London architecture student Jonathan Gales doesn’t just think the 20^th century’s iconic office skyscraper is outdated — he thinks it should be buried. Or chunks of it, at least.

Gales, an M. Arch student at the Bartlett School of Architecture in London, England has proposed, for his eVolo Skyscrapers competition entry, the partial deconstruction of individual skyscrapers to allow for increased green space at staggered heights throughout the city. Citing a 2009 figure from the Telegraph that 11.9 percent of offices in the city are sitting vacant (the equivalent of 10 skyscrapers), Gales poses the idea that replacing a section of each individual office tower with trees and green space would create an increased capacity for the city’s “urban lung.” And instead of sending all that metal and glass to landfills, Gales proposes a sustainable – and ideological – repurposing: re-craft these old offices into an underground tomb to honor to the outdated skyscraper, and all it represents. The Mausoleum to Late Capitalist Iconography would house a think tank dedicated to social, cultural and economic design research, and host debates and symposia below the city’s surface. In a marrying of economic theory and architectural design, Gales asks his audience to consider what the cities of the future really need, and what’s best left to the past. Read the rest of this entry »

OFIS Arhitekti unveiled a mixed-use development for Ljubljana, Slovenia to be completed in 2011. The project is located in the city’s main pedestrian street and its program is a mixture of boutique shops, café, and residences. The street and the park will be connected with a public passage perforating the building  in different levels.

The lower 4 floors are shops connected with a mall while the top three floors are reserved for apartments. The building has terraces between the low-rise historical line and the park, towards the recent extension of the Post Office on the north border of the site. These terraces offer beautiful views towards the old city and the castle. A lower terrace forms an open air café while higher terraces are designed as apartments. 
Some are enclosed with “green pillows”- an organic layered metal mesh with implanted greenery inside.

Similar to fashion, the building changes through seasons: the fall / winter appearance is  silver and sometimes covered in snow. On the other hand, during spring and summer, it is green and covered with flowers. Read the rest of this entry »

Can a building still be called a skyscraper if it, in fact, never has contact with the sky above sea level?

Matthew Fromboluti of Washington University in St. Louis thinks so, and has designed a skyscraper that seeks not only to hold a veritable society worth of people and uses, but simultaneously heals the scarred landscape of the desert outside of Bisbee, Arizona. His project, titled “Above Below,” proposes the infill of a 900-foot deep and nearly 300-acre wide crater left by the former Lavender Pit Mine with a structure that will hold living and working areas, and green space for farming and recreation.

The building is completely self-sustaining, with its own power source, water recycling system, and mechanisms such as a solar chimney to control the artificial climate. Enclosed with a dome roof, the building is completely contained underground, with only strategically-placed skylights for climate control providing access to the world above ground. However, the society living inside is far from isolated – a light-rail system connects the building with nearby Bisbee. Read the rest of this entry »

Award-winning New York studio Asymptote Architecture unveiled a proposal for a new master plan for an area south of Orio al Serio International Airport, located near the historic and majestic city of Bergamo in Northern Italy, calls for an intricate complex inspired by the rolling planar aspects of the region’s countryside. The master plan is a meandering and intriguingly articulated collection of surfaces that seem to have evolved naturally from the adjacent farmlands. The manifestation of the Italian rural landscape in built form is an elegant solution to the real and commercial need for mid- to large-scale development projects such as this one. The scheme calls for powerful, yet subtle, new architectural works placed on an urban plinth and pursues a quasi-urban notion of occupancy where the interior and exterior spaces are fluid and transitional from one another. Overall, the Azzano-San Paolo Master Plan is a signal for the possibility of such developments to be aesthetically compelling and architecturally dynamic. Read the rest of this entry »

