Massimiliano and Doriana Fuksas won the “International Schematic Design Competition of Shenzhen Guosen Securities Tower” After the Shenzhen Bao’an International Airport Terminal 3 won by Studio Fuksas in March 2008, on October 18th 2010 Massimiliano and Doriana Fuksas won the “International Schematic Design Competition of Shenzhen Guosen Securities Tower”.

The project by Studio Fuksas is born from the intention to create a new concept of vertical public space for the tower. A three-dimensional void will be arranged along the facades giving a dynamic image to the building and creating different public scenarios for the offices. The design of the void shape explores the relation between the podium and the vertical section of the tower with diagonals spaces and fluxes that create a vertical tension in the full height of the tower. Read the rest of this entry »

A starkly modern grid-patterned skyscraper within the heart of Los Angeles, the Vertical Campus, designed by architects Gail Peter Borden and Brian D. Andrews, is a tower that “engages urbanity,” and seeks to energize and engage the community by re-orienting the landscape from the city’s horizontal sprawl to a vertical complex.

The tower is located over the Los Angeles River, using the building’s base to generate hydroelectricity, and is a mix of residential, commercial, garden and civic spaces.

Instead of just being a skyscraper, though, the Vertical Campus seeks to help re-envision how to unite people through design, how to house new growth in an already dense city, and how to blend complex building systems to unite an existing complex urban fabric. The building will, through its design and also programmatic elements, be a literal bridge that unites the people of different economic and social classes that currently reside on the opposite sides of the river.

In terms of what it houses and how it’s powered, the Vertical Campus has it all. Wind turbines join the hydroelectric to provide energy, as does photovoltaic film; horizontal farms breed algae for energy use while hanging gardens grow vegetables and flowers for residents; rainwater is collected and purified; and all of the city’s transportation paths – bike, pedestrian, car, subway, train – run across the building’s base, unifying the building in another way with its landscape. Read the rest of this entry »

The Urban Tree project was designed by Geotectura, and award-winning architectural studio based in Israel and founded by Dr. Joseph Cory as a way to merge land and architecture with sustainable elements, cost effective technologies, and social responsability.

This urban scale structure contains greenhouse platforms on dwelling floating cubes that keeps a minimal footprint on the ground. The bioclimatic structure capsule enables space and function flexibility. Variation in size and function in each unit is preserved within each cube with panoramic viewpoints and optimal air flow. Together with the multi-dimensional absolute green environment and the terrace sky courts of this versatile self-sufficient project reflect a sustainable responsability while building high. This concept of two helicoids prefabricated infrastructure is like a growing a urban tree that improves the dwellers’ quality of life while living in the sky. These mega-cubes weave nature and communities  into a dense city. Read the rest of this entry »

Kaohsiung, the largest port city in Taiwan, is in need of a cruise ship passenger terminal and public face for its contribution to the islands growing cultural importance. Sun and Associate’s submitted proposal for the Passenger Transportation District for the Port of Kaohsiung is a sweeping architectural statement on public use and green urban design. The obvious allusion to a wave creates a welcoming sensibility to visitors and speaks to the islands relationship to the sea. The building’s mixed use as a conference center, office, port and urban park expand the programs flexibility and public/ private accessibility. Read the rest of this entry »

Suspension City, comprised of complexes of housing, office and commercial sites built within abandoned quarries in the sprawling outskirts of Santiago, Chile, seeks to blend into the spread out landscape while improving its conditions.

Designed by Robert Alexander and Catherine Burce, the city uses a matrix of woven metal hills to hold pillars that reach to the bottom of the quarries, with office and residential units suspended from the pillars as they descend. Using both the art of M.C. Escher and the structuring of a beehive by the beekeeper to maximize space and accessibility as inspirations, the pair have created a design that seeks to combat sprawl by filling in the very mines whose wealth supported sprawl’s explosion in the area.

The hilly matrix that shields Suspension City has roads woven into its grid, connecting it to the surrounding existing development, and also large holes to expose the city below to sunlight. The city descends as deep as 70 meters in some places. Read the rest of this entry »

Amsterdam-based architectural firm UNStudio unveiled the design for the Urban Library of the Future and Centre for New Media in Gent, Belgium. The new complex creates a dynamic, flexible and open knowledge environment, with an open landscape, alternative circulation routes, several meeting areas and a public plaza. The building is fluid in form, accommodating to its surroundings and incorporates expansive sightlines. The internal organisation of the building is based on an open central void, around which the circulation takes place. This void enhances the spatial experience, creates clear orientation through the building and fulfills a bridging function between the city and the Municipal Library. The structure of the building makes it possible to introduce (green) roof terraces whilst also ensuring low levels of direct sunlight penetration. Read the rest of this entry »

Award-winning Norwegian architectural firm, Snøhetta, unveiled an innovative proposal for the Max-Lab in Lund, Sweden. The Max-Lab is a national laboratory jointly operated by the Swedish Research Council and the Lund University.

The overall architectural idea builds on the meeting point between the strong landscape and the circular shape of a synchrotron (cyclic particle accelerator). The circular shape is twisted and raised to create a dynamic form based on a Möbius strip that becomes an actual volume, not just a ribbon.   The building is unified to the landscape through parks and cultural programs around an oval road with an iconic layout that would be independent from future developments in the surrounding area – from agricultural landscaping to urban developments.  The geometry of the twisted cylinder is generated based on functional requirements and detailed solar studies for heat gain, reducing it up to thirty percent. Read the rest of this entry »

Since the concrete dried last winter the Natural Science Center has attracted a lot of attention worldwide. The Danish building situated in Bjerringbro far away from the capital Copenhagen even went as far as getting cited by the World Architecture Community Awards. Now the innovative building designed by Nord Architects Copenhagen is nominated for the Mies van der Rohe Award.

The Natural Science center is a building out of the ordinary. If you thought atriums spanning two floors were cool, think again. In the Natural Science Center all spaces are open and have views spanning several floors. The building itself is shaped as a cylinder with terraces, openings and cuts to explore and get lost in.

“The idea behind the Natural Science Center is to make young people interested in natural science and pursue a career within that field. Natural Science is about exploring and asking questions, so we wanted to design a building that made them do just that.” – Johannes Pedersen, partner Nord Architects Copenhagen Read the rest of this entry »

McGill University architecture students Yan Jie Chen and Camille John have designed, directly across from Montreal’s Old Port, a skyscraper of glass and gardens that houses residents of the 2030s in the Néocité, a cultural revitalization project seeking to transform Montreal’s Cité du Havre.

The inspiration for the design of “Hanging Gardens” is playful yet complex: the building is based on a Chinese puzzle game with six unique, interlocking rectangles that can only be arranged in one certain way so that no spaces exist between the pieces. The students took this model and stacked it 20 times, rotating as they went, to create a 220-meter tower. The tower has a core that is wrapped by two “identical helices” that twist clockwise until the height reaches 86 stories tall.

This geometrical precision results in a skyscraper that can house 250 apartment units, and also has ample private and public outdoor gardens, meeting grounds and meditation spaces. Read the rest of this entry »

Russian architects Gagarinskaya Anastasiya and Gaydukova Varvara from the Moscow Institute of Architecture propose a three-hundred meter tall space station on the western side of Moscow. The strong architectural forms are inspired by the Russian Constructivists of the early 20th Century with the use of platonic forms and clean lines. It consists of a main multifunctional round platform with additional horizontal landing strips. The station is linked to the city on the other side of the Moscow River by a pedestrian bridge where a hotel and other amenities would be located. Read the rest of this entry »