MahaNakhon by Ole Scheeren at OMA is a 77-storey high-rise complex located in Bangkok’s Central Business District. This vertical development of more than 150,000 square meters will be comprised of a landscaped public plaza; a multi-level retail centre with restaurants, cafes, and 24-hour marketplace; 200 serviced apartments operated by the Ritz-Carlton; the Bangkok Edition, a 150 room boutique hotel in collaboration with Marriot International and Ian Schrager; and a rooftop Sky Bar and restaurant. MahaNakhon is the most ambitious complex of contemporary architecture and urbanism in Thailand and the tallest building in Bangkok.

The design of MahaNakhon dismantles the typical tower and podium typology, creating a skyscraper that melds with the city by gradually ‘dissolving’ as it flows downward to meet the ground. A series of cascading indoor/outdoor terraces at the base of the tower accommodates retail and entertainment facilities, evoking the shifting protrusions of a mountain landscape. An adjacent freestanding seven-storey building – the “Cube” with corresponding terraces creates an expansive outdoor atrium – forming a valley and network of social, dining, and leisure spaces that serve the residences and the public. MahaNakhon Square, at the front, is designed as a dynamic public plaza, a spot for planned and spontaneous cultural events, a landscaped retreat for the city’s inhabitants, and a rare venue for cultural and social interaction.

The Tower has been carefully carved to introduce a three-dimensional ribbon of architectural pixels that coil up the tower’s full height to reveal the inner life of the building. This generates a set of specific features – projecting glass sky-boxes with sweeping views and generous indoor/outdoor spaces – uncommon to high-rise living, but well-suited to the tropical climate of Bangkok. The pixels have been designed to maximize unobstructed panoramas and offers rare birds-eye views of the city and Chaophraya River. Residences located in the non-pixelated area of the tower enjoy a parallel innovation: double-height living spaces equipped with multiple bays of full-height bi-fold balcony windows – sections of facade that fold inwards and upwards – transforming living areas into indoor/outdoor environments. Read the rest of this entry »

The winner is revealed – OMA won the final round of a public design competition for Axel Springer’s new media center in Berlin. The building aims to create new hub in the existing campus in central Berlin. As seen in Axel Springer, the winning design presented conceptually and aesthetically most radical model, while the fundamental innovation of working environments support the cultural transformation towards a digital publishing house.

The building will be located on one of the city’s most significant locations – the street previously separated East and West Berlin. The new office block is bisected by a diagonal atrium that opens up to the existing Springer buildings, an extension of the Springer campus. The essence of the proposal is a series of terraced floors that together form a ‘valley’. Each floor contains a covered part for formal work, which is then uncovered on the terraces to act as an informal stage and a place to broadcast ideas to other parts of the company. The ground floor is open to the city and contains studios, event and exhibition spaces, canteens and restaurants.

OMA’s  winning design team is led by partners-in-charge Rem Koolhaas and Ellen van Loon, and project leaders Katrin Betschinger, Alain Fouraux and Betty Ng. The project was developed in collaboration with Chris Carroll from Arup London, Duncan Phillips from RWDI for microclimate consultation, Eckhard Kahle of Kahle Acoustics, Christian Wernicke and Christoph Winter of SMV Bauprojektsteuerung & Emproc GmbH for cost consultation, and Peter Stanek for fire safety consultation. Read the rest of this entry »

This thesis project by Carmelia Chiang explored the implications of tangential space – the condition caused by two surfaces, either physical or implied, approaching to touch at a single point. The moment of the “kiss” resolves itself in spatial discomfort, awkwardness and tension.

Architects seemed to avoid tangential moments through history, as they considered it to be dysfunctional space – the acute angle. In an eternal effort to create better composition and what they would think of as usable space, methods of overlapping or distancing have been typically employed. As a rejection of this sensibility, the intention of this thesis is to treat tangential moments as catalysts for new use, novel spatiality, unique structural solutions and unexpected atmospheric settings. By designing architecture through tangency, this thesis explores the potential of tangential space in order to provoke new forms of spatial, programmatic and practical relationships in architecture. Read the rest of this entry »

On November 21 OMA finally marked the completion of De Rotterdam, mixed-use vertical city on the river Maas. Efficiency has been very important or even central design parameter from day one, as they stated in OMA. The extreme market play directed the course of the project, but that has been far from a design constraint and in fact has reinforces the original concept. The overall result is a dense, vibrant building for the city, in words of Ellen van Loon, partner in charge. With the completion of the building, a critical mass has been established on the Kop van Zuid, realizing the long-established vision of a second city center south of the Maas.

The building – De Rotterdam – is named after one of the ships on the Holland America Line, which transported emigrants from Europe to New York from the Wilhelmina Pier, next to which the building is located.

The high-rise is composed of the three stacked and interconnecting towers, 44 floors high and with a width of over 100 meters. The building is highly compact, and program mix is organized into distinct, overlapping blocks of commercial office space, residential apartments, hotel and conference facilities, restaurants and cafes. Office employees, residents and hotel guests are brought together in conference, sport and restaurant facilities. The building’s shared plinth is the location of the lobbies to each of the towers, creating a public hub by means of a common hall. Read the rest of this entry »

OMA has won the design competition for the Essence Financial Building in Shenzhen. The project, led by OMA Partners David Gianotten and Rem Koolhaas, and designed as a new generation office tower for Shenzhen, was selected from entries by four competing international and Chinese architectural practices.

The Essence Financial Building, located in the Financial Development Area of Shenzhen, reflects on how the emergent forces in business and society could shape a contemporary office tower typology. The building challenges the many conventions that govern office tower designs, in particular the prevailing central core plan and curtain wall systems.

