Designed by Adrian Smith & Gordan Gill Architecture, Dancing Dragons is a pair of mixed-use towers, a new architecture landmark in the sky of , South Korea. It is a playful development, whose sharply angled mini-towers cantilever around the central core. Regarding the aesthetics, the architects aimed to find a compromise between two extremes – the contemporary language and the traditional Korean culture.

Yongsan, the name of the international business district, means “Dragon Hill” in Korean and the building’s skin further suggests the scales of fish and Korean mythical creatures – the dragons. The skin of these towers is active – it gaps between its overlapping panels just enough that the air can circulate making the façade breathable.

The two towers, 1 and 2, around 450 and 390 meters tall, are similar but not identical. In the tower 1, the massing cuts at the top and bottom of the mini-towers are V-shaped while in the other, 77 story one, the cuts move diagonally in a single line, arranged in a radial pattern around the core, visible as the visitors move around the tower. The “mini-tower” cuts are clad in glass, enabling dramatic skylights effects above the units and transparent floor beneath, which provides the opportunity for high-end, luxury penthouse duplex units. Read the rest of this entry »

KK100, designed by TFP Farrells for Shenzhen, China, is an innovative project, located on a 3.6-hectare site, which previously housed the old dwellings of Caiwuwei Village, an area known for its bad environment, insufficient transportation infrastructure, and degraded buildings. The developer took the initiative to form a company with the villagers (a Joint Development Initiative), for a new model for the district that would benefit everyone. The existing buildings were mainly run-down housing with inadequate living conditions.

This 100-story and over 440 meters high tower is one part of the master plan for a 417,000m2 mixed-use development which includes five residential and two commercial buildings. The tower is horizontally divided into different uses – levels from 4 to 72 houses 173,000m2 of Grade- A office space while the uppermost levels from 75 to 100 are occupied by a 35,000m2 St. Regis Hotel complete with a cathedral-like glazed sky-garden. Due to the curved and smooth roof surface, the generators were not put on top of the building. Read the rest of this entry »

Zaha Hadid Architect’s Innovation Tower for Hong Kong Polytechnic University is near its completion. The architectural office was commissioned to design the architectural landmark that would symbolize the dynamic development of Hong Kong as Asia’s greatest design hub as well as the high level educational institution offering variety of design and research programs.

The design for the University’s Innovation Tower came as a result of the re-examining the characteristics and the requirements of such an institution and therefore the creative multidisciplinary environment called for something other than the classical typography of a tower rising from the podium – the design team proposed seamlessly fluid new structure. However, the tower still references University’s rich tradition, but with an accent on the upcoming, future achievements.

“Collateral flexibility” is a concept derived from the university’s many different programs and their interconnections, which provided a clear guiding principle, used to govern the building’s internal logic and to create a structure inherently organized and easily attended by visitors from the entering point. Read the rest of this entry »

Daniel Caven of the Illinois Institute of Technology was featured in the American Institute of Architecture‘s Architect Magazine and was a finalist for Schiff Fellowship Award for his Relief Tower. Caven’s concept is capable of generating active energy outputs as well sustainable mechanical devices that will achieve economic gains for major cities, such as Chicago. Past ideas of towers acting as modern monumental statues in this modern world have become obsolete. Now towers must incorporate adaptive qualities for climate change and environmental conditions to withstand tests of sustainability as well as create a generative life.

The Relief Tower is designed around environmental conditions from a parametric mind-set while using rules of analysis to govern design choices. Located in the River North area of Chicago, the Relief Tower will be able to generate power to several neighboring buildings as well as a triple zero goal for itself. The form was generated by computational fluid dynamic analysis, as well as large physical models that underwent wind tunnel analysis. The animalistic (amphibious) form was manipulated to push wind into the outer, non-habitable, wing like extremities, that house vertical wind turbines. The funneling conditions in the outer extremities, push the wind faster towards the inset turbines, as well as push air towards the atrium. The energy created through this technique not only powers the towers own-self, but many neighboring buildings. Conservation of energy in the Relief Tower is one of the many factors and goals for itself. The outer skin of the tower creates a screening effect that protects itself from outside elements, as well as creating a play with shadows to the people within. The outside skin opens and closes due to sun radiation and changing elevation in relationship to program (using parametric alterations in the metals’ properties). The tower accommodates offices for a third of the tower as well as luxury hotels for the remaining levels, with a rooftop sky bar/pool area for attendees. Read the rest of this entry »

Couple of days ago, London Mayor Boris Johnson, joined by building’s architect Renzo Piano, cut a ribbon to the viewing platform, positioned 243 meters up The Shard skyscraper, standing next to London Bridge Station. Recently opened attraction, The View from The Shard, accessed directly from an entrance on the ground level, is expected to attract over half a million visitors each year.

The very building, magic for a number of reasons, as its architect stated, has been completed since the summer of 2012, but officially opened to public of February 1^st, 2013. Formally named “The London Bridge Tower”, this mixed-use skyscraper is home to a large number of programs. Designed as a “vertical city”, this London skylines’ newest addition addresses the city’s growing population and need to maximize the space.

