Finalist
2011 Skyscraper Competition

Nick Ochoa, Sabrina Brenner, Michael Krause
United States

Flexible-Modular (FLEXmod) puts the power of form and program into the hands of the occupant. A lightweight mutable structure can be sculpted to desired shape, function, and size. With the ability to change from iteration to iteration with ease, architecture becomes the symbol of the owner. The FLEXmod system can be utilized universally as either individual units or combined with additional units to create spaces and structures that span infinity.

In the instance depicted by this project, the need for a residential community has arisen. FLEXmod units comprised together form the superstructure for residential tower like compositions. Additional FLEXmod units dedicated to housing and support spaces plug into the superstructure. A complex form of private spaces integrated into various public spaces feeds the notion of a unified community.

As a model for a movement representational of sustainability, units are only added as necessary. Rather than creating a building that is designed for a set of criteria, the building becomes designed by the needs of the inhabitants. If a decreased need for program occurs, units are simply removed and transported to other sites or stored efficiently. Read the rest of this entry »

Finalist
2011 Skyscraper Competition

Julia-Elise Hoins, Arnd-Benedikt Willert-Klasing, David Blezinger, Nikolaus Türk
Germany

As a growing metropolis Hamburg is Germany’s second largest city. Although there is a strong demand for housing, new developments cannot be higher than the medieval churches’ towers. Law protects the traditional skyline and a new neighborhood named HafenCity is the only place where skyscrapers are allowed.

This project consists of a mixed-use towers complex in HafenCity with a small footprint that allows the public to move freely and enjoy the ground plan amenities. Since the building is positioned between two major freeways entering the city, the geometry of the building isolates the program from the traffic noise – at the bottom the shorter façades are twisted to the outside while the larger ones open up to the center. The façade responds to the environment by changing its appearance through light and reflections -it dissolves in the sky while stating its presence with shiny gold gradients.

For this area of HafenCity, the master plan developed by the city of Hamburg, requires a mixed-use program of hotel, offices, and housing. It should alsoinclude cultural and public needs which in this project are located in the middle part, where the three towers merge and create a plaza with several levels in the sky. Read the rest of this entry »

Finalist
2011 Skyscraper Competition

Michael Leef, Tahel Shaar
Israel

This project proposes an innovative spatial integration between nature, agriculture, and urbanization – an analysis of Jerusalem’s future development. In Jerusalem, land is a valuable and scarce resource, it is a city that has nowhere to expand; geo-political reasons prevent the city from expanding to the north, east, and south, while ecological reasons prevent the city from expanding to the west, therefore, Jerusalem can only expand internally.

The Agro-Housing Towers are part of our urban masterplan – a multi-use complex with commercial, public, and cultural spaces on the street level and agricultural housing and agro-public spaces above. It is a new way of perceiving the urban fabric by creating a structural network of built space with productive and natural open spaces. The towers have a continuous system of agricultural fields on the southern façade – designed according to the annual sun movement to allow agriculture to exist vertically in the maximum number of levels. Read the rest of this entry »

“The Galleria Cheonan responds to the current retail climate in Asia, where department stores also operate as social and semi-cultural meeting places. Because of this, the quality of the public spaces within the building was treated as an integral aspect of the design.” – Ben van Berkel

UNStudio’s Galleria Centercity Department Store in the Korean city of Cheonan reclaims the social and cultural space within the private, commercial large scale department store.

Rather than being the outcome of a prescriptive, standard-critical approach, the design of the Galleria Centercity is based on observations of current behavioural tendencies in large commercial spaces. Particularly in South East Asia, department stores serve a highly social function; people meet, gather, eat, drink and both shop and window shop in these venues. The department store is no longer solely a commercial space, it now offers the architect the opportunity to build upon and expand the social and cultural experience of the visitor. If today we are seeing the museum as a supermarket, then we are also now seeing the department store as a museum. Read the rest of this entry »

In an effort to design sustainable new housing prototypes for Haiti, architect Laurent Saint-Val unveiled a designed inspired by the traditional art of basketry by weaving natural plant fibres, including bamboo,  from the local habitat into a cocoon-shape structure.

Saint-Val compares the residential structure to the carving of a totem pole, noting the sacred correlation and explaining: “It’s an architecture that segments space and which translates well the transient character of these habitats.”

Wolf D. Prix / COOP HIMMELB(L)AU presents the new ‘Open Parliament of Albania’ in Tirana which incorporates fundamental democratic values such as openness, transparency and public co-determination. The building, located on a site area with approximately 28,000 m², is going to be the first project in Albania for the Viennese headquartered studio.

