When looking at high rise buildings as housing, two extremes often come to mind: luxury skyscrapers that provide penthouses to the rich and powerful, and overcrowded “projects” that offer often substandard living conditions to lower-income families.

Ilana Prac, an interior design student at Tel Aviv, Israel’s Shenkar College of Engineering and Design, has designed a skyscraper that seeks to soften those two extremes. In Prac’s “Merging Lifestyles” 2010 eVolo skyscrapers competition entry, people of varying economic and social backgrounds come together to live in one building, which is a solid structure composed of many multi-sized and colored pods. While merging its population internally, the building also seeks to meld elements on its exterior, seaming into the Neve Tsedek neighborhood of Tel Aviv through use of the area’s vernacular materials and typology. Read the rest of this entry »

The Sustainable Ocean Living (SOL) tower and complex, designed by Australian architects David John McMorrow and Mario Celik, brings a new possible solution to housing the earth’s rapidly growing population – ship them out to sea.

Three billion new people will be born on this planet by 2050, experts say, posing unprecedented burdens on the earth’s resources. McMorrow and Celik see this as an opportunity to utilize modern technology to create a city that is, exotically enough, located in the middle of the ocean. The pair has designed, in SOL, a city system that is completely self-sufficient. Wave power harnessed through buoys provides the city’s energy, vertical agriculture and ocean fish farms provide food, and a marina with luxury hotels, restaurants and other amenities will make the city an exciting and enjoyable place to live and visit. Read the rest of this entry »

OMA recently unveiled their masterplan for Qianhai Port City. Situated at the threshold of Hong Kong and Mainland China, Qianhai occupies a position of strategic significance in the Pearl River Delta. The planned intensification of transport through the site renders inevitable its emergence as a new center. The question is not whether Qianhai will develop, but how? If successful, a new city center in Qianhai could fulfill Shenzhen’s coastal ambitions and establish a node for interaction between various components of the PRD.

The existing use of the site consists primarily of infrastructure, transportation, and logistics. The operations of the port and its related functions define the quality of much of the site and adjacent areas. What if, rather than attempting to suppress or insulate these uses from new development, they are considered as latencies capable of forming the identity of a new city? Can the introduction of new urban conditions benefit from and reinforce the existing (port) conditions of the site? The design organizes the site in a series of parallel bands running east-west. The irregular extension of these layers into the Qianhai Bay and Pearl River Estuary creates piers and increases the proximity of the city to the water. The layers form a stack of different and juxtaposed types of space, each varying in terms of architectural typology, density, and landscape. Read the rest of this entry »

A unique superblock is officially opened today in the French City of Lyon. Designed by Erick van Egeraat created the superblock, called the ‘Monolith’in collaboration with the French architects Combarel-Marrec, Manuelle Gautrand, Pierre Gautier and the Dutch Architect Winy Maas.

This superblock is part of the urban renewal project Lyon Confluence. The building with its exuberant architecture is intended to add the new values to this derelict territory which was previously a thriving industrial district. Now the area is transformed into an innovative and beautiful part of Lyon’s city center. Erick van Egeraat and his French and Dutch colleagues all contributed to this ambitious development.

The Lyon Confluence project consists of three lots: A, B and C. The project of (designed by Erick van Egeraat) is located in lot C which is also know as Le Monolithe. Lot C comprises of office, retail and residential units on a size of 32.000m2, is located in Lyon’s key – redevelopment area Lyon Confluence. It will accommodate 1.500 new residents, 15.000m2 of new office-space and 1.800 m2 of retail. This ‘superblock‘ is part of the larger inner-city redevelopment in the gastronomic center of France. Read the rest of this entry »

In a metaphorical seaming of the social and economic divides that keep downtown and suburban Raleigh, North Carolina separate, Carlos Paredes and Sofia Chiriboga, M. Arch students at the Savannah College of Art and Design, have designed a building that seeks to unite the city’s population through housing, retail, services, and an appealing landscape.

