A few days ago we had the chance to attend the Audi Urban Future Awards, where 5 young and innovative practices presented their visions on the future of mobility for five of the world’s most intense urban regions: Boston/Washington Area (USA), Mumbai (India), Sao Paulo (Brasil), Istanbul (Turkey) and the Pearl River Delta region (China).
The Audi Urban Future Award went to Höweler + Yoon and their proposal for BosWash, a new mega region that connects commuters and center through a new intelligent infrastructure, a project that Audi has committed to push forward.
These regions deal with the most important issues that cities are facing in the urban era: the dilemma between density and sprawl, opportunities, transportation, long term versus fast growth, energy, infrastructure, and as we have seen in the last days, the natural environment.
In the following videos we will see the thorough diagnostics of the cities presented by the architects, along with a short description of their projects. Their proposals will be featured in a following article.
Istanbul, Mumbai, Perl River Delta and Sao Paulo after the break:
The Architects in Missions (AIM) recently announced the winners for their 2012 architecture competition with the topic, “Shengsi Islands: Renewing China’s Traditional Village Lifestyle.” Participants were challenged in guiding the island villages toward a diversified economy through sustainable tourism development. Over the course of this society’s development, the unique fishing village, its products, and its lifestyle, represent a cultural resource that cannot be replicated. Awards were given in the categories of scenic village planning, architecture renovation, sustainable development, innovation production, and a special award. More images and descriptions of the winning entries after the break.
vGHcompany shared with us their competition entry for Mobilicity Tirana, which won an honorable mention. Their project outlines a utopia, which is based on the man who fell into one’s own trap: the notion of time. The rings showing the wheels of a watch in which each mean of conveyance (train, car, bike) are the hands covering the dial. Each of these conveyance flows has their own characteristics and its medium speed. More images and architects’ description after the break.
The proposal for the Daegu Gosan Public Library competition, designed by École Architects and AAKAA, consists of a massive cubic construction, in stark contrast with the surrounding cityscape. The singularity and unexpected nature of this landmark building is legible at once, without, however, bearing the trace of any logo, or distinctive sign of its function. It is its absence of obvious identity – its apparent neutrality and slickness – that consecrates it as a singular landmark. The library projects no further identity than its mass. More images and architects’ description after the break.
Designed by Mateo Arquitectura, the purpose of the Leipzig Freedom and Unity Memorial is to commemorate the “Peaceful Revolution” of 1989 that made Leipzig a decisive place for the fall of the Berlin wall with the construction of this monument. The memory they aim to commemorate is that of a peaceful mass change, with no hierarchies, that we see in historic photos as points of light, changing like a surging sea. Formally and conceptually, the architects decided that their intervention here should address surface rather than volume; it should be horizontal rather than vertical. More images and architects’ description after the break.
Architect, designer and theoretician Gae Aulenti (1927-2012) died late Wednesday night in her Milan home at the age of 84. The Palazzolo della Stella native will always be remembered as being one of the few well recognized women that worked in Italian postwar design. Throughout her career, Aulenti’s multi-faceted talent contributed greatly to the evolution of art, architecture and design.
Jeanne Gang is about to make her New York debut, as the Chicago-based architect just unveiled the latest project planned to border New York City’s beloved High Line. The 180,000 square-foot office tower with ground level retail will replace an existing, disused meatpacking plant along 10th Avenue between 13th and 14th streets. It will feature a “gem-like”, glass facade that is intelligently shaped to avoid the disruption of light, air and views from the High Line.
Dubbed the Solar Carve Tower, the mid-rise structure is currently pending city approval and is planned for completion in 2015.
Continue after the break for the architects’ description.
Amidst the post-Sandy recovery efforts, we would like to share with you New York: Night and Day by Philip Stockton. The New York-based animator and director created the film in attempt to explore the city’s relationships between night and day from a series of fifteen preconceived locations. Using an interesting mix of non-traditional video time-lapse and animation, Stockton combined four to eight hours of footage from each location into single sequences using rotoscoping techniques.
Designed by STL Architects, the new Daegu Gosan Public Library focuses on the evolution of the role of the library in regard to the new ways we now learn and teach. With extensive amounts of information, that could historically only be accessed in and from a library, being readily available to nearly anyone, this library will be a place where people come to live and vast knowledge resources are more than stereo-typical encyclopedias. Instead of libraries being generically thought of as a dusty place where books come to age and be seldom used, this library will be a place where social interaction is the essence of existence. More images and architects’ description after the break.
Architects: Armando Montero + Samuel Bravo Location: Región de Aysén, Chile Architects: Samuel Bravo, Armando Montero Project Year: 2011 Photographs: Samuel Bravo
Intercontinental Curatorial Project, which promotes the role of architecture as the vital part of contemporary culture and life, presents its ongoing traveling exhibition Colombia: Transformed. The event is to be shown November 8-9 as part of the Dialogues with the Informal City: The Case of Latin America and the Caribbean symposium. This interdisciplinary symposium seeks to connect a range of fundamental themes affecting the current conditions and future of Latin America’s growing informal cities and by extension the rising global urban population.The event will take place at the Jorge M. Perez Architecture Center at the University of Miami’s School of Architecture. The exhibition is co-sponsored by the University’s Center for Latin American Studies and the School of Architecture. For more information, please visit here.
