Zaha Hadid Architects designed a new museum of contemporary art for the Kingdom of Bahrain. The new complex will house exhibition spaces for permanent and temporary collections, multi-event auditorium, education facilities, studios for artists at residence, and retail areas. The project is estimated to be completed by 2012 and was funded by the Cultural and National Heritage Sector of Bahrain.

The enigmatic volume emerges from a narrow coastal land stripe at the Gulf of Bahrain. Describing a gentle curve while gradually rising from the ground a volume is formed that bends slightly and reaches over the water towards Manama. The building appears mystically floating above a coastal landscape. Public fields flow around the sculptural mass of the museum, underlining its presence with curvy-linear lines echoing the contours of the volume. The overall dynamism and fluidity of the elongated form support the emphasis on movement through and around the museum. Read the rest of this entry »

In designing an entry for eVolo’s 2010 Skyscraper Competition, three architecture students from Romania, Csegzi Kamilla, Hoffman Alexandru and Moldovanu Vladimir, wanted to question what forces really impact a building’s design. The large, theoretical question comes from using Bucharest as the city to site a new skyscraper: in a place run, until recently, by a communist regime, along with the oppressed mentality and Soviet architecture that accompanies such a force, how can architecture help a culture move beyond a suffocating era?

An architectural style “without form,” the trio claim, can be a way that design can bring “progressive change,” as the architecture itself is eternally able to evolve, grow, develop. The group’s design shows rods growing out of stable, low structures; these rods have units attached to them as they ascend. The units can flexibly change as needed, shift within the building’s location or be replaced altogether. Read the rest of this entry »

A project for a centre for contemporary arts in Rome is now officially the best new building in the world. MAXXI, National Museum of XXI Century Arts, Italy, designed by Zaha Hadid Architects, UK, has won global architecture’s most coveted accolade of ‘World Building of the Year’ at the prestigious World Architecture Festival Awards (WAF) 2010.

The presentation of the WAF Awards took place during a special ceremony, which marked the conclusion of the biggest global celebration of architecture – the World Architecture Festival, held at the Centre Convencions International Barcelona (CCIB) this week.

The winning design was selected from a shortlist of 15 projects from around the world by the WAF ‘Super Jury’. The ‘Super Jury’ consisted of Arata Isozaki, Barry Bergdoll, who is the Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Enrique Norten, founder of TEN Arquitectos, and Hanif Kara of engineer Adams Kara Taylor.

Speaking at WAF 2010 Paul Finch, WAF Programme Director, said: “The clarity required for architects to present their work in ten minutes often underlines the clarity of thought itself. There were a number of buildings that the judges admired, but the winning building had a certain inevitability to win the overall award. This is a building which is a volume, which takes its place in a very happy way, inside the volume of a city – an unwound Guggenheim, with ribbons of connectivity. It is a building which will still be talked about in the history of architecture in 50 years time.” Read the rest of this entry »

The Tour de la Porte Chapelle is a new mixed-use development in Paris, France designed by award-winning architectural firm Abalos Sentkiewicz to be completed in 2012. The project was commissioned by the City of Paris as a new urban hub for the area; the innovative building is composed of three main towers that peel off from a multi-purpose plinth with civic, retail, and recreational areas. The towers are divided according to program including housing, offices, and hotel – a very interesting aspect of the proposal is the weaving of programs at the lower floors creating interstitial hybrid spaces. Read the rest of this entry »

Stuttgart, Germany architecture student Christian Hahn is dreaming of America with his “Use Arrangement” eVolo 2010 Skyscraper Competition entry, which envisions a lively tower for the tip of Manhattan near Battery Park.

To honor the constant flow of traffic, both human and automobile in New York City, Hahn has designed the building to accommodate pedestrian traffic; he seeks the lively flow of people in the building’s core so that it feels “alive.”

The structure itself is a series of thick geometrical shapes arranged into a cohesive tall tower; each individual honeycomb is a “parcel” with several horizontal slats as floors that can hold different units. The massive tower has enough space to essentially act as its own city, with parcels being used as residences, offices, parks, retail space. The building will even house a police station, a fire station and a school. Read the rest of this entry »

The display category at the World Architecture Festival this year was not only about displaying objects, but even more about telling stories. Many of the display nominees were more like exquisite small museums. In the category we also found two of the pavilions from the Shanghai-Expo, where architecture itself is supposed to tell the story of a country. The category winner the Spanish pavilion by Miralles Tagliabue EMBT, is as much a piece of art as it is architecture.

