Comfort Confrontation is a project designed by Johan Tali, Marte Ringseth-Helgeland and Daniel Prost at the Studio Wolf D. Prix of the Die Angewandte in Vienna. It researches the possibilities of living in a desert environment, further more creating an off-grid self-sustainable university campus for 2500 students.

The actual building mass is hovering above the desert surface and is used as an apparatus to organize the public space that is the desert itself. The endless sand horizon is considered as an open field, where shade, brightness, and moisture are the variables to create a diverse public space. As the desert surface expands into the public buildings it becomes more shaded, creating a landscape of oasis like condition and manifests a forum contition for the academic buildings. The massing is developed simulating a field of connected focal points. The fieldlines are manifested as the main arteries and are represented as surfaces that organize the shading shells for housing and as the surfaces meet at a focal point, the bundling surfaces turn into a study of surface contitions like surface-to-volume (and the relation of different volumes to each other) and transparency in relation to sun conditions. Read the rest of this entry »

Aleppo is one of the oldest cities in the world. It has always been perceived as one of the most important and influential cultural centres far beyond Syria and the arabic world. To live up to this fame the city has decided to open an international competition about the design of a cultural center whose main program is to comprise in addition to a library also an opera and a theatre.

Unfortunately, perhaps due to the political turbulences in the country, the outcome of the competition was never decided and the future of the project is still open.

The volume of each of the three main functions, opera, theatre, and library, is optimally tailored to the specific demands of the respective utilisation and clearly visible from the outside. The position of each function within the context depends on its interfaces with the other functions in the building as well as on the interfaces with the surrounding city and the visual contact with its important historic sites. Accordingly, all important transparent parts of the outer shell, as for instance, the background of the stage of the theatre and parts of the facade of the large reading hall, refer to the nearby world-famous citadel of Aleppo. This several thousand years old landmark therefore serves as the main cultural scenery for the new centre. Read the rest of this entry »

LAVA’s Digital Origami Emergency Shelter is a concept for an inhabited molecule. The design is based on a water-molecule, referencing the Japanese Metabolist movement’s idea of prefabricated capsules as living space.

The base molecule can be shipped as a flat pack, cut out of local plywood, or dropped off by a helicopter. The interior can then be carved out of wood, cardboard, newspapers or other locally available materials.

Chris Bosse said: ‘the project plays with ideas of prefabrication and personalised inhabitation, as well as stacking of multiple units, while giving an opportunity for individual expression’.

Each unit contains a sleeping space for two adults and one child as well as a little space for eating and reading. Battery or solar operated LED light brings the shelter to life, turning it into a lantern, a sign of hope.

The Emergency Shelter exhibition features shelters by local and international architects and will be on display on the Customs House forecourt Sydney, Australia from 1-3 September 2011. Read the rest of this entry »

Located in the North Port area of Busan, second largest city in the Republic of Korea, the New Opera House proposal by Architectures David Tajchman aims to bring the new maritime culture island a landmark character both at the city scale and at the international level. Surrounded by the sea, the city buildings and the mountains, ‘operascope’ is conceptualized as a musical instrument and an observation machine. Read the rest of this entry »

Esc-Studio won the International Competition for the redevelopment of the Glorieta Juan Carlos I in Mula in 2009. The scheme, presently in development, integrates the currently fenced plaza into the surrounding urban fabric, returning the space to the community by creating a public promenade that breaks the rigidity of the previous configuration and establishes a direct connection between the city and the heart of the square, while preserving the entirety of the existing vegetation.

The main circulations are carved into the current levels of the square, revealing a dynamic pattern that runs through the space among the programmed activity islands that host children, elderly and performance spaces, and allowing a stepless access to the square from the adjacent streets. Read the rest of this entry »

Studio Mode / modeLab is pleased to announce the next installment of the coLab workshop series: Hybrid Prototypes. As a follow-up workshop to the coLab workshop held in January 2011, Hybrid Prototypes is a two-day intensive design and prototyping workshop to be held in New York City during the weekend of September 24-25, 2011.