“Our design for the new Parliament in Tirana, Albania, stands for the transparency of democracy”, according to Wolf D. Prix, Design Principal and CEO of COOP HIMMELB(L)AU.

Architectural Concept

As the future political center of the Albanian Republic, the Open Parliament of Albania creates an outstanding architectural landmark in one of the main parts of Tirana’s urban fabric. Situated along the compositional axis of the city, it is located in vicinity to the major governmental institutions. The design for the Open Parliament of Albania relies on three main ideas:

• To provide a strong urban statement in this exposed part of Tirana’s urban fabric;

• To assemble the different functions in one building ensemble that is compact enough to create a public forum and a park on the southern part of the site;

• To create a unique building for the most important public institution of the Albanian Republic with a contemporary architectural approach shaped to optimize active and passive energy use.

The design incorporates fundamental democratic values such as openness, transparency and public co-determination. The simultaneity of competing political concepts within a democratic society is translated into the design concept: Different building elements are not opposed, but coexist in one building ensemble with a contemporary aesthetic that allows visualizing new functions and meanings. Read the rest of this entry »

Creativity and innovation meet design, Disney meets DuPont-Corian at the next Milan week of design (11-17 April, 2011), the most important venue for design companies and professionals from around the world. DuPont – Corian and Disney will showcase at “Padiglione Visconti” (via Tortona 58, Milano) “TRON designs CORIAN”, a design exhibition inspired by the film “TRON: Legacy” from Walt Disney Studios.

For the participation of dynamic international kitchen manufacturer Ernestomeda at “TRON designs CORIAN”, Milan-based architectural and design studio AquiliAlberg have conceived a kitchen and dining area inspired by the movie. Read the rest of this entry »

Baku Azerbaijan a land uncharacterized by any singular architectural style is the setting for Zaha Hadid’s latest opus, The Heydar Aliyev Cultural Centre. A government commissioned work, the project was heralded as a building of national importance given Baku’s attempt to host the 2016 Olympics. With the bid coming and going to Rio de Janeiro, the Cultural Centre continues on as a landmark for Azerbaijan’s capital city as well as a symbol of the country’s emergence amongst the world’s wealthiest.

The curvilinear form is engendered from the manipulation of the landscape’s natural topography. The skin undulates across the site, wrapping the various spaces before folding into the interior to become ground. With the floors cascading from one to another, and then connecting to the ramps, the circulation embodies the generative qualities of the skin, creating a continuous path across the interior. The landscape of the interior seamlessly continues beyond the building obscuring the figure-ground relationship. Read the rest of this entry »

The buildings in which aspiring starchitects engage in their creative pursuits are more often than not space-time continuums, clad in banality. Bestor Architecture altruistically fashions a digression from this architectural warp in the form of ¡Disco Silencio! – a temporary disco installation. With architecture students as the “imagined” client, the temporary disco installation provides a lightly hedonistic program that aims to support social and communal experiences.

A burgeoning firm driven by context and experience, Bestor Architecture propagates designs that enable users to interact and experience strange beauty in their everyday environments. Rather than producing an inert object, ¡Disco Silencio! constructs a dynamic process that frames and encourages visual, physical, and social pleasure. Founding Principal Barbara Bestor envisions the installation as a “nightlife student-oriented component of the firm’s larger project-making architecture. The design of the structure is an over-scaled, unfolded demi-dodecahedron model that contains a strong graphic interface. The title ‘Silent Disco’ refers to both the less populated hours of the gallery and to the space itself, when it is unplugged but still dancing.” Read the rest of this entry »

Coldefy & Associates (CAAU) beat out 162 international proposals for the commission of the new Hong Kong Design Institute (HKDI) campus at Tiu Keng Leng. An institute fostering symbiosis between creative and technical design, the winning entry required a reimagining of the interpenetration amongst the multiple disciplines. The purposive iconography created by CAAU goes beyond the deliverables, endeavoring to be the largest state-of-the-art educational design facility in Hong Kong.

The architecture abandons the traditional educational hierarchy, splitting the site vertically into two zones, sky city and the legs of education. This strategy stages a heaven -earth dichotomy between capricious interchanges above, and staged discourses below. The result is a dynamic collegiate environment; a two-storied extrusion of the ground atop four towers. Communal areas, a library and resource centre lie within the extrusion, with the towers housing teaching spaces and vertical circulation. The convex plinth is simultaneously of the school and the city, presenting itself as an urban living room as well as the foundation of the institute. Read the rest of this entry »