Volutes is a skyscraper conceived by Asami Takahashi and Jason Lim located in Singapore’s new marina. Our proposal is to pull upwards the urban fabric and create a helical volume. Public programs are wrapped around a central circulation core while six serpentine structures contain the private spaces. The morphology of the building results from the analysis of 6 control lines sweeping around the central core. The outer skin is linked to the main structure with spokes arranged in a hexagonal configuration.Volutes opens at the street level and closes at the top to allow direct sunlight into the city. Its porous skin maximizes ventilation and regulates the green parks and water reservoirs. Read the rest of this entry »
Serpentine Skyscraper in Singapore’s Marina
From Public Housing to Housing a New Public: The Case of Elemental
“Literally all architecture is about this question of the common world. / Then the question is, ‘which type, which style of architecture is adjusted to the task?’ […] / What is the successor to this style of modernist architecture? I am interested in pushing the designer into asking, “if you have to imagine that the world does not consist of matters of fact, but instead of matters of concern, what happens with the concepts of function, sobriety, public space, etc.?” / [T]he crisis of representation is largely due to the fact that people define politics in too narrow of a sense; that is, it is always defined in terms of race, gender, power and class relations —a very limited repertoire. […] / [I] think the crisis of representation today occurs because it is very difficult to speak about the production of things with this limited repertoire. This repertoire blocks you at the entry of science and technology, and architecture is part of science and technology. / A new beginning would be —in contrast to the world of objects we’re imagining now— about how the architect displays a thing […].” – Bruno Latour1
Housing always creates a “public”2, and when talking about public housing this concept becomes all the more interesting. A picture comes to mind, which includes the residents, the architects, the local authorities, the civil servants, the location, the land owners, the public policy, the urban regulations, the new infrastructures, the municipal supplies, the new streets, the constructor, the construction company, the workers, the construction materials, the local technologies, the budget, the schedule, the students, the volunteers, the existing public amenities, the views, the neighbors, the neighborhood, the district, the city, the climate… In addition, the future inhabitants have their ambitions, dreams, new living expectations, desire of belonging to a specific community and place. Architects dream of designing something more than a “building”, they want to go beyond building for their citizens. The administrators have realized that an intelligent coordination of relocation, appropriate land, funding, and schedule, could turn the ruling conventions of the housing real estate market around and become a revolutionary means for radical urban regeneration that could give the opportunity to poor people to own their home and shape their neighborhood. Read the rest of this entry »
The “Multi-Storey Building” for Amman, Jordan
Although lacking an intriguing name, the “Multi-Storey Building” designed by Athens-based Kois Associated Architects has a very intriguing facade. Backed up against a living green wall, the mixed use building for Amman, Jordon, was designed after a study of Jordanian architecture, which informed the final volume of the building. A traditional block glass walled building is covered in a veil that has openings or shadings depending on the corresponding need for the program on that level. The veil acts as a boundary to the city, and the entrances on the street level are like gates into the building, providing a transition zone to those entering. Read the rest of this entry »
Strata Tower in Abu Dhabi, UAE / Asymptote Architecture
The Strata Tower, a forty-story, luxury residential building designed by architects Hani Rashid and Lise Anne Couture of Asymptote, has broken ground on Al Raha Beach and is now under construction. The tower is scheduled for completion in early 2011 and, at a height of 160 meters, will be the tallest building in the Al Dana precinct, the centerpiece of Aldar Properties PJSC’s prestigious Al Raha Beach development. The project and development was showcased at Cityscape Abu Dhabi from May 13–15, 2008. The landmark Strata Tower is designed to signify a dignified and important future for Abu Dhabi and the region.
As a signature architectural statement, the Strata Tower’s articulate, striking physical presence seeks to encapsulate meaning through the use of abstract form drawn from both local cultural landscapes and motifs and dynamic forces of global influence. The Strata Tower’s design utilizes primarily mathematical means in its design to achieve both a poetic, as well as highly pertinent, architecture for the UAE, a region in flux with ambitions for continued rapid growth. Read the rest of this entry »
Adaptive Prototypes: Vanke Center and Formal Adaptability / Steven Holl
Ideal forms or adaptive geometries? Presented with the problem of resolving a complex program, such as housing, within a difficult site, architects usually pursue one of these two strategies. They can either resolve the abstract issue of program, or address the concrete problem of context. The former becomes predicated on a pure internal logic, while the latter becomes an issue of adapting to external contingencies. A schism is created between idealized solutions to the problems of Housing, for example, and attempts to most fully ingratiate architecture with its surrounding context.