The city’s once structured grid, deformed over time, has served as the design inspiration for the building’s multi-use towers, which curve and intertwine within a skeleton of intersecting rectangular frames. The building’s two towers are also symbolic: the lower tower houses a financial services complex and represents Raleigh’s urban population, and the taller tower, which nestles into the lower at points, represents the wants of the city’s suburban population by providing high-end housing units. Elevators that move both horizontally and vertically are utilized to link floors within the 15 and 30-story towers, and ample greenery is interspersed to provide shading and organic gardens. Read the rest of this entry »

Architect Tamir Lavi of Tel Aviv, Israel is using bamboo as the material in his new apartment skyscraper, but not in the way you might think. Bamboo isn’t Lavi’s construction material – it’s his research material.

The stalk of a bamboo plant – its sturdy inner skeleton, the way light shines through to the inside, the layout of its hollw cells – has served as a blueprint for the conception of Lavi’s building, which is proposed for the northern “diamond exchange” border area of Tel Aviv. Using bamboo’s strength against wind and other environmental stressors as evidence of its design superiority, Lavi’s skyscraper version replicates the cell layout to arrange the individual apartments, and uses the sun’s infiltration in thinking about how to control natural light throughout the building. Read the rest of this entry »

Award-winning architectural firm REX designed  a residential complex in Songdo Landmark City, Korea in which every apartment offers direct southern exposure, cross-ventilation, and views. However, Korean zoning guidelines and local building practices typically produce towers that fail to provide these three locally-prized amenities. Furthermore, prevailing site strategies carve up the open space such that the result is not the often-advertised “Towers in a Park,” but anemic “Towers in a Yard” instead.

Block A4 challenges conventional Korean development practices to provide the three key amenities within each unit and a true publicly-accessible park at grade. Korean towers typically have four or more units per floor. As a result, many apartments have limited direct light, no southern exposure and poor cross-ventilation. By splitting a single tower with four units per floor into four separate towers with only one unit per floor, the resulting super-slim building type. Read the rest of this entry »

In his project “Collage Scape,” Kang Woo-Young, an associate professor at the Kaywon School of Art and Design in Gyeonggi-do, South Korea imagines a future where nature has been eradicated from the modern urban landscape, and must be replaced with a man-made landscape. To combat a sea of typical skyscrapers, Woo-Young has designed a building that stacks “memories of nature,” and mimics the natural world’s patterns by blending mathematical precision with art and technology. Using the layering and fluctuating forms of energy fields, lava flows and sediment accumulation as inspirations, the building builds layers of curving shapes into a 600 meter-tall skyscraper, a utopian oasis in the newly developed modern metropolis of Songdo in Incheon, South Korea. Read the rest of this entry »

Solus4 recently unveiled  a 2,500 sm Marine Research Center Located 100 meters away, parallel to the shore of Kuta Beach, Bali, Indonesia. The program is composed of three main components: public, semipublic and private. The spaces vary from underwater labs, scientist bedrooms and aquatic garden to sea water pool, swimming pool terrace, bar and an auditorium. The spaces are located above and under water and allow the visitors and scientist to take full advantage of the amazing landscape that surrounds the project.

This project represents a new typology for stationary in-water based projects reached by boat, which in the past have been mostly relegated as merely work, non-destination platforms which do not take into account the design possibilities that the in-water sites present. Read the rest of this entry »

The new Antwerp Port Authority headquarters designed by Zaha Hadid Architects will house approximately 500 staff (currently working in separate buildings) in a single new location that comprises a former fire station and the new extension.

Staff and visitors arrive in the central atrium which also operates as an exhibition space, from where public counters, offices and meeting rooms in the existing building are directly accessible. The offices, meeting rooms, auditorium and panoramic restaurant in the new extension are accessible via panoramic lifts just off the central courtyard. In total the new Port House design is 12,800 m² (gross): 6,600 m² in the refurbished Fire Station, and 6,200 m² in the extension. The maximum dimensions of the new building extension are 114 m long, 24 m wide and 46 m high, providing an additional 4 floors. Read the rest of this entry »