The new Kaohsiung Marine Gateway Terminal designed by Asymptote is a new state of the art transportation interchange, an urban destination with both terminal and public facilities including exhibition and event spaces for the people of Kaohsiung as well as for national and international visitors. The project transforms the site from its industrial roots into a dynamic urban hub and a global gateway that bring a powerful and electric experience to the city 24 hours a day. The port terminal as envisioned by Asymptote is designed to invigorate and activate Kaohsiung’s city edge at the water. The port terminal extends the urban realm from the center of Kaohsiung to the city’s waterfront and connects this new urban space with the vitality of the future Pop Music Center and other public recreational and commercial activities that are to be located along the planned park at water’s edge.

Key components of Asymptote’s design are two elegant towers, a sculptural terminal hall that is framed and hovers in an elevated position between them, and a plinth below that connects the towers and accommodates a new public urban space. This open plaza is an articulated yet continuous public space that is located at the very intersection of circulation paths that seamlessly draw the urban space of Kaohsiung into the heart of the project through to the water’s edge and back towards the city. These provide access to a number of important public spaces and programs as well as contribute to the dramatic entry sequence to the port facilities. This intertwining of public and private access as well as programming creates an activated public realm, providing a unique experience to ship passengers and city dwellers alike. The curved form of the terminal hall sits delicately yet majestically above the large open plaza activated by the flow of people moving back and forth between the harbor and the city. From the city, the terminal forms an urban scaled aperture that frames the harbor and water beyond. The sculpted underside of the floating building provides shelter to the urban space from the strong sun and seasonal rains while at night it provides dramatic illumination for the ongoing public activities, events and celebrations. Read the rest of this entry »

Greg Lynn’s Fountain is the first architecture and design project guest-curated by architectural historian Sylvia Lavin. As part of Hammer Projects, Lavin will organize a new project approximately once a year over the next three years that will present new works by architects and designers. These projects will be sited in different locations around the Museum.

“I was influenced by an ex-assistant of mine who stayed on in my position at the ETHZ named Matthias Kohler who is using robotic arms to place standard masonry units like bricks and blocks as well as Office DA who must have inspired him by building something similar in China with intricate brick patterns using manual labor and curved templates. I was interested in an intricate approach to masonry but instead of geometries of how to place bricks I decided to start with a new kind of brick itself. A hollow plastic lightweight brick that would be cut intricately in order to achieve complexity of surface as well as rustication (a quality I admire in the baroque architecture and sculpture); all without use of mortar for tolerance. My wife, Slvia Lavin suggested that the best scale for these new hollow plastic bricks (Blobwall and Toy Furniture) was a Fountain. Once the typology that was her idea was in place I started looking at Bernini’s fountains around Rome in particular. I realized that as sculpture they were too busy (they were assembled out of many many parts including turtles, elephants, fish, dolphins, shells, human figures, serpents, etc…) whereas as architecture they were figural and made out of relatively few pieces. I was inspired by this typology of the fountains that had more discrete pieces than sculpture but fewer more figurative parts than a building.” – Greg Lynn Read the rest of this entry »

Boston-based architect E. Kevin Schopfer in collaboration with Tangram 3DS (visualization) envisioned “Harvest City” in Haiti as a floating agricultural / light industrial city off the shores of the island. Harvest City would be a vibrant fully functioning city of 30,000 residents which embraces three major concepts.

1. The creation of an artificial, floating, productive and livable land desperately needed for Haiti.

2. A city designed based on the principle of Arcology (Architecture and Ecology) which embodies an ecologically sustainable and practical urban platform.

3. That harvest City should be established as a “Charter City”. Charter City is a relatively new and advanced economic model specifically developed for struggling nations. Read the rest of this entry »

The 85,000 square metre Dongdaemun Design Plaza designed by Zaha Hadid Architects will establish a learning resource for designers and members of the public with a design museum, library and educational facilities, whilst the 30,000 square metre Park will create a green oasis within the dense urban surroundings of Dongdaemun, Seoul. The form of the Dongdaemun Design Plaza and Park revolves around the ancient city wall, which forms the central element of the composition, creating a continuous landscape that physically links the park and plaza together. The fluid language of the design, by inference and analogy, acts as a catalyst by promoting fluid thinking and interaction across all the design disciplines, whilst also encouraging the greatest degree of interaction between the activities of the Plaza and the public.