New York based architects SO-IL conceived the “Flockr” pavilion as a structure that responds to its environment while also creating a sense of place through its basic form. Covered with thousands of tinted mirrored panels, the skin reflects its surroundings and makes the changing contexts of this temporary and mobile installation—the cityscapes of Beijing and Shanghai— an integral part of its expression. In SO-IL’s experimental façade, only the top of each panel is attached to the structure, allowing the individual pieces to respond to wind and creating a kinetic skin that is permeable by light and air. The pavilion’s structure is made out of 56 thin, flexible steel rods that connect at the bottom and the top into two large steel rings. The larger bottom ring frames the interior perimeter of the structure while the smaller top ring creates a skylight; the relationship between the two results in the pavilion’s curvilinear womb-like shape. The activities that take place within are gently enclosed by a dynamic pattern of thousands of flickering reflections. Because it is circular in plan and curvilinear in section, the pavilion does not discriminate any direction; once passing through the entryway, the interior is generous and encompassing. Read the rest of this entry »

Dutch studio Wiel Arets Architects won the first prize to design the Ijhal – the pedestrian portion of the Amsterdam’s Central Station which is currently undergoing a drastic transformation to become the centrepiece of the city’s plan to reconnect neighbourhood clusters through the restructuring of its public transportation systems. The IJhal, to be located in the rear of Amsterdam’s Centraal Station, on the waterfront of the river IJ, will be the main pedestrian centric portion of the renewed station, adding gastronomic, leisure and service areas to the station’s program.

Historically, the neighbourhood of Amsterdam North has been separated from the rest of the city by the river IJ. With the opening of the IJhal at Centraal Station – and later, the North-South Metro line that will travel under the IJ and physically connect Amsterdam North with the rest of the city – this barrier will be broken down. Read the rest of this entry »

The wryly named Fake Hills is a large apartment complex set on the water in the city of Beihai, China. MAD architects took the long lived Chinese principle of architecture mimicking or responding to nature to counterpoint the modern monolithic residential building trend by using local hill formations as a reference. Its principle design intention was to move away from the current residential towers that are sprouting up in the metropolitan area and reconnect the city with the local hillsides and natural formations. Currently the bulk of building construction in China is cheap residential towers and row buildings that are intended to maximize developer profits but dehumanize and denature the environs. Developed in such a large scale the apartment complex will create an iconic symbol for the city. Read the rest of this entry »

Italian architectural studio OFL architecture received the first prize in the international competition “New Silk Road Map” that aims for the recovery, reinterpretation, and reconfiguration of the Silk Road – a network of commercial, cultural, and religious paths that connected the Eastern and Western civilizations for more than 2000 years.

OFL’s project description:

Silk Road Map Evolution (SRME) is a project born out of the will to revive and regenerate the current layout of the silk road. This is to be accomplished by means of a social, economic, political and architectonic redevelopment of the historic stretch of the road that once belonged to Marco Polo.

The project deeply integrates infrastructure with architecture and by means of a new railway system functioning on gravitational platforms follows the trail from Venice to Xian, Shanghai and Tokyo, extending its “arms” to create new infrastructures, commercial services and residences. A wiry MOTOR CITY extends itself to help out urban realities and struggling economies. The (linearly) diffused city runs into other micro-cities in such a way that the greater entity hooks onto the smaller ones to help them survive and, like an economic pump, extends life from the greater nodes to the smaller and poorer extremities. The 15,000 km of the silk road shall be broken up by bionic towers which will represent the centers of new urban sprawls. The new silk road line will also serve as the GENERATOR of other paths that will branch off of the main course of the road to develop a larger economic armature. Read the rest of this entry »

French architectural studio Complex City unveiled their design for a mixed-use hall to be located in the small city of Prégny-Chambésy, Switzerland. The project is based on intimate relationship between exterior and interior areas where each space is codependent of another. The outer skin is inspired on traditional embroidery and plant cell patterns allowing an interesting play of light and shadow. The new hall to be completed by the end of 2010 will contain exhibition and performing spaces and serve as a cultural destination for the city and region. Read the rest of this entry »

The design for the Lusall Iconic Stadium in Doha, Qatar was recently unveiled in a ceremony in London as part of Qatar’s bid for the 2022 World Cup. The energy efficient stadium was conceived by Foster and Partners as a floating bowl with a retractable roof. It will seat over 86,000 spectators which will be protected from the extreme hot by an innovative canopy that allows light while blocking the heat. The stadium’s parking is covered by photovoltaic cells that will provide sufficient energy during matches and will power a large portion of the neighborhood when not in use.

via Inhabitat Read the rest of this entry »