Porous and open, the new addition to the Columbia District’s cultural scene in Washington DC chalenges the traditional library typology. Designed by Adjaye Associates, the Francis Gregory Library is conceived as an extension to the adjacent park. Its materials and lighting, along with the large canopy overhanging the entrance, welcome the public inside, providing a smooth transition from the street.

The two-story library echoes the natural environment. The reflective geometric facade is a netowrk of quadrilateral openings, thus framing the views of the park. The curtain wall is designed as a thick structure oriented towards the street, allowing visitors to sit within the apertures. The library facilitates three major services: content for adults, teenagers and children, along with a public meeting room and a series of conference rooms. A social element is introduced to the program which inherently involves areas of quiet and less interaction between users. Read the rest of this entry »

Swiss Sculptor Zimoun, in collaboration with architect Hannes Zweifel, has has designed and built a series of sound sculptures MNAC Contemporary Art Museum of Bucharest in Romania. These architecturally-derived instruments of sound are made from common, everyday materials, such as cardboard, paper, string, and wire.These materials and mechanisms are combined to create intricate sound sculptures. Read the rest of this entry »

Schebloc by Rotterdamn-based A-ngine aims to utilize digital mapping of a tidal area and of climate conditions at large to inform the design of a mixed-use housing development in Scheveningen, Netherlands. During the design process, contextual site properties were measured, analyzed, and computationally articulated, generating the building’s structure, its facade geometries, and informing the material composition of the structure’s final form. Using a ‘cross referencing probe method,’ students took detailed notation of the area’s rising and falling tides, detailing these features in a series of colorful maps. To this end, localized measured readings informed the design’s physical manifestations across all levels of Schebloc, arriving at a building that responds to its site not simply in design approach, but in numerical terms, as well.  Read the rest of this entry »

News Room of the Ministry of Agriculture by H20 Architects of France, is a built project that utilizes the material qualities of wood, coupled with a specific physical manipulation and organization of this material to achieve desired spatial and experiential qualities. The intention, as stated by the client, The French Ministry of Agriculture in rue de Varenne in Paris, was to develop a material representation within this newsroom that would transform the room itself into a ‘technical tool’ used to enhance and symbolize the room’s function. Read the rest of this entry »

The most exciting architecture today is not only environmentally astute but re-imagines a sense of place. The book [ours] by Andrew Michler is a collaboration between eVolo and the Institute for the Built Environment at Colorado State University on contemporary architecture trends of sustainable design in selected locations around the world. We have put together a Kickstarter campaign to help support the ground breaking research behind the book.

[ours] disseminates how the best architecture comes together to create regional identity in the 21st century. Site specific design is a core reality in developing robust, thriving communities and informing the shared nature of the built and natural world through environmentally attuned development.

Regions are already responding to the challenge through inventive and provocative architecture. [Japan Condenses], [Spain Wraps], and [Australia Unfolds] explores how design practices inform a sense of place and provide solutions to complex issues in the built environment. These three divergent areas exemplify the quality of redefined design vernacular that addresses deep sustainable objectives.

Other regions from around the world will be explored as well including [Denmark Plays], [Germany Maintains], [Mexico Buries], [Cascadia Grows], South Africa and Central America.

The germ of the idea is to explore sustainable design by putting these buildings into context. We see the re-imagining of the built environment as one of the most important goals in thriving in an altered planet in the 21st century. By pushing the envelope these buildings create new architectural archetypes, integrating function and form to improve performance. We will explore how architects have learned from their failures and from taking risks. Read the rest of this entry »

The proposal for the RTV Headquarters in Zurich by Oliver Dibrova (Asymptote) is an exercise on minimal surfaces and their porous qualities. Inspired by liquid crystals, these surfaces behave as spatial elements for programmatic interweaving, creating highly differentiated spaces. Various conditions of “soap” films are created as the surface changes from states of solid to liquid at different temperatures, dividing the program into administrative areas, TV studios, radio studios, an open public zone, and internal working spaces. An aggregation of generated components allowed for various iterations of spatial interweaving patterns which were ultimately woven at different scales into a hybrid program to achieve maximum communication and selective visual connections. Read the rest of this entry »

Paper Sculptures is an exercise by artist Richard Sweeney that tests the limits of folded paper as a medium for the creation of spatial situations. Sweeney pursues a ‘purely experimental’ trajectory with this work, utilizing the manipulation of two-dimensional sheets of paper to arrive at three-dimensional creations. Through a process of drawing, tracing, cutting, and folding, Sweeney is able to achieve incredibly complex sculptural forms. The artist begins with simple and methodical geometric manipulations that ultimately result in a complex array of abstracted polyhedral forms. Through the combination of repetitive geometries, curved lines, and modularity, Sweeney pushes paper into compelling quasi-architectural terrain, finding that paper, though flat and essentially limited to a two dimensional plane, can be articulated into a myriad of forms and functions. The limitless potential for variation inherent in the sheet of paper is determined by subtle changes in physical approach: the degree of each fold, location of cuts, as well as the orientation, sequencing, and execution of each manipulation. Read the rest of this entry »

Infobox is a speculative competition entry to build a new information center over a metro station at eingeschoßige in Vienna’s Old City. Here, Vienna-based design collaborative KARAMBA3D and Bollinger-Grohmann-Schneider engineers are challenged with a site that is layered with existing plumbing utilities, underground sewers, a parking lot, and a bus terminal. Because of the complex and unplanned layout of these infrastructures below the site, the building’s load bearing strategies could not be regular or centralized in any particular location. Instead, through parametric modeling and a system of bundled structural anchor points, Info Box is able to effectively accommodate the limitations of the existing site while fulfilling its programmatic duties. Read the rest of this entry »

Marc Fornes / Theverymany’s latest Double Agent White is a continuous surface composed of an intersection of 9 unique spheres, achieving a maximum degree of morphological freedom with a minimum amount of components. This forms as part of a series of prototypical architectures (Centre Pompidous, FRAC Centre, Art Basel Miami to name a few) and uses Object Oriented computing to generate developable parts for fabrication of double curved surfaces. Continuous double curvature is defined around the Double Agent White surface for material rigidity and optimal use of nesting storage for larger decomposable units. In this way, the piece achieves structural continuity, visual interplay, and logistical efficiency.

This project is the first of a new series of fabricated projects to investigate a double agent system. Two parallel but divergent sets of distributed agents describe the surface condition. The first is a controlled macro set that generates the overall geometry with the minimum number of elements able to be cut within specified flat sheets of aluminum. The second involves a much more expressive set of higher resolution and morphologies that crafts aperture as ornament. The two sets then inform each other simultaneously, following the logic of assembly mobility. The resulting structure adheres to a myriad of formal and technical constraints that provide a dynamic structure of spatial nuance.