The Architects’ Association of the State of Veracruz, Mexico launched an open architectural design competition for its headquarters to be located in the city of Cordoba. The mission of the Architect’s Association in Mexico is to promote the architectural profession developed within the highest standards of legal, moral, and responsible practice while promoting professional development, public outreach, design excellence and appreciation of the influence of architecture in shaping the city.

The project challenges involved not only a highly irregular site, but also a limited construction budget. The competition objectives looked for design proposals responding to open, flexible and rational schemes with strong dialogue with the urban structure and site. The architectural program involved a multipurpose space, stockroom, service area, office, workstations, meeting room and parking garage, among others. Read the rest of this entry »

Experiments in Motion is a research initiative conducted by the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP), in collaboration with Audi of America and LowLine. The aim of the initiative is to explore new forms of urban motion and new spaces for mobility, with special emphasis on New York City.

Students from the program have spent the summer researching all transportation systems in New York City, exposing the potential of underground spaces. Three studios have researched different aspects of movement in contemporary cities: Paradigms in Motion, Design in Motion and Participation in Motion. A fifty foot floating model of Manhattan made from aluminium displays Manhattan’s road infrastructure, while the plexiglass below presents a never before seen view of the architectural volumes of every subway station on the island. A network of subways, tunnels, bike lanes and bridges are presented as flows of movement, revealing a new reality of the city life – it exposes the city as an interconnected system for mobility. Read the rest of this entry »

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 »