An installation project by 24° Studio will be exhibited at Kobe Biennale 2011 from October 1 through November 23. The project was one of the winners for Shitsurai Art International Competition organized by the city of Kobe. This multi-use environmental installation serves as a meeting place where every area can be used as seating for visitors to contemplate the surroundings, thus invoking a social interaction.

The design motive was influenced by the history of the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake of 1995 that led to inevitable changes within built environment sparring only the nature that surrounds Kobe. This devastating experience is remembered by Kobe residents making them a persistent and tight community, but remaining open and friendly to the visitors of the city. Strong social ties between people helped them to overcome the disaster and rebuilt the city making it a better living environment. However in the everyday life without problems and crisis, the face to face social interaction between people is decimating and it is one of the biggest problems in our technology driven time.

Crater Lake, an installation – environment where people have a place to meet to observe the beauty of the surrounding environment and more importantly to call forth an emphasis on sustaining social interaction, which was the important catalyst that brought Kobe residents to revitalize their city after the disaster. The installation is situated in the man-made Port Island, Shiosai Park that provides a vast view of the Kobe urban center, its surrounding mountainscape and seascape. Read the rest of this entry »

HTDSTUDIO competition entry for the Mercedes-Benz Business Center is less concerned with form-following-function as it is with form being functional.  The tower sited in Yerevan, Armenia is hyper-rationally organized, with a layout synthesized from user-flow. The program ranging from hotel, apartment, and fitness center, to theater, restaurant, and conference room, require a reconsidering of the public-private relationship. This relationship is reinterpreted as an opportunity for inclusion opposed to separation. As a result, the functional activity is aligned along the exterior, with discreet separations occurring within the core. This new programmatic arrangement is projected to the façade, with the juxtaposing programs serving as cladding elements that animate the elevations with social exchange. Read the rest of this entry »

As the twin towers in Toronto, Canada’s Absolute World development near completion, MAD Architects look to break ground on yet another arduous skyscraper concept. Located in Chongqing, a major city in founder Yansong Ma’s home country of China, the Urban Forest proposal reiterate MAD’s design approach of syncing architecture with nature. Aesthetically evocative of the surrounding mountainous terrain, the peak-and-valley elevation is generated by the successive cantilevering of the floor plates. Abstractly curved, the floors are un-referential to what is above and below, rendering the high-rise building as a swaying tree in a forest of towers. Read the rest of this entry »

This project is a winning entry conceived by architects Chi Wai Chan, Xinyu Wan, and Geng Ke for a competition to design an arts and cultural square at Lake Sanyon in Daqing, China. The project examines the relationships between the elements of water, sky, and earth. A waterfront promenade that ensues the formal attributes and fluidity of the water, a 1,394 m long canopy with LED display that transpires the form of the clouds, and a ground condition of self-similar marine lifeform that establishes view corridors to the lake. These three design elements serve as the organizing  apparatus for the design of the square. Read the rest of this entry »

The ambition to provoke urban change can be understood as a desire to create an icon such as the Taiwan tower designed by STL Architects that highlights the unique character of Taichung city. The architects envisioned this reality as coherent blend through an architectural landscape anchored by iconic venues that will satisfy the needs of locals, the industries and future trends. The idea is to generate a flow network that communicates the Taichung gateway city project with the most important landmarks of the city.

The skin itself is a system: it is pixilated with glazed openings in the programmed and occupiable zones while permeable with openings in the central area. The degradation of the openings, varying between 20% and 60%, is done in order to achieve greater lightness in the central part of the tower, therefore using less material and saving.

The density and arrangement of beams in the structure provides higher levels of stiffness at the base, and a horizontal arrangement that does not obscure views at the top. The beams are minimized wherever possible to reduce dead load and create an overall visual lightness for the structure. While the body of the tower resists twisting and bending, the overall structure is held upright by the foundations. The foundations is created by the bottom of the ring, which is embedded several stories into the earth to resist lateral movement and stop the tower from falling. Read the rest of this entry »

This project for a new Public LIbrary for the city of West Hollywood was designed by Zifan Liu at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc). Long concerned with the articulation of form by means of volume to mass, and way beyond a contemporary threshold of hyper articulation, the discipline seems to be at a critical juncture by having to choose between polar opposites: to continue the search for more complexity via the willful sculpting of soft surface, or to return to a fundamental purity by the articulation of simple platonic volumes.

Turning its attention towards both primitive and figure, this project’s intention is to generate new cumulative mass and interstitial networks based on a simple logic of aggregation and growth of self-similar primitives, their formal accretion will promote a diversely unified spatial atmosphere that defy the distinction between holistic and discrete, figure and figuration. With emerging and ever-shifting number of massing configurations, group outlines and individual silhouettes as possible outcome. Read the rest of this entry »

Performance Center Alexanderhoehe is to be located in Iserlohn, in Germany. The authors, B+U architectural firm placed the building north of the existing Parktheater and oriented it towards the inner city in order to emphasize and redefine its relationship to Alexander Heights. By orienting the building in such manner, it became possible to create a single access point for visitors to both Parktheater and the new Multifunctional Hall. In order to achieve that and avoid blocking the views from the existing Theater, a “linkage space“ was created: a generous multilevel foyer space that that allows for the actual hall to float above the ground and opens up views from the old Parktheater to the city towards the Northeast. Read the rest of this entry »

The design of the Pushkinsky Cinema facade renovation places the face of the landmark venue behind a sculptural veil which acts as a dramatic backdrop to Pushkin Square and an iconic face to the cinema. Inspired by the screened views, geometric intricacy and flowing surfaces of a “Russian Veil”, the design contrasts the imposing presence of the Brutalist architectural icon by simultaneously enclosing and revealing its contents behind a delicate yet robust open air lattice materialized as thermo-formed sheets of DuPont Corian. The solid mass of the building is clad in a series of Corian panels which gently morph the relentless diagrid pattern of the existing facade into a flowing and varied matrix of warped hexagon modules. Read the rest of this entry »

Bangkok authorities still consider flooding a crisis, instead of a constant. This negative mindset contributes to the economic loss the city has experienced over the last years. With the city sinking 10 cm below sea level, the latter rising by 40 cm annually, the safest place to create architecture is above water.  Architects at S+PBA propose a Post-Diluvian prototype community that translates the principles of traditional, flood-conscious architecture into a contemporary, sustainable Wetropolis. Read the rest of this entry »

Conceived as a multiple seating structure, the bench aspires to facilitate interaction between users. Designed by Marco Goffi, its initial form referenced French traditional seating structures. It further evolved into a curvilinear element, growing organically through rotation and translation of the triangular section. The movement of the ‘roto-section” generates an organic shell with significant sculptural qualities.

After the first polystyrene arrangement, just to control proportions and sloping part, a wood model in scale 1:1 was created and after some correction by hand, the official basic “object” necessary to manufacture the mold was decided upon. The type of mold has been conditioned from the type of the finishing Fusillo will offer and considering the polished lacquering as the best obtainable result, it was decided to manufacture a fiberglass mold with a gel-coated inner finish. Read the rest of this entry »