The New York-based firm FXFOWLE has six active projects in the King Abdullah Financial District in Riyadh, a 55 million-square-foot, mixed-use development. Among them is the Museum of Built Environment, which aims to explore the role that social, economic, and environmental forces have played in the region’s constructed landscape, both historically and in recent times.

The 340,000-square-foot museum will be sited near a large plaza by a sunken pedestrian parkway. It will house galleries for permanent and temporary exhibitions, a 150-seat auditorium, and a restaurant, in addition to a monorail station and a network of skywalks. Read the rest of this entry »

The competition for the Passenger Terminal Building connecting Hong Kong with Shenzhen City closed on 21. March 2011. The two-stage competition included an online public survey in deciding on the winners. The aim was to create an urban landmark, structurally enabling the continuation of the existing traffic flow and connecting the banks of Shenzhen River.

Designed by Prague-based EDIT! Architecture, the proposal attempts to reconcile the iconic character of the building with the functional requirements of the site. Fallowing the visual imperative of fluidity, immanent to transportation structures, the design uses both horizontal and vertical transformation of rounded forms. The build­ing entrances are empha­sized by lift­ing of the vol­umes, leading to arrival and departure halls on the first floor. Offices and ser­vice spaces are located on the sides of both halls and also on two floors above orga­nized around the cen­tral atri­ums, which illu­mi­nate the inside of the build­ing and allow a visual con­tact between the dif­fer­ent lev­els. The green roof is terraced thus evoking the typical South China landscape. Read the rest of this entry »

Built in 1935, the Joenniemi Manor was the masterpiece of architect Jarl Eklund. The floor plan and design of the building point to the clear influence of Functionalism and English country house architecture. The park and formal garden featuring geometric landscape elements are designed by Paul Olsson in the same year. At that time, this style of landscape was unique in the Mänttä village community. The Joenniemi Manor and its garden are symbols of the architecture in the early 20th century and express the cultural awareness in Finland’s rural surroundings.

The architectural solution by award-winning architects Kubota & Bachmann intends a discrete insertion of the new extension into the site. The horizontality of the glass roof reflects the different seasons and times of the sky. The interior benefits from a panoramic view of the Lake Melasjärvi. Beneath the large roof and taking advantage of an existing depression in the site, the program elements step gently down in sequence: conference and representation facilities, restaurant and kitchen facilities, offices, collection facilities, exhibition facilities, the sequence terminating at the foot of the banks of Lake Melasjärvi. Read the rest of this entry »

Voussoir Cloud by IwamotoScott explores the structural paradigm of pure compression coupled with an ultra-light material system. The design fills the gallery with a system of vaults to be experienced both from within and from above. The edges of the vaults are delimited by the entry soffit and the two long gallery walls. Spatially, they migrate to form greater density at these edges. Structurally, the vaults rely on each other and the three walls to retain their pure compressive form. The fourteen segmented pieces also resolve to make a series of five columns that support the interior and back edge. Read the rest of this entry »

Downtown Los Angeles based design group APHIDoIDEA proposes the eCORRE COMPLEX, The Environmental Center of Regenerative Research & Education, to the City of Long Beach in California. The project takes the ISO container used by the Port of Long Beach (2nd busiest port in the World). Designed and placed as a FINALIST entry for the AIA-LA / USGBC Emerging Talent Design Competition, APHIDoIDEA re-adapts the shipping container as core building elements and implemented sustainable strategies to educate its visitors and users about “green” building practices such as solar energy, water collections, interior daylighting, rooftop gardens, passive cooling techniques, reuse of grey water, to name a few. Read the rest of this entry »

Award-winning architecture firm Scau unveiled their design for the Great Stadium of Casablanca. A sports facility that will serve as the home to the Morocco national football team. Designed in collaboration with local firm Archidesign, the project features massive fanned-out concrete fibre blades around its perimeter, filtering natural light and promoting cross ventilation throughout the interior. With a capacity to hold up to 80,000 spectators, the projected completion date is set for 2013. Read the rest of this entry »

Zaha Hadid Architects new E.ON Energy Research Department building at RWTH University in Aachen emerges from between existing rail tracks, grass and tree slopes and a 4-lane arterial road. Their concept translates the direction and contours of the site as a primary form generator for the building and connects the two arms of the university campus into a larger spacial gesture.

There is a close correlation between the structure and form of the proposal to movement within the building and around it; the natural day light and air flow across the site. The structural and aerodynamic fins along the length of the roof-scape allow for the modulation both of daylight and wind stream air flow over the roof, maximising the provision of natural light and ventilation to all parts of the building interior. Read the rest of this entry »

The proposal by Brooklyn-based firm Barker Freeman Design Office for the historic Pushkinsky Theater creates a programmatic envelope for the existing volume that expands the territory of the theater into a series of enfolded layers and surfaces that connect the building enclosure to the plinth on which it resides and out onto the landscape of Pushkin Square itself. The shifting angles of the new envelope knit together the two axes in the public space of the square: the building’s frontal alignment with the park, fountain and Pushkin statue and its diagonal relationship to the Boulevard Ring angling away from it.

This transition of horizontal to vertical connects and activates the different spaces around the theater. Enfolding the plinth, secondary stairs and central grand stair generates more connections to the ground plan that allow the building to connect with street life and the public realm of the square. These new surfaces provide exterior sheltered spaces for gathering that become sites of projection, sources of illumination, and conveyors of graphic information that create a new context for engaging auxiliary cinematic and cultural programs. Read the rest of this entry »

The EDV-01 is the first of its kind. A stainless-steel container about 6 meters long, 2 meters wide and 2 meters high, is equipped with cutting-edge systems to provide water and electricity. A rooftop solar system and fuel cell generates power that is stored in lithium-ion batteries (developed by Elly Power Co), whereas another system collects up to 20 liters of potable water a day from the air, which enough for two adults to live on for about month.

The container’s main attraction is that it does not require any construction. With the flip of a switch, a hydraulic pump raises the walls in four and a half minutes to form a second floor. The first floor contains a kitchen that utilizes induction heating for cooking, a shower and a bio-toilet. The second floor has fold-away beds and an office space with a separate desk. Read the rest of this entry »

After months of research into why prefabrication has not been the glowing success people had hoped it would be, a design team at the CCA has developed an answer: mix prefabrication and CNC technology with the current trend of mobile food trucks. Rapid Type: A Mobile Coffee platform is their first prototype for a mobile, pre-fabricated food service pod.  Construction was completed in the Fall of 2010 as part of a studio co-taught by Kory Bieg and Andre Caradec.

The studio was given a generous donation of Alpolic, which is a unique aluminum composite material manufactured by Mitsubishi Plastics, Inc. In order to explore the full potential of the material, Kory and Andre decided to co-teach an experimental design studio with one goal: push the material as far as possible within the limits of currently available CNC fabrication technology. Read the rest of this entry »