French architects Guihun Choe and Etienne Jaunet desire the spaciousness and tranquility of suburban living combined with the cultural and communal benefits of the city. Their architectural solution is a green skyscraper in which an open exoskeleton or structural grid allows individual housing units to plug-in. These units are custom made by each resident following certain design guidelines but with entire freedom on size and program. Owners could purchase several “lots” to build larger homes and/or gardens. The primary structure provides the basic infrastructure and communal areas such as parks, plazas, and shopping areas. The building is fully equipped with photovoltaic cells, wind turbines and recycle centers. Read the rest of this entry »

Namib Biomimesis Research Tower (NABR) designed by architects Hunter Ruthrauff, Hayley Stewart, and Garrett Van Leeuwen is a biomimetic research lab in the Namib Naukluft National Park with the purpose of studying indigenous plant and animal species which may act as role models for the creation of new ecological technologies.  It consists of a research center, eco-tourism hub, and a utility tower proposing a low-impact solution within the Namib Desert. Eco-tourism has recently become popular to thrill seekers looking to carve down the massive dunes on sand board. This coupled with a research center invested in new sustainable technology creates a micro economy that can support the continued preservation of the land. Read the rest of this entry »

A lot of recent speculation into the future of agriculture and its role in urban environments includes the construction of large vertical farms – eco skyscrapers devoted completely to growing food. But what if there was an easier solution rather than constructing whole towers devoted to the endeavor? One idea is to craft growing pods or greenhouses designed for urban rooftops that feed off the building’s waste and excess. These growing pods would involve significantly less investment and infrastructure and easily tap into existing systems.

Natalie Jeremijenko, an aerospace engineer and environmental health professor at New York University, in partnership with Jeremy Edmiston, principal at SYSTEMarchitects, have come up with an interesting concept that could easily transform the rooftops of the urban fabric into growing machines. The rooftop greenhouses, called the Urban Space Structure, pack in the plants and can support growth all year long. Rib-like supports create the main structure, which is wrapped in ETFE (ethylene tetrafluoroethylene), which is a translucent polymer that is both strong and recyclable and seen in use on many structures recently – most notably the Water Cube for the Beijing Olympics last year. Read the rest of this entry »

The skyscraper designed by Egyptian architect Hunia Tarek Tomoum is a three-dimensional structural mesh of variable size tetrahedrons where two different grids overlap to allow diverse programs and circulations. The building consists of a series of large pockets or community hubs with public amenities such as restaurants, theatres, parks, and plazas connected to diagonal units with offices, residences, and hotels.

The circulation network of vertical cores and diagonal elevators connects the community hubs with the private units. The tetrahedron skyscraper is planned as a see through mesh that will interact with the city and enrich the urban fabric – a visual pedestrian continuity is achieve by lifting the structure and creating open areas at ground level. Read the rest of this entry »

Designed by Thomas Shingo Nagy

Over the past two decades, Tokyo has invested in the development of Odaiba, a landfill site along the waterfront district, as part of a larger effort to attract businesses away from the congested downtown area.  In contrast to the multi-layered and self-organized urban centers of Tokyo, Odaiba was master-planned to accommodate an array of skyscrapers connected by a transportation network and green space.  Although the site offers vast territories unprecedented in Tokyo, development by the private sector has been slow primarily due to its significant scale. The lack of human scale places significant risk upon investors and discourages small businesses to move in, resulting in less programmatic diversity and an ineptitude in being able to adapt to the needs of an ever changing society. In order to create a viable environment for a wide array of businesses to coexist and flourish, Soup City draws inspiration from the field-like urbanism of Tokyo as a model for successful development. Read the rest of this entry »

Designed by Houston Drum

As we move toward the year 2040, the demands for energy, mobility and space in Los Angeles continue to grow in a region already overwhelmed with urban sprawl, traffic congestion, scarce open space, and inferior public transportation.  Excessive autonomy of living situations and transportation are at the root of these problems.  The 25-Hour City looks to oppose the Los Angeles urban model of autonomy by creating an urban environment with hyper-density and vibrancy by incorporating everything, everywhere, all the time.  The hyper-mixing of program allows for the freedom of continuous work or leisure at anytime of the day or night.  This urban configuration is coupled with the programmatic dispersal of commercial, residential, retail, public, and recreational space to fulfill the 25-Hour City concept.

