In Petaling Jaya, west of Kuala Lumpur, a great urban development designed by Studio Nicoletti Associati is underway for the establishment of a new urban centre. As a landmark for this area, the developer wanted to host his onsite offices and sales showroom in an ‘iconic pavilion’ that would reflect the spirit and the architectural style of the whole development.

Natural water droplets were the inspiration for ‘The Pod’ pavilion structure creating a dynamic spherical form resulting in a primitive building archetype with a modern twist. The round and soft shape of The Pod is formed as a series of elliptical sections of variable widths and heights.

Slithers of window bring natural daylight into the spaces below. Internally the pavilion is divided into two parts: one zone dedicated to the office area and the other containing the main showroom. The building appears to be sliced diagonally into a series of ribbons which wrap up and over the building creating an animated space within, forming a layered protective shell. Read the rest of this entry »

Tel Aviv’s real estate is rapidly recovering from the economic crisis and the Skinless tower designed by architect Shoval Omer proposes a new type of residential high-rise where highly customizable living units attach to a steel exoskeleton. This innovative geometry derives from the analysis of the anatomy of shell patterns in nature.

The building is conceived as an aggregation of small volumes with a large number of open spaces that allow light to filter to the city. It is also predominately white to blend with the existing urban fabric. The development also includes commercial areas at the lower levels and recreational parks intertwined with the residences. Some of the “pods” are designed as vertical farms and water collectors with photovoltaic cells. Read the rest of this entry »

Zaha Hadid’s design for Sunrise Tower in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, engages with the city in multiple ways. By exploring potential synergies at different levels and anchoring itself to the existing urban fabric, it creates a platform of services that engage with neighbouring developments, sustaining critical mass and a sense of community. The scheme merges all programmes into one building, distancing itself from the traditional tower and podium typology. Through a detailed landscape strategy the design interweaves tower and ground, extending and connecting the different parts of the site, integrating the new pedestrian routes and internal road system, structuring the fabric of the new development.

The building is designed through a series of independent flows that map the tower and organize different routes for different programmes. Along these routes the lobby and shared facilities floors work as communication hubs, like intersections that enable flexible itineraries and changes between uses. Similarly to the skin, the circulation materializes as a multi dimensional spatial grid, inclusive of the program, treating interior and exterior in a seamless way, thus maximizing the clarity of the scheme and the perception of the different levels. The design of a clear navigation system for lobbies, atria and common areas, enables visual communication as well as access through the cores, ensuring fully accessible environment for all users. The building’s complex programme is distributed through 66 floors in total, 4 bellow ground and 62 above ground, with an absolute height of 280m. The ground lobby is the primary hub of the tower, defining 4 different dedicated lobbies for residential, hotel, offices and general public. Read the rest of this entry »

Twenty-seven Billion tons of CO₂ are released into the atmosphere every year. This has resulted in a one-degree-centigrade rise in global temperature since the Industrial Revolution.  Carbon emissions are causing Climate Change across the globe, resulting in hurricanes, rising sea levels, spreading deserts, and the loss of arable land.

SKYGLOW is a 200 meter-long helium filled airship that is solar powered and enveloped in a flexible OLED lighting membrane. SKYGLOW will be flown into major population centers on any continent and docked at these locations. Multiple smaller replicas of SKYGLOW, fitted with touch screen questionnaires, will form an interactive night park at its base. The public will be invited to answer these questionnaires on carbon related issues in our homes, transport choices, and recycling levels. In turn this information will feed into the lighting of the small SKYGLOWS. The colors range from red, where the results are poor, to blue, which shows a change for the better. Targets can be advised and the public can revisit the Night Park to recalculate their carbon footprint. All this information will then be fed into the main SKYGLOW, along with national grid energy consumption levels and air quality information.

The intention is that within a short period of time the impact of positive choices will make a visible difference to the OLED output of the SKYGLOW.

The project was designed  by Ross Orr, Gary Dubary, Andy Kiely and Adam Lauri who took part in a back to work scheme called Greenshoots. Greenshoots gave unemployed professionals in the construction industry the opportunity to work on a eVolo Competition in a live work environment which was kindly provided by FHP Architects.

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‘Tall and Green: The Remaking of Mumbai’ was design studio lead by Antony Wood (Executive Director of the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat) in collaboration with the Illinois Institute of Technology and the University of Nottingham.  The purpose of the studio was to investigate on an architectural green future for the city of Mumbai, India.

