Herzog & de Meuron’s design for Hong Kong Museum won the competition – they will design new museum for visual culture in Victoria Harbor. The M+, as it is called, will not be just another museum, in the words of its architects – it will aim to be a cultural center for 20^th and 21^st century art, design, architecture and the moving image. The various museum spaces range from conventional white cube, reconfigurable spaces and rooms for screenings, multipurpose facilities and industrial space. The industrial space was particularly requested and it has the purpose to investigate and show how the post-industrial space can be created from vacant land.

The site for the museum is specific – the building will be anchored to the land that was once reclaimed from the sea and founded on the underground tunnel of the Airport Express. Seen as an obstacle at first, the situation later became the “raison d’être” for the project and demanded raw, rough, large-scale exhibition universe.

Quite spectacular space for art and design exhibitions as well as the large scale installation and performance was created by uncovering the tunnel – the “found space” is actually a challenge to artist and curators and it represents the space of un-investigated potential. Read the rest of this entry »

Tirana Flux Exchange (FL-EX) by Barker Freeman Design Office is a proposal for a multimodal transportation hub and new urban landscape model for the Albanian capital positioned to greatly expand the scope and connectivity of the city’s infrastructural networks.  FL-EX connects the existing HSH Railway and intercity bus lines with a new airport transit, bike, and pedestrian paths linking the historic urban center to international transportation systems. This hub also acts as a nexus of commerce where strands of retail, office, and housing blocks thread across the landscape to create a new constructed ground that supports urban agricultural production, community recreational and entertainment spaces, and sustainable roof systems. Read the rest of this entry »

This interdisciplinary project of the new research pavilion is conducted by researchers of Institute for Computational Design (ICD) together with the Institute of Building Structures and Structural Design (ITKE) at the University of Stuttgart. The pavilion is entirely robotically fabricated, from glass and carbon fiber composites and it investigates the eventual co-relation between bio-mimetic design strategies and new processes of robotic production. The new composite construction paradigm in architecture is rooted in morphological principles of arthropods’ exoskeletons.

A key point researched through the project of this pavilion was the possibility of transferring the fibrous morphology of the biological model to fiber-reinforced composite materials, which would lead to new tectonic possibilities in architecture. The high performance structure was therefore manufactured – pavilion’s shell is four millimeters thick and is spanning eight meters.

The researchers followed a “bottom-up” approach, therefore wide range of different sub-types of invertebrates were investigated in regards to the material anisotropy and functional morphology of arthropods. The observed principles were further analyzed and abstracted in order to be subsequently transferred into viable design principles for architectural applications. Read the rest of this entry »

RUR Architecture PC announced that the groundbreaking of the Taipei Pop Music Center took place Wednesday, June 19, 2013 at the center’s new site on the edge of Taipei, Taiwan. Envisioned as a coherent environment that challenges the limitations of traditional performances spaces, the innovative new center will consist of several mixed-use spaces woven together into a dynamic, multi-purpose venue that reflects and supports the evolving culture of pop.

Taiwanese pop music, while enmeshed in its local roots, has also transcended them and operates on a global stage. Likewise, the TPMC simultaneously functions as an organic part of everyday Taipei life and as a global center for the music industry. The TPMC integrates theater with public space and commerce to become a cultural hub that will engage visitors independently of scheduled performances. While the scale and grain of the civic programs – retail, dining, offices, etc. – respect the vital fabric of Taipei street life, their architectural identity is unique and distinct. Read the rest of this entry »

ALA Architects, a Helsinki-based firm, supported by Arup Ireland, was announced the winner of the international design competition for a new library. This is a new benchmark for energy consumption in a modern high-technology library facility as the 16,000 m² building will consist almost entirely of public spaces and will serve as the new focal point for the city and Finland’s impressive public library network. It has been estimated that the library will attract 5,000 visitors per day and 1.5 million visitors per year. Read the rest of this entry »

The new Crystal World, designed by studio Asymptote Architecture, is rooted in the spectacular geological conditions of the site of the Changsha EcoTech Resort City in China. The powerful assemblage of the crystalline forms is taking advantage of the unique natural setting, by leaving it as it is. The resort is floating above a new Crystal Mirror lake surrounded by cafes and restaurant along a waterside promenade.

