Before modern structures as we know them were developed, man and animal lived together in nature. Gothenburg, Sweden-based architects Joakim Kaminsky, Fredrik Kjellgren, Maria Martinez Fabregas, Alexandra Agapie and Shadi Jalali Heravi with the firm SAR/MSA have proposed reinstating this original cohabitation, but in today’s modern, vertical context.

Their concept, called “Alive Architecture,” imagines a skyscraper in Shanghai that houses both human and animal inhabitants within a building that blends the typical domiciles of both: modern building materials in the building’s core protect the building’s mechanical systems, but more primitive materials on the exterior, including wicker, straw, clay, mud and stone mimic a bird’s nest and earlier human building methods as well.

This blending of nature and modernism is the arch that “green architecture” could taken to restore what has been lost in our typical urban centers. Building vertically, the architects argue, solved cities’ density problems, but simultaneously grievously harmed human interaction with other people and with nature. What if the new green architecture were developed as a functional habitat for wildlife, they ask? Read the rest of this entry »

Thomas Heatherwick’s Rolling Bridge, completed in 2004 at Grand Union Canal Paddington Basin, London, is one of the most unique bridges in the world. A small pedestrian crossing, it is designed to curl up to allow boats through the inlet and uncurl again over the water. Eight triangular sections host a hydraulic ram on either side. As the rams open out of their vertical posts they extended the hand rails upwards. The pivoted sections are drawn toward each other creating a slow curling motion. The bridge can stop at any interval.

Fully curled up the bridge forms a compact vertical standing octagon at the water’s edge. Winner of the 2005 British Structural Steel award the bridge is also a sort of kinetic sculpture performing at high noon every Friday. Read the rest of this entry »

How to integrate an opera theater into the historic urban fabric of Vienna? This project seeks to develop a middle ground between excessive un-architecture and conventional opera theater. One of the strategies is to create a new vertical transition part as the coherent between the opera theater and the concert hall. It was designed as a solution to the substantial decrease of earth specially which site is located in a high density residential district. This tower proposes an intensive, yet ivy romantic environment with an Opera Theater, a Concert Hall and a Panoramic Restaurant where you will be able to find little squares, picturesque sightseeing to this city, parks, hanging garden, and many cultural facilities.

Tang Fei experimented with form production at the Excessive Studio II, Urban Strategies, Die Angewandte Vienna in Austria to produce an Opera Theater or a Concert Hall in the Karmelitermarket. Read the rest of this entry »

Following the international competition held in 2006, Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA) were chosen to create initial conceptual proposals for the Civic Centre of the City of Elk Grove, California, a fast-growing suburb of Sacramento.

The main objective of the Elk Grove Civic Centre Design Study was to explore a wealth of possible ideas for programmatic distribution; incorporating the city’s requirement for initial ‘visioning’ proposals that identify all the project components while keeping the opportunities for flexibility.

The city commissioned AECOM to provide ZHA a brief for the 76ha site consisting of 3 main aspects: Civic, Commercial and Recreational. The civic aspect includes a library, children’s discovery centre, community and performance centres. The commercial aspect included a hotel, retail and conference center, while the recreational aspect include gym, tournament fields, park and a wetland. Read the rest of this entry »

Designed by FREE Fernando Romero EnterprisE, Museo Soumaya opened to the public on March 29, 2011 after four years of development. The Museo Soumaya houses one of the most important art collections in Latin America with over 6,200 artworks and 60,000 square feet of exhibition space.

The Soumaya Museum is located in a former industrial zone dating from the 1940’s which today presents a very high commercial potential. The Soumaya Museum plays a key role in the reconversion of the area: as a preeminent cultural program, it acts as an initiator in the transformation of the urban perception. Its avant-garde morphology and typology define a new paradigm in the history of Mexican and international architecture.