David Gianotten commented: “OMA is very excited about its continuous and deepening participation in Shenzhen’s development, especially as the city makes its latest evolution: from a manufacturing city into a services hub. This next generation of urbanism calls for a new generation of office towers, of which the Essence Financial Building could be one.” The Essence Financial Building will be OMA’s second building in Shenzhen: the Shenzhen Stock Exchange, for which OMA won the competition in 2006, will be completed in April this year. Read the rest of this entry »

OMA’s entry for 425 Park Avenue competition, awarded to Foster and Partners, in their own words proposes one aesthetics, oscillating between nearly exhausted orthogonality and a still immature curvaceousness. Shohei Shigematsu, in charge of New York office, and Rem Koolhaas were project leaders for the competition that brought together international practices such as Atelier Christian de Portzamparc, Ateliers Jean Nouvel, Herzog & de Meuron, KPF, Maki and Associates, Renzo Piano Building Workshop, Richard Meier, Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners and Zaha Hadid Architects.

The form of the high-rise was the response to Manhattan’s zoning laws for commercial buildings, requiring a silhouette from which it is almost impossible to escape. OMA’s interpretation was slightly different – the three cubes are connected by curved planes of the envelope, reflecting the city and the sky, and creating smooth transition from cubes of different sizes. Stacked, one on top of another, cubes alter in dimensions – the lowest one is a solid block on Park Avenue while the smallest one is on top, rotated 45 degrees. Read the rest of this entry »

How can architecture represent the essence of law today, in a world focusing on decentralization and proximity? OMA’s project for the new Parisian Courthouse is a unitary building where the program is organized into three clearly identified parts: Civil, Criminal and Offices.

By inserting the tower (offices) in between the Criminal and Civil public spaces (courtrooms), OMA first optimizes the flow between different parts of the program (the tower is linked to the courtrooms with a hypercore system) while also giving a reason for height in the Parisian skyline. The emerging building, visible in the metropolitan landscape, is balanced and stable. The tower is about impartiality, discretion and the sublime. Read the rest of this entry »

Shanghai is a fragmented collage of different scales and styles. The identity of the city lies in the diversity of traditional, colonial, communist, and “post-modern” architecture united only through the city’s history. The Global Financial Centre on the Bund – yet another mixed-use project among all these opposing elements – has the natural task of addressing and emphasizing all the contradicting qualities of Shanghai without compromising their benefits.

The schizophrenic character of Shanghai calls for a cohesive agent: our project is a cluster of similar tilting towers but with different heights and footprints of different scales. The varying scales of each footprint allow different programs to inhabit the same complex and follow the logic of the site, with a smaller scale facing the old town, mitigating the difference between the various typologies surrounding the site. Global Financial Center on the Bund incorporates the richness of the small and the big, the local and the international, “hard” structures and “soft” elements, natural forms and man-made constructions. It can become a new landmark for Shanghai that is immediate, unique and identifiable while simultaneously remaining a fully-integrated and representative piece of the city’s rich culture. Read the rest of this entry »

BIG + TNT Nuuk + Ramboll Nuuk + Arkitekti is the winning team to design the new National Gallery of Greenland in the country’s capital Nuuk, among invited proposals totaling 6 Nordic architects.

Located on a steep slope overlooking the most beautiful of Greenland’s fjords, the 3000 m2 National Gallery will serve as a cultural and architectural icon for the people of Greenland. The new museum will combine historical and contemporary art of the country in one dynamic institution The winning proposal was selected by a unanimous museum board among 6 proposals, including Norwegian Snøhetta, Finnish Heikkinen‐Komonen, Islandic Studio Granda and Greenlandic Tegnestuen Nuuk.

“The Board has a clear vision: to work for the establishment of an internationally oriented highly professional institution that communicates the continuous project of documenting and developing the Greenlandic national identity through art and culture. Our dream is a national gallery where historic and contemporary art meets circumpolar pieces, Nordic and world art in general. Our dream is an institution that stimulates our curiosity, awake our excitement with its thought‐provoking design and where we all feel at home. Selecting a prominent architect as BIG, I am sure that our chances of realizing that dream are good”, Tuusi Josef Motzfeldt, Greenland’s National Gallery of Art.

As a projection of a geometrically perfect circle on to the steep slope, the new gallery is conceived as a courtyard building that combines a pure geometrical layout with a sensitive adaption to the landscape. The three‐dimensional imprint of the landscape creates a protective ring around the museum’s focal point, the sculpture garden where visitors, personnel, exhibition merge with culture and nature, inside and outside. Read the rest of this entry »

The Energy Report: a comprehensive study developed by the WWF, AMO and Ecofys claiming that the world can be 100% reliant on renewable energy by 2050, launches globally today.

The report proposes to address the urgent problems caused by looming climate change and dwindling fossil fuel supply through its assertion that by 2050, the world’s energy needs could be met entirely by renewable sources. It outlines an ambitious energy saving scenario as the first step toward an energy system in which fossil fuels are gradually replaced by wind, solar, geothermal, hydropower and sustainable forms of bio-energy.

The aim of the report is to inspire governments and businesses to understand the challenges associated with this shift and, at the same time, to encourage them to move boldly to bring the renewable economy into reality. By demonstrating the advantages of global cooperation and the deeper integration of global energy infrastructure, The Energy Report shows that the benefits of a transition to renewable energy far outweigh the challenges.

AMO’s contribution to the report, led by Partner Reinier de Graaf and Associate Laura Baird, both conceptualizes and visualizes the geographic, political, and cultural implications of a 100 percent renewable energy world. AMO draws a vision of a world without borders in which all continents have equal access to sustainable energy. Read the rest of this entry »