The Waterworld Park houses various programs –swimming pools together with whirl and tiodal pools hang suspended in the vast interior of the park. The environment is highly dynamic due to structures such as water slides and recreational amenities that move through the space.

The contents are facilitated within the geometric volumes; therefore the ones requiring bigger space are housed in joined, contiguous space, as it is the case with Water World. The layering of different program elements creates a microcosm of unique interior environments, ranging from leisure and recreational to​athletic and educational.​ The main attraction of the structure is the multi-story lobby, celebrating snow, ice and water. Each hotel room is a state off the art technological space with custom control of all aspects of the guest’s environment. One of the most spectacular structures of the Crystal World is the indoor ski hill, which intersects the Snow and Ice World and spans the breadth of the quarry. As one looks through the entire building it becomes evident that the interplay of volumes and functions is very dynamic and amusing. The entire structure is carefully placed to minimally impact the surrounding natural condition of the site. Read the rest of this entry »

Aedas designed the 100,000-square-meter Bravo Pazhou mixed-use tower, located in the western portion of Pazhou’s central business district in Guangzhou, China with restaurants and a boutique hotel at the lower levels and office space at the upper floors.

The extraordinary thing about this development is its design to cater two owners in one unified composition. This special request from the clients provides opportunities to explore creative ways to amalgamate specific masses in a single iconic composition.  As a result, the distinction between the functions is visible on the elevation. The whole composition is unified by a semi controlled random fenestration using vertical fins at regular intervals. The top portion of the tower uses a simple but effective gesture that combines observation points with the utility nodes. Read the rest of this entry »

Set to become of Asia’s tallest buildings, new 550m skyscraper is designed by Asymptote Architecture, for Millennium Tower Business Center (WBCB), through the Busan International Architectural Cultural Festival (BIACF), and sponsored by the municipality of Busan City and the Solomon Group. It clearly shows how the once monoform typology of skyscrapers deviated into pluralism and branching structures.

Designed as three independent towers, breaking apart from its unified base, the structure provides strong identity, forming one of the most striking lobbies, looking up at three towering columns to the sky. The independent volumes grow from the tapering form of the base, yet in rigid and defined manner. This landmark piece of architecture however sets new standards regarding aesthetics and high-rise typology.

The towers could also be read as three distinct forms, set against Busan’s dramatic natural surroundings of sea and mountains. The very base of these very tall towers negotiates the site at the ground level while from the top of the midsection the slender towers rise above the sky-lobby level, tapering upwards around a spectacular central void. Read the rest of this entry »

Avoiding Figuration is a final thesis project of Jacques Lesec and Sean Markle, developed at SCI-Arc. In words of the authors, it investigates the perception of figuration and void within a complex field condition. Employed strategies oscillate between 2D and 3D, as a means of augmenting the legibility of volume and other times subverting this perceptual reading.

The aim of the project is to challenge conventional understanding of mass and void within the urban context. The design tries to disrupt current condition within which we tend to perceive the city as a collection of individual instances and iconographic volumes, without further integration. This thesis investigates the possibility to generate visual synthesis across adjacent facades, therefore bringing perceptual integration back into Manhattan’s commercial skyline. It introduces new layers of mass-void relationship.

Starting from the interest in developing a complex field of information, two architects developed a catalogue of perceptual devices, derived from a series of analytic drawings and models. Different techniques proved useful along the process, such as masking, expanding and highlighting, both subverting and confounding diverse perceptual readings, ranging from clear volumetric legibility to the complete erasure of volume. Read the rest of this entry »