The new Dongdaemun Park creates a place for leisure, relaxation, and refuge. The design integrates the Park and Plaza seamlessly as one landscape element, blurring the boundary between architecture and nature. Informed by the Korean painting traditions depicting grand visions of the ever-changing aspects of nature, the Park reinterprets elements of traditional Korean garden design: reflecting pools, lotus ponds, pebble beds and bamboo groves, with no single feature dominating the perspective. The external landscape of the Park transforms Seoul into a greener city by folding into the internal shopping/dining areas below. Numerous voids, undulations and depressions give park visitors glimpses into innovative world of design and allow Dongdaemun Design Plaza and Park to be an important link between the city’s contemporary culture, historic artefacts and emerging nature. Read the rest of this entry »

Spear tower is a five-star luxury hotel designed by architecture students Milica Stankovic and Vuk Djordjevic from Belgrade University in Serbia. The main idea was to create a high-rise hotel as a new land-mark for the city. The tower is 201 meters tall and has 80,000 square meters of space. The structure itself consists of an inner core and an outer shell as a chamfered triangle supported by seven rotated trusses. Green floors are repeated every six floors while extended green floors are open-space gardens accessible to guests and visitors. The gap between the inner core and the extended trusses provides an excellent source of natural ventilation to the entire building. The hotel has four restaurants, three bars, a large conference area, a wellness center, an art gallery, a library, several shopping areas, and over 250 rooms. Read the rest of this entry »

In an increasingly dense urban fabric, residents become further disconnected from the origin of food they consume. Urban vertical farms challenge this disconnect, often through challenging design. Emerging architect Scott Johnson has hyperlocalized the vertical farm into a program that supports the tower’s residences with a tiered farm in the core of the building.

The Chicago based concept tower is based on the structure of a sea cucumber. The animal is a part of the Echinoderms family with a spiny exterior skin protecting soft tissues dedicated for digestion and reproduction. The provocatively named project Aberrant Architecture is conceived similarly as a ridged exterior frame supporting the floor plates. An outer section is for a hotel and residential units, making up the bulk of the program of the outer ring. The southern face is reserved to food production and dips to provide exposure for an inner tower which is dedicated for growing crops. Each level is reserved for one of twelve foods, depending on solar exposure and humidity. Read the rest of this entry »

Hertl Architekten unveiled their completed project for a design agency and apartments situated directly on the bank of the river Enns in Austria, the site offers a meadow with old fruit trees and a view to a forest slope above the water in the west. The house for a design agency and an apartment moves close to the street in the east. It’s nearly without openings there. The building regulations allow one and a half stores. That is why diagonally roofs determine the form of the design. They are arranged as three layers of different length and hereby react on the scape of the site and the internal functions.

The sculptural volume is covered with a concisely surface made of a black rubber film. It is roof and façade at the same time and it plays with the analogy to the media industry. Light domes of different dimensions are scattered over the surface, meant as a metaphor of water droplets. They illuminate the office and emphasize on the black covering.

The entrance to the office is at the street corner. It’s emphasized by a loggia and the fact that it stands alone. A stairway in a ravine at the east side of the middle tract leads to the second floor. The open office space, which makes the form of the roof visible inside, is seperated from the ravine only by parapet wall. The space is structured by a discussion area which is thought as a box. There is only one view through a small strip window to the river. Read the rest of this entry »

The new plans for the Zayed National Museum, a monument and memorial to the United Arab Emirates founding President Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, were recently unveiled by Foster + Partners, an international architecture firm based in the United Kingdom.

The museum, which will be located on Saadiyat Island, 500 meters off the coast of Abu Dhabi, seeks to blend modern, sustainable architectural design with traditional Arabic forms and cultural values. The result is a warm and hospitable complex that, while forward-thinking in design, is also uniquely of its place.

The museum will be warm culturally, but literally as well: the complex is comprised of a dramatic lobby that sits within a man-made hill, and is topped, in addition to a thick layer of earth, by five wing-shaped, solar thermal towers that act as thermal chimneys. Fresh air that flows into the lobby is pushed through the complex and up through the towers, giving a constant, cool airflow to the museum. The towers are made of lightweight steel to mirror the light, aerodynamic design of a bird’s wing. This design is functional but also references Sheik Zayed’s love of falcons. Read the rest of this entry »

Part art installation, part portable sanctuary, the “Ma Bulle, Ma Plante, & Moi” (My Bubble, My Plant, & Me) exhibition by Amaury Gallon recently placed several transparent, plant-filled bubble structures on the streets of Paris to provide passers by with 15 minutes of inspiration, beauty, and fresh air.

Four bubble gardens in total were constructed. One bubble overflowed with plants to be a “jungle;” another was filled with hundreds of orchids that were woven around the metal supports that comprised the bubble’s frame. All featured hundreds of lush plants and flowers, which were visible through the clear cover that enclosed the bubbles, which were wrapped around the metal frame. Read the rest of this entry »

“Progression Through Unlearning” is part of an ongoing research by Bao An Nguyen Phuoc, Arie-willem De Jongh, and Mingy Seol from TU Delft into an architecture which explores the generation of programmatic, structural and spatial order through a multi-agent based design methodology which operates in a high pressure environment. The intention was to achieve highly varied heterogeneous spatial formations, catering to a wide variety of human activities and programmatic demands. The strategy of the project was to explore the possibilities of connecting exclusive programmatic and hard threshold zones through a continuous and gradient experience of the multifunctional voids and green areas. Read the rest of this entry »