As architects and designers, we make things and build objects that interact with other objects, people, and networks.  We’re constantly seeking faster and more inexpensive methods to build prototypes, yet we are frequently hindered by practical and time consuming factors that arise in the process of bringing our ideas to life. Firefly is the new paradigm for interactive hybrid prototyping; offering a comprehensive set of software tools dedicated to bridging the gap between Grasshopper (a free plug-in for Rhino) and the Arduino micro-controller.  It allows near real-time data flow between the digital and physical worlds – enabling the possibility to explore virtual and physical prototypes with unprecedented fluidity. Read the rest of this entry »

This building proposal for the Taipei Museum of Contemporary Art by OTA+ challenges the traditional definition of a museum and the conventional relationship between building and site. The ground floor of the building is reduced to a nominal footprint, enclosing only enough space for basic services, structure and ticketing functions. The ground plane is primarily reserved for exterior public space, including an art park, Hall of Fame, and garden walk. The bulk of the program and building mass are split by the open ground floor. Half of the building is coupled with the earth while the other half hovers in the air. The purpose is two-fold; to minimize the damaging effects of extreme local weather by harnessing environmental flows toward productive outcomes and to re-conceptualize the identity of a modern art museum. The manicured roof plane of the below ground program is pocketed with water absorbing vegetation and catchment systems, while the hovering museum above expands to form open atriums, allowing diffuse light to brighten the space and passive airflow to comfortably condition the building.

The program of the museum is interconnected. The Contemporary Museum of Art, Children’s Museum of Art and Administration are located within the floating mass. The lecture hall, parking, art resource center, library and classrooms are located below ground. The programs below ground are easily accessible and directly connected through vertical circulation tubes, providing both structural support for the floating mass above and space for movement systems, such as escalators, stairs and elevators between levels. All of the below ground programs are flooded with diffuse light passing through skylights that penetrate the landscape. Read the rest of this entry »

London-based design studio Minimaforms (brothers Stephen and Theodore Spyropoulos) questions how architecture can facilitate new forms of communication.Through experimental architecture, they explore these questions in hopes to open up a dialogue about social and material interaction.

Through an invitation from world renowned performance artist Stelarc, Minimaforms was asked to develop a gateway structure for Brunel University. The Gateway proposal conceived a threshold space suspended above an existing reflection pool as an exterior room and sanctuary. This structure is an open-cell system that operates as a perceptual framing device. Read the rest of this entry »

A new paradigm of design based on three concepts from the Korean way of life: abstractness, life, and human nature is the main concept for TASK Architects’ proposal for the Busan Opera House.

TASK started working on the project to create great memorable moments for the visitors from the minute they approach the site. The architects designed three main exterior spaces, the entrance space as the visitors paths under the huge cantilever, the main exterior plaza, designed to be completely isolated, an escape from the city life; and the sky terrace which visitors can easily access from the exterior plaza. Read the rest of this entry »

Architects at EMBT did an unpopular thing for their Comic and Animation Museum Design: they addressed the issue of context. The idea was to engage the surroundings in a visual and associative narrative, delivering a design that joins the Confucian geometry to a mystical appreciation of nature. The intense relationship between object and landscape and subtle referencing to tradition aimed to transform the site into, what the architects called-“a kind of magic land that will enhance the impossible and dare the mind to reach unexpected levels of imagination”. The punch-line iconicity and visual overstimulation were replaced with multilayered experiences of the specific and the imaginative.

The basket-like forms of the museum resonate with images of the Chinese vernacular. Their alignment suggests a processional navigation through the exhibition space, a principle immanent to the Taoist idea of “path”, ultimately embodied in the Chinese traditional garden design. The distinguishable imagery of narrow paths and networks of bridges amid lush green ambiance is reinterpreted, while still essentially rooted in the idea of the Chinese garden as “a cosmic diagram, revealing a profound and ancient view of the world and of man’s place in it”. Read the rest of this entry »