The semi-public, ground level houses a public piazza with restaurants, cafes and areas for art installations. Triangular-shaped, building facilitates 55,000 square meters of offices, three floors of restaurants and 200-room Shangri-La Hotel, which is due to open this summer. Moreover, ten luxury apartments are expected to be priced £50 million each. Ventilated winter gardens add luxury to the exquisite office spaces with striking views.

Generous at the bottom, the building is getting narrower to the top, disappearing in the air almost like a pinnacle of the Gothic cathedral. Its architecture is firmly based in the historic form of London’s masts and spires, elegantly reinterpreted by great Piano. Active envelope is enabled by sophisticated use of glazing – expressive facades of angled panes are designed to reflect light and changing patterns of London sky, therefore the form of the building will change according to the weather or seasons. Read the rest of this entry »

Upon completion, the 490 meter tall Solomon Tower, part of South Korea’s World Business Center in Busan (WBCB) designed by New York-based Asymptote Architecture, is poised to become one of the tallest buildings in Asia. The tower was commissioned as part of an international design competition organized by the Busan International Architectural Culture Festival (BIACF) and the Busan City municipality in 2008. Read the rest of this entry »

An addition to a series of projects involving the architecturization of parking facilities, the Car Park proposal designed by Interface Studio Architects tries to integrate the automobile culture into the vertical environment of Hong Kong. Through a playful use of ramps, repetition and uniformity, elements of the car park typology are exaggerated. In the attempt to create a distinctive urban structure that competes with the neighborhood of Hong Kong’s high-rises, the design evolves into a multi-functional building, introducing various programs: shopping, cafes, restaurants and green spaces.

The tower look of the project appears to derive from the city’s existing attitude towards infrastructure, acknowledging its all-present, overwhelming personality. It takes is further, as it mixes the car traffic trajectories with central functions in a single kinetic gesture of swirling ramps. The structure is then deformed as if physically influenced by forces and volumes of adjacent buildings. Read the rest of this entry »

UNStudio’s design for The Scotts Tower in Singapore has been designed to conserve space whilst maximizing live/work/play areas, The Scotts Tower presents a new dimension of functional and flexible vertical space. The Scotts Tower high end residential building is situated on a prime location in Singapore, close to the Orchard Road luxury shopping district and with views encompassing both nearby parkland and the panoramic cityscape of Singapore City.

Ben van Berkel: “An interesting facet of The Scotts Tower is the way that it reacts to the urban context of Singapore. Instead of the more usual means of planning a city horizontally, we have created neighbourhoods in the sky; a vertical city where each zone has its own distinct identity.” The 18,500m2, 31-storey, 231-unit tower consists of 1 to 3-bedroom apartments and 4-bedroom penthouses; expansive landscaped gardens, sky terraces, penthouse roof gardens and diverse recreational facilities.

Neighborhoods in the sky
The concept of The Scotts Tower is that of a vertical city incorporating a variety of residence types and scales. In addition, outdoor green areas in the form of sky terraces, penthouse roof gardens and individual terraces form an important element of the design. The vertical city concept is interpreted on the tower in three scales; the “city”, the “neighbourhood” and the “home”. The three elements of the vertical city concept along with the green areas are bound together by two gestures: the “vertical frame” and the “sky frames”.

The vertical frame organises the tower architecturally in an urban manner. The frame affords the tower the vertical city effect by dividing the four residential clusters into different neighbourhoods.

The sky frames – at the lobby (Level 1 & Level 2) and sky terrace (Level 25) – organise the amenity spaces and green areas of the tower. Read the rest of this entry »

HTDSTUDIO competition entry for the Mercedes-Benz Business Center is less concerned with form-following-function as it is with form being functional.  The tower sited in Yerevan, Armenia is hyper-rationally organized, with a layout synthesized from user-flow. The program ranging from hotel, apartment, and fitness center, to theater, restaurant, and conference room, require a reconsidering of the public-private relationship. This relationship is reinterpreted as an opportunity for inclusion opposed to separation. As a result, the functional activity is aligned along the exterior, with discreet separations occurring within the core. This new programmatic arrangement is projected to the façade, with the juxtaposing programs serving as cladding elements that animate the elevations with social exchange. Read the rest of this entry »

As the twin towers in Toronto, Canada’s Absolute World development near completion, MAD Architects look to break ground on yet another arduous skyscraper concept. Located in Chongqing, a major city in founder Yansong Ma’s home country of China, the Urban Forest proposal reiterate MAD’s design approach of syncing architecture with nature. Aesthetically evocative of the surrounding mountainous terrain, the peak-and-valley elevation is generated by the successive cantilevering of the floor plates. Abstractly curved, the floors are un-referential to what is above and below, rendering the high-rise building as a swaying tree in a forest of towers. Read the rest of this entry »