Designed by JBAD (Jonathan Barnes Architecture and Design), the proposal for the Daegu Gosan Public Library proposes to simply, and radically, invert the conventional relationship of public space, circulation and access. In doing so, the public space typically defined and confined as interior, enclosed space becomes externalized, extroverted, stretched, and reformed. With their ”INversion’ concept, the way of interpreting the library as structure and space provides an opportunity to create exterior public space in ways that are both more integrated with the library’s functions and more connected to its urban context. More images and architects’ description after the break.
Given the state of the economy around the world, many people are returning to school in the hopes of acquiring new skills while riding out the worst of the effects of the global recession. Toward that end, ArchDaily has begun a College Guide to help people explore different educational options. There are many issues to consider beyond a school’s “name” such as the types of programs architecture schools offer. The Guide has highlighted schools with programs in Building Ecology, Forensic Architecture, and Human Rights, to name a few, while some of the practical issues have included cost analysis, financial aid, and access to cross-disciplinary training.
What has not been explored in the Guide because of its scope is a more theoretical examination of pedagogical strategies. What direction has architecture academics taken and where should it go in order to remain socially relevant, practically agile, and economically competitive? To discuss these issues, we interviewed Michael Rotondi, a founding student and current Distinguished faculty member of SCI-Arc and principle at RoTo Architecture. Throughout the conversation, Mr. Rotondi’s insight combine with a constant and voracious intellectual curiosity to provide visions that are important to both students and educators.
When Wired correspondent Lauren Hilgers arrived to Broad Town, the headquarters of the Broad Sustainability Group in Changsha, China, she soon realized that this was not your typical workplace environment. At Broad Town, employees must be able to run 7.5 miles over the course of 2 days; recite company “policy” - covering everything from how to save energy to how to brush your teeth - at a moment’s notice; and refer to their boss as “my chairman.”
It may sound strict, but the workers at Broad are on a higher mission. The CEO and founder of the company, Zhang Yue, a.k.a the chairman, doesn’t just consider himself the head of a construction company, but of a “structural revolution.”
In a few years, Zhang has turned the world of skyscraper design on its head, pushing the technical and structural capabilities of pre-fabrication to its utmost (perhaps you’ve heard of the 30-story hotel he built in just 15 days). Not only do Broad’s techniques save time and money, they represent a potentially game-changing opportunity for China to maintain its unfathomable rate of growth in a way that’s both safe and sustainable.
But where does innovation enter in this revolution? China, for years an intellectual playground for Western architects, has become increasingly concerned with nurturing its own latent intellectual capital. However, if Broad’s paradigm takes hold (which, pragmatically-speaking, it should), what will that mean for architectural innovation? In a world of pre-fab structures, can architecture exist?
The Seattle Center HUB (Hybrid Urban Bioscape) is an innovative urban space that explores the value of urban hybridization as a design opportunity to address sustainable and technological issues in the definition of the contemporary public space. The starting point for the proposal by Aétrangère was to introduce an innovative approach to reach the same goals envisioned by the Seattle Center Century 21 Master Plan. Instead of conceiving the demolitions, reconstructions, new buildings, the underground parking, and the major open space as separate elements, they allow some degree of integration for sustainable features we focused on defining this public space project starting from a sustainable approach. More images and architects’ description after the break.
What’s scarier, Ando as a mime or Zaha as a witch? With their Costume Critique | Morbid Models post, Building Satire transformed Tadao Ando, Bjarke Ingels, Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas and Jean Nouvel into creepy trick-or-treaters. Review them all after the break!
A few days before the wrath of Sandy, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) broke ground on what will be the first net zero energy school in New York City and the Northeast U.S. Located on a 3.5-acre site on Staten Island, at the intersection of Crabtree Avenue and Bloomingdale Road, P.S.62 Richmond will serve 444 pre-kindergarten through fifth grade students. When completed in Fall of 2015, the cutting-edge primary school will harvest as much energy from renewable on-site sources as it uses on an annual basis.
Wave Dilfert: Wave (moves in wave-form oscillations) + Dilfert (geek-like intelligence, absorbs information like a sponge).
Wave Dilfert is a new kind of space that reads the changes in light and shadow occurring within it, catalogs and calculates them, then pulses, contracts or expands in reaction. The installation was inspired by the work of Ushahidi; a non-profit, crowdsourcing disaster relief, tech innovator. Much how Ushahidi de-mystifies the complexities of war-torn or disaster ridden locales, The Principals developed a system that could de-mystify the complexities of space through sourcing the information of its users and making it accessible through interaction.
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