Emerging Corporate Territories: Trade of Shades
Monday 11 – Thursday 21 August 2014
Seoul National University, Seoul

Registration is now open to students and professionals alike, who are interested in participating in an 11 day AA Visiting School design workshop in Seoul, focused on exploring the form, image and identity of the corporate building

The Visiting School returns to Songdo, the newly finished corporate hub of South Korea, the wannabe Singapore-Hong-Kong international node of the booming economic future of North East Asia. Smart, Leed certified and directly plugged in into an airport, equipped with one Central Park and one Venice Canal, Songdo is the latest venture in the corporate real-estate bonanza.

So new and so fast with so much glass, and so few people walking down its streets. This sleek ghost town is not only waiting for its people but also itching to have its first architectural reading. So join us as we depart from the scale of the master-plan and delve specifically into these shimmering buildings, to understand each node of this wired operational network through its own face and skin.

Taking as a given the dominant form of the typical plan, the deus ex machina of architectural solutions, we will challenge this in-discriminant sprawl of towers strictly vertically. Each student will propose a full bleed curtain-wall facade system, which will speak of feeders such as economic and technologic drivers as well as corporate aesthetics and architectural fetishes.

What story will your facade want to project?

Ps. Invisible towers are forbidden.

The workshop is open to current architecture and design students, phd candidates and young professionals. Software Requirements: Adobe Creative Suite, Rhino (SR7 or later), or any CAD software knowledge is preferred.

Email: visitingschool@aaschool.ac.uk
Website: http://korea.aaschool.ac.uk/
AA Seoul Webpage: http://www.aaschool.ac.uk/STUDY/VISITING/seoul

Colonizing Rococo is a design project by Michael Royer, done at University of Pennsylvania. The main idea behind the project was to use contemporary techniques, such as aggregation and emergence in order to try to revisit architectural problems of the past. Contemporary computer techniques allow for the use of highly complex geometries that could only be achieved by master craftspeople in the past.

The project is significantly dealing with the ideas of asymmetry and symmetry and questions of ornament. Looking back at problems from the 18^th century lights our contemporary issues in different way, bringing new way of answering questions such as façade as ornament and the relationship between symmetry and asymmetry. Baroque and Rococo craft work and architecture were a specific jumping off point when looking at these issues. The emergent qualities in the building arise from the aggregation of parts to create a whole. The symmetry in the project was then put in as a counterbalance to the emergent technique that had already taken place. This is the point at which an uncanny scenario happens in the building where emergence and contemporary issues of creation are brought back into the historical issues of symmetry and asymmetry of the Baroque and Rococo. Read the rest of this entry »

The Vertical Village in Calabria, Italy by  OFF, Tanguy Vermet, Philippe Rizzotti, Samuel Nageotte and  Ramboll UK is a winning competition proposal for a ‘Solar Highway’, which re-used sections of the Salerno-Reggio Calabria highway soon to be decommissioned by the Italian Highways Authority.

The project of a viaduct is ambitious as well as audacious in both its program and architectural form. As they state at Oxo Architects, every consideration on viaduct redevelopment must start with particular attention to the largest sense of its context as well as its components, both visible and invisible. It is of course essential to consider the site potential in order to integrate the project within its landscape. The authors faced two opposite scenarios as the viaducts can be either adapted to integrate in the continuity of Calabria’s common society, or on the other hand, they can give a push of motivation for new possibilities that such an atypical redevelopment offers to the region, and developed the second option.

The winning architectural team proposed a re-appropriation of the viaducts into residential, leisure and health centers that take on a typology that rises out of the context and the goal of environmentally conscious development. The project was influenced by the primary observable characteristics of the site. The Calabria region has one of the most stable climates in the world and is located in a variety of natural habitats among human interventions.

The Vertical Village is designed as an autonomous community. Read the rest of this entry »

Widely known, award-winning architectural practice Snøhetta has designed The Makkah Metro C-Line Stations for Saudi Arabia. The exciting design envisions the unique fusion between the ultra-modern technology of the metro system and the historical richness of Makkah, therefore architecture acts as a framework – both for understanding and enriching the places it meets along the metro line – and for projecting the future vision and goals of the city.

The station – a sleek skin of the future, hovers delicately above the rising urban landscape of the city, creating a new public arena in the space between the ground and the sky. Linking again with tradition, the wrap is a unique ceramic tile with varying degrees of textures and signatures developed in cooperation with local artists.

The hard shell of the station on the inside is revealed to have a soft and ornamented interior consisting of a complex yet contextual mashrabiya screen. The screen links history and technology, consisting of traditional patterns applied through the latest of computer and fabrication technologies – symbolizing the duality between the future and the past. ​From station to station the mashrabiya screen changes again in color and material offering each station a personal signature whilst retaining a coherent identity throughout the line.

The meeting point, suspended between these two moments, as the plaza rises and the station reaches down, represents the common link between these two distinct elements within the public realm. Creating a bold yet elegant icon for each station – the design defines the network as a coherent unit changing slightly from station to station, because of the different city pattern.

Due to using a highly adaptable strategy for the demands and constraints of the site on the landscape, the new urban plaza connects, orients and safely manages both large and small groups of commuters and pilgrims from all parts of the city and the world – whether departing and arriving on a daily basis or for the first time.

This year’s Serpentine Gallery pavilion will be designed by Chilean architect Smiljan Radic. Radic is fourteenth architect chosen to design a temporary Pavilion in Kensington Gardens and his cloud-like design will follow Sou Fujimoto‘s last year structure. The new structure will occupy a footpring of 350 square meters on the lawn of the Serpentine Gallery – this semi-transluscent, cylindrical structure is designed to resemble a shell, resting on large quarry stones.

