We are pleased to read Archdaily’s review about eVolo 04: Re-Imaginning the Contemporary Museum, Exhibition, and Performance Space. This issue explores the most innovative examples of performance and exhibition architecture today. These are projects that revolutionize architecture on many levels, including sustainability, aesthetics, technology, and urban design. It is interesting to point out that these works are not concentrated in one specific region, but are located in every corner of the globe; from MVRDV’s Comic and Animation Museum in China, to the new Broad Museum in Los Angeles by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, or Kengo Kuma’s Victoria and Albert Museum in Dundee, Scotland. Read the rest of this entry »

The second prize winning proposal for the Tehran Stock Exchange, designed by Hadi Teherani Office + Design Core [4S], is a two-part structure enveloped with a double-skin façade that has a lacey appearance of the traditional Iranian architecture. The 66-meter high building is based on the historic Iranian “wind-catcher” structures that act as natural cooling systems. Read the rest of this entry »

The Bowoos temporary pavilion is a bionic inspired wooden structure that references the material-efficient construction methods found in nature. The collaborative project was created by architecture students at Saarland University in Saarbrücken, Germany. It is influenced by biomimetics, specifically drawing inspiration from the shells of marine plankton. Read the rest of this entry »

Designed by KAW Architecten&Adviseurs, Veilige Veste is a safe house for victims of human trafficking and child prostitution. The three-storey building, first constructed as a police station in the 1970s, provides home for 48 girls that have suffered as victims of prostitution or abuse. Veilige Veste is the first major renovation in North Netherlands that implements Passivhaus principles. The building uses very little energy with optimum insulation and draft proofing and minimal installations.

The layout of the building is a perfect square with horizontal and vertical grids of 360 cm, which is also the starting point of the design. The facade is covered with diagonally angled, square elements. Beneath the white squares, wooden panels and large windows regularly alternate along the ground floor elevations. The building stands on a raised plinth, creating a fortress-like appearance. Although providing an intimate and sheltered atmosphere for the residents, the building engages in interaction with its surrounding. Read the rest of this entry »

By treating the extreme conditions of the California Mountains site as the means for formal and conceptual evolution of the project, Ecoscape integrates nature and architecture into a responsive system. The building’s skin is constituted of photovoltaic cells. Its surface geometry maximizes solar exposure by responding to a wide range of environmental parameters. These parameters are integrated to an algorithm that transforms and optimizes the surface geometry. Considering the requirement to design a project that would be self-sustainable, the maximized skin offers an important increase of energy production.

Customized according to the principles of discreet geometrical systems, the structure is a contemporary system led by a technological convergence of properties that generates its own natural paradigm. Its hypothesis seeks a modality that would engender architecture as nature by the use of cladding that generates both internal climatic and external architectural conditions such as skin and landscape. The structure does not only concentrate on the performance of the architectural entity as a matter of climatic conditions, but asks to treat the environment as an inclusive situation in which climate, surface and landscape are integrated to propose the evolution of events. Read the rest of this entry »

Adhering to the rising trend of skybridges and twin tower design in the Yongsan district, Asymptote Architecture‘s design for the Velo Towers creates social environments through the stacking of a series of rotated oblong volumes.  Uniquely oriented to views of the Han River and the adjacent Yongsan park, residents of the eight residential units can access public housing amenities and green roof spaces through light filled atrium spaces and two bridge structures. The base of the towers offer a communal landscape over a raised plinth, and a Skybridge soars thirty stories to provide access to cafes, pools, lounges, recreational centers, housing fitness, and a sky garden with spectacular views of the city. Read the rest of this entry »

Instead of taking the conventional approach of building upwards in a successive manner, Vladimir Plotkin and Roberto Meyer have designed a new tower typology – one that rises by stacking housing blocks on top of each other. The M-City project references the stylobate, stepped platform  on which colonnades of columns are placed in classical Greek architecture. The entire building is pierced with triangular openings of multi-level atria and open-air courtyards, forming a silhouette of a symbolically rendered letter “M”. Read the rest of this entry »

Adaptive Mutations is a design predicated on the fact that nature exists not in stasis, but in perpetual flux. Just as life forms in nature evolve to their surroundings, so must our design considerations. “Adaptive Mutations” are the DNA rather than the collective composition, understanding the relationship among discreet modules, rather than the global agenda. Thus, the design situates itself not in physical locations on the site, but at the intersection of a design discussion, open to collaborative adaptation. Read the rest of this entry »

A zero-energy house under construction in Germany is set to provide the first real-life test for a new façade system that uses live microalgae to provide shade and generate renewable energy at the same time.

The world’s first ‘bio-adaptive façade’ will be installed in the ‘BIQ’ house for the International Building Exhibition (IBA) in Hamburg, which runs through 2013.

The façade concept is designed so that algae in the bio-reactor façades grow faster in bright sunlight to provide more internal shading. The ‘bio-reactors’ not only produce biomass that can subsequently be harvested, but they also capture solar thermal heat – both energy sources can be used to power the building.

In practice, this means that photosynthesis is driving a dynamic response to the amount of solar shading required, while the micro-algae growing in the glass louvres provide a clean source of renewable energy. Read the rest of this entry »

Our modern times are unimaginable without planning. The growth of settlements and cities is so tempestuous that a slow process of adaptation is no longer possible. This, therefore, poses the question, whether by means of more adaptable planning theories, processes can be promoted or simulated.

This work examines the thesis of Frei Otto regarding the future direction of urban planning theory through the lens of parametric urbanism. The urban theory proposed translates the type of generating principles of the natural systems and unplanned settlements invoked by Otto, into a means of developing new forms of emergent urbanism.

Within these naturally evolving systems, whether biological, chemical, or physical, a base structural principle becomes the foundation for intelligent pattern generation, as seen in the supply systems of leaves, bubbles, foams, or crack patterns. The result may not be read as typical or predictable, but offers an optimized solution capable of adaptation and growth. Rather than simply mimic the form of such systems, this approach to urban planning uses foundational principles as a means of developing new, informed patterns of connection and territory. Read the rest of this entry »