When designing for children, you have to think fun, exciting, and colorful as well as safe, which is exactly what Paris-based firm, KOZ Architects created when they designed the Youth Center & Sports Facility for Saint Cloud, France. What immediately stands out are the brightly colored tinted glass windows, as well as the the modern concrete exterior. And when you see the inside, you realize how incredibly fun it must be to hang out there. This isn’t some candy-coated gingerbread day care center, this is an exciting world for kids to run and jump around in, and hopefully even the adults are enjoying it too. Read the rest of this entry »

The new luxury apartment complex, 100 Eleventh Avenue with it’s glittering glass facade, opens this month. Designed by French Architect Jean Nouvel, the 23-story condominium building faces the Hudson River with a front facade composed of 1,700 panes of glass, each set at a different angles and torques to better reflect the light. It’s a striking building that certainly lends a bit of character as well as glamour to the Chelsea neighborhood. On top of that, it’s aiming for LEED certification, with a long laundry list of sustainable building elements to prove its worthiness.

While the front side of the building is sheathed in glass, the backside is constructed from a simple black brick with windows punched through all the way up to the top. From the outside, the placement of the windows seems random, but from the inside, great care was taken to position each window to provide a picturesque view of a NYC landmark, like the Empire State Building. As Nicolai Ouroussoff of the New York Times describes it, 100 11th Avenue is a, “mix of grit and glamour — embodied in a glittering facade that seems to have been wrapped around the curved front of a black brick tower like a tight-fitting sequined dress.” Read the rest of this entry »

Commissioned by the Philharmonie de Paris, this WA Community Awards 6th Cycle winner balances the strict needs of a world class concert hall, with the intricacies of the surrounding neighborhood and the grandeur of the City of Paris. The work is the product of Jungmin Nam, an Award Winning architect now Working at KVA , in Boston, MA. He completed the project while as a student at the Harvard School of Design. Read the rest of this entry »

The United States Department of State recently announced  that KieranTimberlake has won the design competition for the new, United States London Embassy. Ambassador to the United Kingdom, Louis B. Susman, and Acting Director of the Bureau of Overseas Buildings Operations, Adam Namm, remarked, “KieranTimberlake’s design meets the goal of creating a modern, welcoming, timeless, safe and energy efficient embassy for the 21st century. Their concept most fully satisfied the requirements outlined in the design competition’s mission statement. The concept holds the greatest potential for developing a truly iconic embassy and is on the leading edge of sustainable design.”

The core design challenge was to bring form to the core beliefs of American democracy – transparency, openness, and equality – and do so in a way that is secure, welcoming, and sustainable.

Located on the Nine Elms site in London, the site is to be transformed into an urban park and garden, designed as a spiraling form and providing strong pedestrian connections to mass transit and the proposed Battersea developments to the west.  The park doubles as a security measure and is a welcome alternative to the walls, fences, and jersey barriers that have come to dominate American government buildings. Read the rest of this entry »

The park bench, much like other public, utilitarian furniture, has too often been regulated to uninspired mediocrity. They seldom have a contextual relationship to their surroundings and they almost never contribute to the story of a place. Ben Thorpe’s Peelback Bench however, manages to do all of the above with grace and elegance.

The bench seems to peel away a layer of history, presenting for the person sitting on the seat, a short explanation of the history of the area. As Thorpe explains “The basic principle of the bench is to give the effect that it has been peeled away from the ground, revealing a typographical story based upon the history of the particular area where the bench would be placed, giving the impression that you were reading from the foundations of the town”. Read the rest of this entry »

Project submitted to the 2010 Skyscraper Competition
Designed by: Santiago Marenco

Ecopolis is a global city for the future based on the idea of designing a set of highly differentiated sustainable and habitable cells. These primary units are organized into clusters according to program, habitants, and its relationship with the natural world.

Ecopolis façade is equipped with sustainable systems such as solar panels, wind turbines, and rainwater collectors. It is a modular design that grows according to different requirements in a given period of time. Read the rest of this entry »

Axis Mundi
John Beckmann, CarloMaria Ciampoli, James Coleman, Nick Messerlian, Pauline Marie d’Avigneau, Taina Pichon
United States

Project submitted to the 2010 Skyscraper Competition

As the city takes stock in a post-boom era, architect John Beckmann sees this as the time to rethink the tall buildings that have become synonymous with New York City’s identity.  

“Instead of disguising the rich potential of towers that have a mix of uses, we looked for a way to express that diversity,” Beckmann explained. The firm used parametric computer-modeling software to test a wide range of possibilities. Out of this iterative process, Beckmann and his firm, Axis Mundi, propose a new way to organize and express tall buildings: the Vertical Neighborhood. “A more diverse, complex, heterogeneous, and environmentally minded city need no longer be represented on its skyline by one-note architecture that makes a singular visual image and little else,” explained John Beckmann, the founder of Axis Mundi, a Manhattan-based architecture firm. 

Rethinking Hines Tower Site
Beckmann proposes a conceptual alternative to business-as-usual, choosing the site of the proposed 53W53rd, among the city’s largest skyscraper proposals in one of the most overbuilt parts of Midtown. Hines, the developer, engaged Paris architect Jean Nouvel, who designed an 82-story hotel and residential tower higher than the Chrysler Building. Read the rest of this entry »

Doonam Back, Yann Caclin
Korea / France

Project submitted to the 2010 Skyscraper Competition

While the majority of skyscrapers focus on height, the concept behind this proposal is its fragmentation in a series of buildings around a central courtyard for recreational activities. The different fragments are configured according to program and orientation. The result is a cluster of crystals linked by promenades, gardens, and plazas. Read the rest of this entry »

Architect Vincent Callebaut designed a sustainable tower in Paris to filter air particles and harvest wind and solar power. The project would be located in the 19th Parisian district which characterizes for being an extremely polluted area surrounded by old factories.

The project is divided in two; a “Solar Drop” located on top of abandoned railway tracks and a “Wind tower”. The Solar Drop is designed to transform polluted into clean air through a system of filters covered with titanium dioxide which break the pollutant particles. Along with the green technologies, the building is equipped with recreational areas for the city such as gardens, pools, galleries, and commerce. The Wind Tower equipped with turbines in its entire façade produces enough energy for the neighborhood and houses a museum and learning center on renewable energies. Read the rest of this entry »

CHROMAesthesiae: An installation of modular color

SOFTlab’s latest installation, CHROMAesthesiae, arrives at Devotion just in time for spring. CHROMAesthesiae is a flourishing landscape of color, blooming across the ceiling in high contrast-gradated clusters. This installation is an investigation on the spatial and chromatic perception of space. SOFTlab uses modularity as a core modality in order to generate complexity from repetitive form, allowing for rapid expansion or contraction of every piece created. With the motto, “everything changes,” the ability to adapt and grow conceptually underpins their entire body of work. This customizable installation is made of discrete, laser cut paper structures held together with binder clips: everyday objects are repurposed and precisely recombined. Forms evolve and shift color throughout the exhibition. Read the rest of this entry »