The Earthquake Disaster Prevention Center in Istanbul was designed as a competition proposal  by CRAB Studio led by Sir Peter Cook. It was designed to resist the destructive forces of cunamis.The building’s concrete “blades” are meant to divide the streams of water and reduce the impact of the wave. The building meanders along the site as a chain of events. Its form is both structurally invaluable and lyrical, as it takes the appearance of a chain of flowers. The Center creates a series of highlights and shadows, rises and falls, with expressions of resistance and caress that, with their sense of dynamism, aim to be a focus for an otherwise unattractive piece of suburbia.

The building is a series of five Clusters. Beneath them are a series of shallow pools and dampened earth with indigenous plants. At the more formal edges of the site these rise to being banks of small trees, towards the south the ground is treated as a brittle, fractured shale-like surface with fissures that are themselves a reminder of the seismic inheritance. Most visitors will enter at the North-East corner, either parking below the building or walking directly in from the higher ground to the lobby and coffee shop in the First Cluster. From then on the route through the building is really an experience, but always having a simple interface with each of the Clusters. The Second Cluster contains the Planetarium and hovers over the parking area. The Third Cluster contains the Conference Room. The Fourth Cluster contains the Earthquake Simulation Section and the Fifth Cluster houses the Rainstorm Simulation and the Training Evaluation Section.

Maxthreads’ proposal for developing the Kaohsiung Port station in Taiwan explores the principles of sustainable urban planning by introducing urban agriculture farming to the city of Kaohsiung and existing old town Yen Chan district. The aim of the masterplan proposal is to strengthen a sense of community and environmental responsibility.

The design uses the historical train track pattern as the starting point for the infrastructure. It combines living, working and leisure and balances the civic and natural space of the city. A series of historically integrated parks intertwine with the built space. The focus is on keeping as much of the old town as possible in order to impart a sense of history and Kaohsiung’s transformation from an old industrial city to a city of the modern times. Kaohsiung’s existing plan is based on gridded planning. In this plan the city is divided into various blocks where the roads cut each other in a rectangular fashion. The railway line lying on the edge of the city creates some sort of a boundary which demarcates the city limits from the adjoining Wan Shu Mountain. Read the rest of this entry »

The Georges-Freche School of Hotel Management in Montpellier, France, is intended for hotel, gastronomic and tourism-related disciplines. Situated on an area of 1,6 hectares, the structure consists of  two buildings for the school connected by 5 footbridges crossing the central courtyard with trees. The school includes a 12-room hotel, three public restaurants a gastronomic a brasserie and a pedagogic restaurant a multipurpose room. The whole structure is characterized by the presence of two cavities that provide, on one side, the entrance to students and visitors, on the other side, a secondary entrance for teachers. Read the rest of this entry »

Lead designer and architect, Andrea Lenardin from a l m project, created the beautiful décor at Sprinkles Ice Cream, opened in May of 2012. For Sprinkles Ice Cream, the new venture of Sprinkles, it was just as important to be identifiable as a new member of the Sprinkles family, as to create a brand that simply celebrates ice cream, its heritage, and its iconography.

Exterior like interior derive from a minimalistic design approach and are brought to life by the ample flow of natural light and shadow play. The sparse white façade consists of metal shields with a laser-cut perforation along Sprinkles signature scalloped line applied to the bottom edge. The illuminated cone logo at the top right and a pin-mounted red script “icecream” next to entrance along with the crowd populating the indoor/outdoor bench stretching across almost the entire width of the façade entice you to enter. Read the rest of this entry »

Zaha Hadid Architects’s “Arum” installation at the 2012 Venice Biennale is an homage to Russian Suprematism. It is inspired by Frei Otto’s work which paved the way for material-structural form-finding processes. The pleated metal structure is an affirmative response to David Chipperfield’s premise of the Biennale that stresses the importance of continuity in the history of architectural research. This year’s Biennale theme “Common Ground” aims to show the cumulative power of architectural research and the historical lineage that unifies the discipline. Read the rest of this entry »

This installation and seating place in one was made of 13700m of woven rope, strung through steel frames. Creating optical illusion, this colossal piece is questioning boundaries of human perception. Screenplay was created for this year’s Dwell on Design festival in Los Angeles, by Oyler Wu Collaborative.