The idea of taking wicker, even though not solely a Spanish material, shows what architecture can do when Expos like this send architects off doing the unthinkable. It stands out as a building, and a story, that the visitors to the event will remember. The container of the exhibition becomes an ephemeral poetic and strongly memorable image of the creativity of Spain. The connection of the Chinese visitors to the craft of wicker making encourages a level of sympathy with Spanish craftspeople of past times. Read the rest of this entry »

The project for the World War Museum in Gdansk designed by Chicago-based architect Sean Lally is organized around two straightforward principles. The first is to create a central exhibition core, a “jewel box” that contains the permanent and temporary exhibition space, continuously accessible from all sides along a “loop lobby” that encircles it: the second is the location of the public programs associated with the museum’s urban context–conference, restaurant, hotel, library, and education facilites as well as an urban park–on the upper level rooftop, initiating a “new city floor” with views to the surrounding city, accessible year-round. Making these outdoor public spaces attractive to visitors regardless of season requires the design of a “climatic wash’ that can produce artificial micro-climates and extend seasonal activities throughout the year.

This wash is made possible by harnessing the energy dumps that inevitably occur in a building of this scale (36,000 m²), which requires 900 m² of mechanical space and 11,000 m² of parking garage, both of which vent large amounts of heat and moisture, as well as the combined body heat of several thousand visitors a day. This climatically elastic and unique ‘new city floor’ is the resource for the museum and the city of Gdansk as a whole. Read the rest of this entry »

When you say the word skyscraper, do you always think of a tall rectangle? Is it freestanding? Is there one main entrance? Australian architecture student Josephine Turner takes issue with these, and other assumptions about what skyscrapers are, what they should be, and how they can function individually, within a system of other buildings and for the city as a whole.

In designing a skyscraper complex, Turner has proposed a network of “skylinks that connect elevated urban plazas” for the Bangaroo district of Sydney, Australia. Her design, the “Bangaroo Sky Village,” incorporates the elements of the skyscraper that Turner would like the public to rethink; for example, her towers are designed as stacked triangle shapes instead of rectangles, and they are rotated to give help soften the sharp geometrical look of the buildings. Using triangles to construct a massive building, she says, is exceedingly efficient when distributing weight, and therefore can allow for a more creative layout within the building.

In her design, Turner uses reinforced “spider joints” to allow for the triangular shaped modules to be stacked into towers of varying height, so as to weave artfully into the existing city landscape. The different levels in the towers are connected with skybridges that are open, fostering a pedestrian, community environment. Agricultural levels are staggered throughout the buildings, interspersed between residential, commercial and office levels, and are fed through a hydroponic system throughout each building that brings water for the crops. Read the rest of this entry »

Award-winning firm Studio SHIFT unveiled their proposal for mixed-use housing in the periphery of Milan, Italy. Mario Cipresso is the founder of the Santa Monica-based studio and commented on the project: “The project is one of twelve proposals located on the periphery of the historic city center offering conceptual solutions for the densification of Milano. Each proposal injects 25,000 inhabitants into the existing fabric of Milano for a total population increase of 300,000.

The radical nature of this undertaking, specifically the insertion of twenty-five thousand new inhabitants at the site, on the periphery of the cultural and economic center of the city, requires an equally radical response. The population increase will most certainly impose enormous demands on existing infrastructure and the social and economic well-being of the population will face new strains.

In order to address this situation, our proposal employs a comprehensive strategy that simultaneously establishes a self-sustaining community and one that seeks to integrate programmatically and physically with the existing city. Read the rest of this entry »

Creative director Byung Ju Lee of Planning Korea announced a new paradigm in bridge called ‘Paik Nam June Media Bridge’ in Seoul, Korea. Connecting Dangi-li Power Plant (which has a plan to be redeveloped into public cultural space) in the north and The National Assembly Building in the south, this bridge shows the first example of ‘a city expanded to the river’.

As a futuristic and aesthetic sculptor over the Han River, Paik Nam June Media Bridge shows how to use spaces over the bridge efficiently and eco-friendly. Inspired by the water strider, the overall shape is organic with sleek, streamlined outline. With the total length of 1080m, this mega structure bridge is covered with solar panel to generate energy by itself. Read the rest of this entry »