ranging from 7 to 15 stories. This height regulation governs the development of the entire neighborhood, including the school site. In order to create privacy in the school spaces and make the building more efficient, designers at Sanjay Puri Architects introduced a second skin of hexagonal modules encompassing the entire building. The modules have small openings on the southern side to reduce heat gain into the building while providing cross ventilation since the sun during most of the year is on the southern side in this location while southwest breeze blows throughout the year. Towards the northern side, with indirect sunlight, the hexagons are like truncated pipes moving in and out and creating additional usable spaces for sitting, playing or reading as extensions to the open spaces on each floor. Read the rest of this entry »
Pin-plant Installation Created with 5000 Colored Buttons / Design With Company
Pin-plant is an installation designed by Stewart Hicks and Allison Newmeyer from Design With Company like a series of experiments – an examination and interpretation of humanity through anthropomorphism and color. Finding the fantastic in the systematic. What do our desires to personify computer parts express about us? It all began with an old computer motherboard. At first it was a city scape, then a vast mechanical microcosm, with circuits leading this way and that- a garden of forking paths if you may- immediately immense and endless. Aggregating in intense exchanges of information- where color became landmark and organization revealed a scale of part to whole most basic in its arrangement, yet complex in possibility. It’s efficiency a testament to its time. Technology of foreign pieces. But what did we want to do with it? We wanted to give it life to understand it. Aestheticize it until it could be more than a commentary on the mechanics of things. Through sculpture, the conventional exformative connections are disconnected. Read the rest of this entry »
Two Towers Proposal in Shenzhen / Saraiva + Associados
“The Two Towers” proposal by Saraiva + Associados in partnership with IDU (International Design Union) and Tianhua aims to resolve in an equal form all the variables in this intervention, creating a strong landmark building that is generous and practical in is form and that can fully embodies modernity, strength, development and eco-friendly. The main idea was to give the two towers a strong sense of responsibility and a modern language – both financial institutions well differentiated yet sharing a common global image.
Sitting in the CBD and administrative/cultural center of Shenzhen, this project reflects the study of the city’s history, geography and ecology in an integrated development, respecting both urban planning and the stipulated program. As a response, the design reunites two different buildings that would combine into one unique and harmonic force, materialized in an architectural built mass that is fragmented into several blocks. These combined groups of blocks arise from the podium, the strongest piece that connects the buildings to the ground and surrounding environment. Furthermore, the external square highlights the unique entrance to a main, shared, lobby that will then connect to two different lobbies for each company.
Its exterior image follows the idea of a modern, sober and contemporary group of buildings with ample glazed surfaces, interspersed with mesh elements, in a balanced composition of volumes and surfaces. Read the rest of this entry »
Expandable Surface Pavilion
The project was created for the recent SPOGA furniture design exhibition in Cologne, Germany and is part of an ongoing research into Expandable Surface Systems, which began in collaboration with the Emergent Technologies and Design Programme at the Architectural Association. The project was designed, fabricated and mounted by the designers.
The design manifested into an exhibition and meeting room pavilion that explores complex geometries generated by simple cut patterning in sheets.
To realize the built structure, the team underwent extensive structural and geometric digital analysis to understand and anticipate the reaction between the material and pattern. A system of mathematical relationships were derived to control found material properties digitally. This iterative process was then scrutinized and revised by findings resulted from structural analysis. The ability to understand material properties from the standpoint of geometry lead to the success of the project. It was a great lesson for the designers to learn from the material – this feedback was the guiding factor in the design process. Read the rest of this entry »
Nanjing Vegetation Laboratory: Robotic Architecture
Nanjing Lab is a vegetation laboratory located in the historical district of Nanjing. Different from the traditional vegetation lab, which focuses on the attributes of the plants themselves, the purpose of the Nanjing lab is to test the plants’ behavior inside Nanjing city, for instance, the plants’ reaction to the the city’s polluted air and dust.
Therefore, the design focuses on being able to control the plant’s interaction with the outside. In order to do this, different plant species are put into separate containers which protrude from the main volume of the building to the outside environment. The containers provide the ability to let sun light come through and control the amount of air that passes through. At the same time, the form of the landscape around the building creates different levels humidity and solar conditions around the building, allowing the containers to interact with a diverse environment. Read the rest of this entry »
Yucca Crater: Synthetic Earthwork / Ball-Nogues Studios
Using the desert near Joshua Tree as a backdrop Ball-Nogues Studios have installed what they call a synthetic earthwork which hides a swimming pool inside. The project is part of High Desert Test Sites, an art project which “generates physical and conceptual spaces for art exploring the intersections between contemporary art and life at large.” The parametric bowl Yucca Crater is 30 feet tall and egressed by ladder. Visitors transverse the swimming hole, which bottoms out 10 feet below grade, by a series of rock climbing hand holds.
The wooden frame was re-claimed from a previous art project’s form work which was originally intended to be supplies for this piece, something the artists termed as “cross-designed”. The plywood is stacked and cut in sections, slotted into the ribs to create a bowl. Plywood strips skin the interior, like a ship hull in reverse. Read the rest of this entry »
Hotel Liesma Inspired by Music / Jevgenijs Busins & Liva Banka
Proposal is designed for music-themed upscale Hotel Competition in Jurmala, Latvia. It is the meeting point of waves and coast, wind and pine-trees, ideas and people, various music rhythms and audition. Music has the power to stop time. An oasis of peace hides behind the shape of the dynamic hotel like calmness subsists in the deep below the waves of the sea. The hotel is a place where to offload the daily stress, to gain the peace of the soul, the feeling of freedom and harmony with the environment. It is the uniformity with lights and shadows, color tones and textures, forms and sounds.
Architecture of the building is characterized by calisthenics of facades. The basic construction has remained untouched but facade has been changed completely. The facade has a wavy shape with vertical wooden constructions. Hence the classical traditions of architecture of Jurmala have been honored. Wooden materials in various tones and factures are used as the predominant materials in the design. The rhythm of vertical lines of glued pine wood gives the building an appeal as it associates with boles of the wood and embraces the building in the landscape of Jurmala.
Transparent and frosted glass is used in the external design behind the wooden constructions. Hence the external pattern is independent and is characterized by form of free plastics. The musical form of the building has been achieved by using the parametric principles of architecture: both internal and external design is dominated by wavy lines, parametric plastics and rhythmical modeling of bearing constructions. It is of particular importance that wavy design has been achieved by rather simple elements – straight frames which form wavy effects by changing parametrically. Such solution does not increase the costs of building. Frames that change the blocks of rooms of the Soviet building form rectangle to musical, rhythmical form are not there only for decoration – these frames are basic structure for wavy balconies. In this way the spacious balconies do not only allow enjoying the rustling sea, observing the changing colors of the sky during sun sets or simply watching the sun but also serves as natural shading for rooms of lower floors. As well, the frames of the facade form shading hence protecting from overheating in hot summer days. It is worth mentioning that facades that are more open for the sun feature larger balcony extensions than those which are less impacted by the sun. Read the rest of this entry »