The new Pavilion is designed with a multi-purpose, flexible social space with a cafe inside. Visitors will enter and interact with the Pavilion in different ways throughout its four months tenure. On Friday nights between July and September, the venue will become the stage for the Galleries’ Park Nights series, which will bring together art, poetry, music, film, literature and theory, including three new commissions by emerging artists Lina Lapelyte, Hannah Perry and Heather Phillipson. AECOM provides engineering and technical design services as it did last year. In addition, AECOM will also be acting as cost and project manager for the 2014 Pavilion.

Radic sees the 2014 Pavilion as a part of the history of small romantic constructions seen in parks or large gardens, the so-called follies, which were hugely popular from the end of the 16th Century to the start of the 19th. Externally, as he states, the visitor will see a fragile shell suspended on large quarry stones. This shell, white, translucent and made of fiberglass, will house an interior organized around an empty patio, from where the natural setting will appear lower, giving the sensation that the entire volume is floating. At night, thanks to the semi-transparency of the shell, the amber tinted light will attract the attention of passers-by like lamps attracting moths, as stated by the author. Read the rest of this entry »

Designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, Poly International Plaza in Guangzhou, China, is 116,000-square-meter complex of three speculative office buildings, which offers a spacious and light-filled work environment. Its long-span structural design strategically opens up the interior spaces and employs a highly sustainable approach to addressing the climatic and air quality issues specific to Beijing. A faceted diagrid exoskeleton system forms an outer thermal envelope around the office spaces enclosed within a second glazed interior envelope, creating day-lit communal areas. These areas not only accommodate meetings and foster social interaction, but they also allow physical and visual connectivity between floors. Read the rest of this entry »

Flavors Orchard is an eco district, designed by Vincent Callebaut and consists of 45 Plus-Energy Villas in a huge community which integrates Smart Grid system, self-managed by the gardener-inhabitants and the participants of the project.  The aim is to associate a state-of-the-art for smart building automation systems and information integrated in each villa with an intelligent energy network, in order to redistribute the produced excess towards the nearest needs so as to prevent from the loss in lines or related to the storage systems. In addition to the fuel cells, the electric vehicles are also used as buffer storage of electricity excess produced by the solar roofs assuring thus the daily travels of the inhabitants for free.

The objective of the settlement is also to repatriate the production of the organic agriculture in the heart of the city, center of its consumption. This bio-geographical integration of the master plan respects the natural qualities of the site and maintains the continuity of the endemic ecosystems. Flavors Orchard is a genuine garden sharing its energies designed and cultivated collectively. Ideas are here more shared than the ground, the sun or the wind because it deals not only with producing what to eat, lighten and air conditions but also to meet on a common ground of ecological experiments and collective projects. Read the rest of this entry »

The EDP Foundation Arts & Technology Center is a new public building, designed by Amanda Levete Architects and located on the Belém waterfront in Lisbon. The structure will renew the access to the Tagus River from the city while consolidating the wider publicly-funded urban regeneration of the quarter and restoring the historic connection between the city and the water. The 7,000m² of new public space will accommodate a trans-disciplinary program of exhibitions, public events and community engagement – a new discursive space for the city.

The topographic form blends structure into landscape in a move that creates visual and physical permeability between inside and outside. A space to be appropriated by the public, it allows people to walk over and under as well as through the Center and access the city via a new footbridge over the railway tracks. The roof becomes an outdoor room, a physical and conceptual connection to the city’s heart, where you can turn away from the river and enjoy the vista of the cityscape, and at night, watch a film with Lisbon as your backdrop. Read the rest of this entry »

The Taichung Echo Wind Tower by Oxo Architects is an expressive green tower. Overseeing the Taichung basin, the Taiwan tower is the observatory of the central Taiwan ecosystem, ranging from the central mountain range to the South China Sea. The tower’s envelope is composed of 2 million suspended thin metal leaves that tilt up against the wind which operates 64 internal helicoidal wind turbines, generating enough energy to make the building fully sustainable. The facade shows patterns of air flows as a monumental expression of the natural context and its immediate climatic conditions. Its skin symbolizes the cohesion of the surrounding habitat while the evolving winds provide transformations of its form.

The tower is 350 meters high and this slight obliquity allows the metal leaves’ polished surfaces to reflect Taichung to itself. Approaching visitors seize in these reflections their city at different scales and from contrasting viewpoints. At night, the tower turns into a 2 million pixel led vertical screen with infinite possibilities to provide dynamic digital visuals. A tripod emerges from within the reservoir comprising of a lobby, an office block and a singular mirrored shape. The tower floats above ground fitted on top of the tripod.

The museum of the Taichung city development is suspended under the tripod and exhibits a model of the metropolis composed of key historical urban fragments, architectural landmarks and views of the cityscape. It hosts group and individual educational programs about the city, its achievements and digital projections on the sky scrapping screen. The achieved technology acts not only as a monumental object but functions as an instrument to promote cultural ventures and moreover democracy. Read the rest of this entry »

It has been recently announced that Sou Fujimoto, together with French practices Nicolas Laisné Associés (NL*A) and Manal Rachdi Oxo Architects, has been chosen to construct the second architectural folly of the 21^st century. The first one was designed by Farshid Moussavi. The spectacle will be located in Montpellier, France.

The new multipurpose tower is called Arbre Blanc (White Tree)and mixed-use – designed for housing, a restaurant, an art gallery, offices, a bar with a panoramic view and a common area. From the project’s conceptual phase, the architects were heavily inspired by Montpellier’s tradition of outdoor living. The tower is strategically located between the city center and the newly developed districts of Port Marianne and Odysseum, midway between the “old” and the new Montpellier. Read the rest of this entry »