Almost static in orthographic projection, the wall unit is clearly recognized as organized series of patterns. But as the fourth dimension is activated by the viewer’s moving around the piece, the situation dramatically changes and the unit reveals its complex nature, oscillating between series of twisted surfaces and intriguing play of cavities and material densities. Read the rest of this entry »

This project by Olivier Brouillard from COMPLEX CITY is a media library, a space which preserves and gives access to audio-visual contents, sound documents and video recordings, material considered as cultural testimony with the same value than written documents.

Divided between paper and virtual information, it characterizes a reality of a modern way to use space, these places will evolve in a parallel manner to media progress but especially to technology progress, having as main support the computer supplied with Internet.

Designed in the area of Toulouse, this media library has the purpose of exalting the brick, an architectural material considered as a cultural patrimony of this region. Read the rest of this entry »

eVolo Collection

It is a great pleasure to inform you that we have been named by the WSJ one of the leading independent architecture magazines in the world. We are also celebrating another great year of editorial creativity. To celebrate we are offering all our readers worldwide a 60% discount on the entire eVolo Collection – only 300 sets available.

Regular price: $100
Celebration price: $40 (Celebration price is only available for 1 week – September 3-10)

eVolo 01: Housing for the 21st Century
Cover: Perfect Bound
Size: 9″ x 11.5″
Pages: 176
ISSN: 1946-634x
ISBN: 978-0981665818

eVolo 02: Skyscrapers of the Future
Cover: Perfect Bound
Size: 9″ x 11.5″
Pages: 200
ISSN: 1946-634x
ISBN: 978-0981665825

eVolo 03: Cities of Tomorrow
Cover: Perfect Bound
Size: 9″ x 11.5″
Pages: 130
ISSN: 1946-634x
ISBN: 978-0981665832

eVolo 04: Re-imagining the Contemporary Museum, Exhibition & Performance Space
Cover: Perfect Bound
Size: 9″ x 11.5″
Pages: 192
ISSN: 1946-634x
ISBN: 978-0981665856

-> Order the eVolo Collection at 60% discount.

The Exocarp Chair is made using algorithmic design and a 3-axis CNC mill on three sheets of birch plywood. The results show incredible amounts of texture and dimension without even having to touch it. The design separates the surface areas by making the parts that the body touches really smooth and the parts that are on the outside, or away from the skin, are textured or irregular.

Description from the artist:

I have been fascinated for the longest time with reptiles skins and fruits with a tough skin.  I find fascinating the duality and poetics that are involved in such complex systems; the way that they perform and look is primarily functional… Some scales may be modified for specialized functions, such as protective spines. This notion of function vs rough beauty is something that I find highly intriguing, so I started to play with the idea of creating objects closer to the human scale that deal with the same system… The design of Exocarp came about by separating the areas where the body would touch the chair and areas where an extrinsic agent might try to approach the chair. Thus, the areas that the user touches the chair became smooth and comfortable whereas the areas approached by an extrinsic agent became texturized using a script that uses a perlin noise algorithm to generate the irregular texture, where the script to generate the irregular texture increases in amplitude proportionate to the surface area. Through the use of birch plywood, a secondary pattern emerged through the variation of grain.  This pattern was not really predicted and it was truly a wonderful surprise that can only be achieved by the use of CNC machines. This type of investigation starts to give more of an understanding of material and craftsmanship, as opposed to simply generating an output from a file; by layering the material and paying close attention to detail, a more personal product can be achieved through digital means, as opposed to a generic and utilitarian form.

Whitevoid’s LivingSculpture 3D module system was designed for Philips’ interactive product family. The giant waves of OLED screens is controlled via iPad. The modular plug and play lighting system that creates infinite variations in layout and arrangement. The surface onto which is mounted is transformed into interactive and ever-changing architectural element. The highly flexible system consists of an online configurator to create and order the individual arrangement, a plug and play modular hardware system and an iPad controlled light animation application. Read the rest of this entry »