From the outside, the building is an organic and asymmetrical shape that is perceived differently by each visitor, while reflecting the diversity of the collection on the inside. Its heterogeneous collection is housed in a continuous exhibition space spread over six levels, representing approximately 60,000 ft². The building also includes an auditorium for 350 people, library, offices, a restaurant, a gift shop and a multi-purpose gathering lounge. Read the rest of this entry »

Agentware is a seven-day workshop in Rovinj, Croatia directed by Alisa Andrasek of Biothing and Jose Sanchez of Genware. Its focus is generative algorithmic design, in particular multi-agent computational systems that can read external feedback for applications in complex design ecologies. The workshop will be followed by a two-day symposium entitled Proto/e/co/logics. The symposium will bind together ideas of speculative realism in philosophy, expanding developments in science, and shifting modes of production as it pertains to design – all working towards a redefinition of materiality and adaptation in complex environments. Invited speakers include Wolf Prix, Patrik Schumacher, Reza Negarestani, Sanford Kwinter, Francois Roche, Sylvia Lavin, Ed Keller, Tom Kovac, Adrian Lahoud, Brett Steele, Jeff Kipnis, Yoshiharu Tsukamoto, Usman Haque and others.

Imminent future developments within still largely untouched stretches of Adriatic Coast offer opportunities for speculative approaches to ecological exploration in architecture. Specifically, these studies aim to go beyond innocent and reductive approaches to ecology such as notions of “sustainability” and “green.” In relation to increased computational intelligence with the introduction of adaptive agent-based systems and large data sets in architecture, the workshop will explore rewriting material and organizational protocols within design and planning sequences. This specific focus will push the design output towards a larger sensitivity to host ecologies. Speculative agent-based proposals will be tested through pilot locations found within rich cultural and natural resources of Istria. Read the rest of this entry »

Can parametric architecture be considered Architecture? Two of the eVolos 2011 Competition finalists, Patrick Bedarfand and Dimitrie Stefanescu would say so. Their C:Strip can be described as a singular manifesto for  meaningful use of computational techniques.

With the assistance of software analysis and various datascapes capturing different environmental influences, the design evolves into a multi-layered architectural object of almost permeable urban quality.

Ecotect was used in processing wind speed and insulation grids, calculating the optimal position of apertures and photovoltaics. In order to avoid disrupting the existing pedestrian flows and visual parameters, circulation analysis programmed in Processing/Java used starting parameters gathered by local observations. Functional distribution was carried out with careful attention to visual trajectories, relying on DepthMap calculations. Centric distribution of functions was replaced with grouping of facilities along motion paths, allowing not only spread of data, but also creating new information through societal behaviour. Read the rest of this entry »

Growing with stringy tentacles off of typical, rectangular high-rise towers is the Sky Cloud, a skyscraper that winds and grows from the ground into a twisting structure that resembles, at the top, an aquatic tail or fin.

The Sky Cloud design, by New Jersey and New York-based architects and designers Patricia Sabater, Christopher Booth and Aditya Chauan, presents a building whose skin and shape are “experimentations of deformation with portals and cellular growth.”  The portals feed the exotic needs of the future: gateways at the skyscraper’s peak allow for arrival and departures of sky taxis and a sky rail system. The building’s cells house a variety of functions, from apartments and hotel rooms to corporate meeting space, a “sky lounge” and a museum of economic crisis. The structure will also feature a park and a resource co-op. Read the rest of this entry »

Planners have long argued against suburban sprawl for the possible health effects it has on residents who are able to avoid physical exercise from behind the wheel. California Polytechnic State University architecture students Thomas Shorey, Ryan Nevius and Baptiste Roult have approached design as health promoter in a more urban manner: design a city vertically to force physical movement and better health.

Their Sky District plan abandons the typical design of buildings where visitors are distributed to floors via easily accessible elevators, saying that method offers “poor architectural design, consumes finite resources and promotes a lazy way of life.” Instead, they propose, arrange city blocks vertically and offer skip-stop elevators and attractive stairways that reward climbers with impressive city views. Not only does this encourage walking, they say, but it also increases opportunities for public interaction. Read the rest of this entry »

If the S.M.A.R.T. tower appears to be in constant motion, it’s only because the structure is covered by a swarm of 100,000 robot bees.

S.M.A.R.T. stands for Swarm Manufacturing and Augmented Reality Technology. Using CAD and LPS (Local Positioning System) data, the bees can be programmed to augment the structure virtually, turning virtual information and data into physical realities. The concept is the vision of Seoul, Korea architects Yoon H. Kim and Yang-Kyu Han.

These bees aren’t interested in honey: these workers will actually build a structure. Each robot is capable of using cartridges filled with agents that enable them to construct literal physical material, which the designers dub “augmented synthetic material.” An amassing of this material forms skyscraper that is conductive, allowing electricity and data to flow throughout the skin of the structure which enables the pulses to be directed to very specific locations. Read the rest of this entry »