This vertical proposal accomplishes the ultimate level of sustainable responsibility vis-à-vis hyper levels of land-use efficiency. By condensing 75,000 people in one tower, transportation needs are reduced substantially while open space on the ground level is maintained.  When dealing with the hyper-dense situation of 80,000 people / km², parameters of natural light and ventilation become the most prominent influences on zoning and massing throughout the city. Using these parameters of light and air to understand limits in density that can happen at the ground level, the only logical way for a city to grow is vertically. Through the use of this logic, swells in the urban fabric are created that evolve into vertical cities where the limits of density cease to exist. Read the rest of this entry »

Designed by Joshua Freese, Young-Suk Choi

Located on the Delaware riverfront in Philadelphia Pennsylvania, Quatre seeks to establish a new urban gateway at the city’s eastern edge.  The once vibrant industrial waterfront has long been severed from the city by the addition of the highway nearly fifty years ago. Recently, new developments interested in taking advantage of the physical context and trying to reconnect the cities waterfront to its urban core have begun to emerge and be realized. Using this physical threshold as a contextual catalyst for establishing a unique architectural landmark, Quatre becomes an anchor in the reclamation and redevelopment of the cities waterfront. Read the rest of this entry »

Designed by Carlos Augusto García, Luis Quiñones

The initial studies of Pendulous Threads were composed of extensive cyclical analyses of the existing context, the New Orleans Mississippi Riverfront. We employed the use of such studies to gain an understanding of the network of activity characterized by a culturally diverse city such as New Orleans. The cyclical analysis investigated elements of surrounding program types, ranging from hotel and residential, to music venues and galleries. These nodes of influence contain attributes of occupancy, proximity, and hours of activation based on a twenty-four hour timetable. A two-dimensional network of paths, based on the attributes of these nodes, generated the primary and secondary circulation paths through the site, a vacant parking lot in the heart of the New Orleans Riverfront.

Using parametric design techniques, we were able to transition to a complex system of three-dimensional organizational routes. Reapplying the attributes of the existing context to the introduced program facilitated the connection between the initial programmatic study and the emergent program distribution. With these seemingly atypical design methodologies engaging a traditional framework such as the French Quarter of the New Orleans riverfront, the hyperspecific topography employs the use of variation in a previously restrained cityscape. The rift between New Orleans and the Mississippi has created a lack of riverfront development, a driving force behind the will to create a departure from the traditional notion of city-river connection in New Orleans. Read the rest of this entry »

Designed by Madam Studio (Rebecca Harral, Adam Nathaniel Furman, Marco Ginex)

By 2030 urban analysts expect 92.2% of the British population to be living in urban areas. Corollary urban growth pitched against prohibitive green belt protection will become the central exigency within the urban architectural process. ‘Skyscraping’ will become an inevitable combative strategy.

However for several decades, inner-city skyscrapers have been firmly located within the corporate realm. These towers have been characterized by single ownership, occupancy by grade-A Office and Residential property, being exemplified both by the old generation of single use towers like 1 Canada Square, but equally by the token mixing of Luxury apartments into the program matrix by the new generation, starting with the Shard at London Bridge. Such unbalanced approaches are meaningless in the context of cities like London, and areas like Soho, defined as they are by migrating communities, and the need to balance the flexibility and strengths of these shifting communities against the ever increasing scales of capital investment.

Mixed use skyscrapers represent a minor step towards reconciling the diversity of a thriving community, and tall buildings, but invariably emerge as isolated, self contained, and alienating urban islands. It is the need for large initial capital investment to construct such towers that leaves them with single owners, who are inevitably susceptible both to paying back construction debt, as well as the difficulty of re-investing later at the scale of their large and monolithic asset. Read the rest of this entry »

Designed by Maria Mingallon, Sakthivel Ramaswamy, Konstantinos Karatzas

Fibre composite adaptive systems is a research project which emulates self-organisation processes in nature by developing a fibre composite that can sense, actuate and hence efficiently adapt to changing environmental conditions. Fibre composites which are anisotropic and heterogeneous offer the possibility for local variations in their material properties. Embedded fibre optics would be used to sense multiple parameters and shape memory alloys integrated in a fibre composite material for actuation. The definition of the geometry, both locally and globally would complement the adaptive functions and hence the system would display ’Integrated Functionality’. Read the rest of this entry »