Those projects that set out to generate a ‘perfect’ programmatic or conceptual solution usually achieve this by disengaging themselves from their surroundings, resolving their formal aspects in isolation. Often the way this is achieved is by literally lifting the projects out of their sites, as was proposed by Le Corbusier when he shifted his buildings onto pilotis in the pursuit of a true ‘machine for living.’ Steven Holl’s nearly completed Vanke Center, in Shenzen, China is also lifted up off of its site, but unlike its modern progenitors this lift allows the project to marry the two halves of what had previously been a dichotomy of purpose. The lift constructs a more active relationship to site, while reinvigorating the bar building as an archetypal residential typology. The project points to a future paradigm where internally derived, conceptually pure prototypes are subtly co-opted to create new forms of contextuality. Read the rest of this entry »
Parade: Installation Explores Nonlinear Public Spacial Design
Critical Practice is a public arts group based at the University of the Arts, London. They operate under the proposition that developing aesthetic and programmatic space is a radial rather than lineal process and created the installation Parade to explore the effectiveness of their process in the public square. Made from 4300 black milk crates tied together with zip ties the structure’s components were minimized in order to focus on special relationships during the design and assembly process. It was constructed on the Rootstein Hopkins Parade Ground at Chelsea Collage of Arts and Design during the third week of May, 2010. Read the rest of this entry »
Space Skyscraper
The main idea behind this proposal is to build a skyscraper in space. It will sit on the plane of an orbit where gravity is zero. The concept is to keep the median point of the structure on the orbital plane and build it until it almost reaches the Earth’s surface. This experiment is one of the many investigations to free the skyscraper from gravity and create the tallest structure which could completely solve our housing problems. The building is 1000 kilometers tall and its orbital plane would be at 500 kilometers. Read the rest of this entry »
Linear City Would Connect San Diego and San Francisco
Architects Joseph Moore and David Tai Wai Pak believe that the future of urban design will be found in the interdependence of expansion and mass transit systems. In California the directionless sprawl of its largest cities has created a culture of cars, pollution and commuting. Continual independent growth was solution that provided great comfort and freedom while land and resources were available. However, California’s population has grown exceedingly in the past fifty years and it cannot sustain its current growth within this old system. Los Angeles’s population in particular has increased from 4.7 million in 1950 to a staggering 16 million in 2008 and it is projected by the U.S. Census Bureau to continue to grow to a total population of 24.6 million by 2050. To deal with this future population increase, Intension proposes to relocate any further expansion of California’s major cities towards a linear urban plan. The catalyst for this proposal was California Department of Transportation’s development of a high speed rail that will link major cities from Sacramento to San Diego. Read the rest of this entry »
Slumdog Superstructure in Nairobi
Kibera in Nairobi, Kenya is Africa’s second largest slum and one of the densest human settlements on the planet; over a million people in a congested mess of cardboard and corrugated tin shanties in a bare two-and-half square kilometers area.
The settlement’s illegality is at the heart of its perverse attraction; chaotic, anarchic – unbound by tenancy laws or building restrictions or any of the strident, stringent limitations of a modern city. The land is cheap, and the slum, with both its proximity to Nairobi and its own, semi-autonomous economy, exercises a magnetic attraction on the millions of Kenyans fleeing rural poverty. Yet the area is dominated by a handful of landlords, who have no incentive to invest in Kibera’s infrastructure. Illegal in the eyes of their government, and ignored by their erstwhile landlords, the residents of the slum make do as best they can; struggling with the – literally – shifting territory, with internecine and inter-ethnic strife, with fire and floods. Read the rest of this entry »
Biomorphic Skyscraper
As time transcends the virtual and physical limits of tall buildings, their ability to mingle into the existing urban fabric and transform a city’s dynamic core becomes a fine line between the density and physical mass already embedded in the metropolis and the ingenious ability to create grandeur. We therefore only see fragments of the past and brave gestures of the future in the densification of urban cores. Each gesticulation becomes an expression – a murmur on the reality of what could be achieved.
To allow for true freedom of expression that allows complete indulgence concerning the interplay of form and structure we have to consider the rationale of building placement. Allowing buildings to set their footprint in avenues of un-built mass provides for urban renewal in areas of cities previously left as urban wasteland from decaying manufacturing. Read the rest of this entry »