The project called for designing a cluster of tall buildings in the ‘C-ward’ neighborhood in the southern part of the city inspired by the cultural, physical, and environmental aspects of the region.  The result is a fascinating masterplan that consists of a network of five towers linked by series of bridges and sky-plazas. Each of the towers responds to a specific program and proposes a solution to some of the city’s major problems. Read the rest of this entry »

The International Highrise Award is offered every two years by the City of Frankfurt, Germany, and it is jointly curated by the Deutsched Architekturmuseum DAM and Dekabank. Based on six fundamental criteria including pioneering design, integration into the urban setting and sustainability, 27 high-rises from 16 countries were nominated for the 2010 award.

From the five finalists, the international Jury will select the winner which is accompanied by EUR 50,000 prize money. The announcement of the winner will be made on November 5, 2010.

The five finalists are:

Aqua Tower. Chicago. Studio Gang Architects.

Burj Khalifa. Dubai. Skidmore Owings and Merrill

Shanghai World Financial Centre. Shanghai. Kohn Pederson Fox Associates

Mode Gakuen Cocoon Tower. Tokyo. Tange Associates.

The Met. Bangkok. WOHA Architects in association with Tandem Architects.

Italian architects Massimo Guidotti and Davide Albertini designed a mixed-use development for Downtown Los Angeles. The project would be located in front of the Walt Disney Concert Hall as a set of five towers linked by sky-plazas and bridges. The main intention of the proposal is to create an outdoor recreational area suspended above the city. The plaza is linked to the ground by a set of enclosed escalators and the towers’ cores.

Among the proposed programmatic elements, Guidotti and Albertini proposed an extension to the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), two office towers, hotel, residences, galleries, and fitness center. Each of the towers has a distinct envelope designed in relationship to the program, city views, and orientation. The museum tower appears as a solid volume covered by metal sheets with controlled openings while the residences are glass and steel towers that allow 360 degrees panoramic views of the city. The project is also equipped with the latest green technologies including rain water collection systems, wind turbines, and solar panels. Read the rest of this entry »

Japanese architect Toyo Ito completed a high-rise hotel in the Porta Fira Ddevelopment of Barcelona. The striking hotel was conceived as a distorted cylinder in which all rooms will have excellent views to the city. The building also contains commercial areas at the ground level and a panoramic restaurant in the top floor. One of the most interesting aspects of the project is the façade made of a system of red metal tubes placed at a certain inclination depending on solar exposure and orientation. At 110 meters-high, the tower is one of the tallest buildings in Barcelona and a new icon for its skyline. Adjacent and in dialogue to the Hotel, a new office building by Spanish architects b720 is also part of the Porta Fira Development that intends to be a new gateway to the city. Read the rest of this entry »

The O-14 Skyscraper stands at the heart of Business Bay in Dubai. It was designed by New York architects Reiser + Umemoto as a concrete shell that not only is the structure of the building but also creates a lace-like façade open to light, air, and views. Twenty-one stories of custom-designed office floors are carried without the barriers of conventional columns and walls. At ground level, exclusive shops link this site to Business Bay’s waterfront esplanade combining high-end shopping eminent culture and popular entertainment. Below grade, four levels of parking provide capacity for over 400 cars.

The openings on the shell are modulated depending on structural requirements, views, sun exposure, and luminosity. A space nearly one meter deep between the shell and the main enclosure creates a so-called “chimney effect,” a phenomenon whereby hot air has room to rise and effectively cools the surface of the glass windows behind the perforated shell. This passive solar technique essentially contributes to a natural component to the cooling system for O-14, thus reducing energy consumption and costs, just one of many innovative aspects of the building’s design. Read the rest of this entry »

The Abu Dhabi Investment Council Headquarters Towers designed by Aedas (the world’s fifth largest architecture firm) in collaboration with Arup will reach a height of 145m (476ft) and will be completed in 2012. The design occupies two sites at the Al Qurum Beach and will act as a gateway to the city providing working areas and private amenities for 2,000 people.

An innovative honeycomb structure was designed following the analysis of high-efficient load paths. The towers will also accommodate three sky-gardens at the top to reduce solar heat gain on the most exposed elevation.

Aedas described their project as a “design generated from a mathematically pre-rationalized form that derives from Islamic design principles…a key feature of the design is the application of a diaphanous screen that envelopes the most exposed aspect of the building in the form of a dynamic ‘Mashrabiya’, opening and closing in response to the sun’s path, significantly reducing the solar heat gain and providing a more comfortable internal environment.” Read the rest of this entry »