The Taiwan Tower, designed by STL Architects, will act as a monumental building that will frame the new center and provide the entire city with a renewed and iconic identity, such as Eiffel Tower in Paris or The Sydney Opera House. Iconography achieved by challenging the forces of nature, designing an urban symbol, to strengthen people’s feeling of identity towards their city. Twisting the conventional idea of a tower and tilting the complex structure to contextualize the building in a technological era. The importance of symbols to civilization and architecture for people to feel identified with a place by means of an icon. More images and architects’ description after the break.
This en-route experience, a three city touring seminar on digital fabrication, draws a diverse group of design participants from afar for a full schedule of exchanges with leading practitioners, practices, fabrication labs… all while exposed to European transit infrastructure: trains planes & even a few mountain roads.
People have been communicating through storytelling since they lived in caves and sat around campfires. Today, businesses use narrative to convey their companies’ messages and stand out in an increasingly competitive marketplace. So how does storytelling apply to design firms? What distinguishes one firm from another is not only its portfolio, but messages conveyed through creative and compelling stories. These speakers will demonstrate how design firms can use multimedia tools and different platforms to create effective stories that boost marketing, communications, and public relations programs.
The Museum of Art at Washington State University is organizing ‘Architecture for Art,’ the first comprehensive exhibition devoted to the career of Jim Olson, one of the Northwest’s most significant architects and founder of the internationally recognized Seattle-based firm, Olson Kundig Architects.
The exhibit, which is open from now until December 10th, will serve as a retrospective for Olson’s 45-year career, highlighting his residential legacy, including his own homes-an apartment in downtown Seattly and his cabin on Puget Sound-as well as his public design work, which encompasses the Lightcatcher Museum in Bellingham, Washingtom, St. Mark’s Cathedral and the Pike and Virginia Building in Seattle, and the Noah’s Art Exhibit at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles. More information on the event after the break.
The Awards rewarded excellence in architecture and design from the emerging regions of the Gulf States, the Middle East, Africa, Latin America and Asia (excluding Japan, New Zealand and Australia) and recognized architects and their projects that have shown outstanding designs, performance, vision and achievement in key areas of architecture. More information on the winners after the break.
The Met in Bangkok, Thailand by WOHA has scooped the Royal Institute of British Architects’ (RIBA) prestigious RIBA Lubetkin Prize for the most outstanding work of international architecture by a member of the RIBA.
A residential skyscraper incorporating outdoor spaces, balconies and gardens, The Met is a 66 storey perforate tower which uses the power of nature to cool the apartments. Wind speeds at that height are considerable, so by punching holes through the building and drawing air up vertical voids in the structure, the architects have been able to introduce natural ventilation to flats at all levels. Some of these floors are kept open to provide communal spaces, which include a garden, a gym, a 50 metre swimming pool and other leisure facilities, such as barbecue and seating areas. More information on the award after the break.
The MVRDV and COBE scheme for the transformation of a former concrete factory into a multifunctional creative hub was chosen as the winner of an international design competition. The masterplan proposes an informal transformation of the 45.000m2 site into a dense neighborhood, incl. 8.000m2 existing factory halls, organized around a plaza for events. Three new volumes will be added on top of the halls: The 11.000m2 ROCKmagneten consists of The Danish Rock Museum, The Roskilde Festival Folkschool incl. student housing, and the headquarters of the famous Roskilde Rock Festival. They share program in a public creative communal house. The museum with a total of 3.000m2 will be completed as the first phase in 2014. More images and architects’ description after the break.
In an elimination that began with 14 participants in the starting line-up, CuraVita won the competition for their design of a new 133,730 m2 hospital just outside Herning, Denmark known as the New Hospital in the West. With this honoring selection, they have taken a big step toward the construction of their professionally ambitious and attractive hospital to ensure a hospital of international standard. More images and architects’ description after the break.
Autodesk recently released their Project Vasari 2.1, an easy-to-use, expressive design tool for creating building concepts. Vasari goes further, with integrated analysis for energy and carbon, providing design insight where the most important design decisions are made. And, when it’s time to move the design to production, simply bring your Project Vasari design data into the Autodesk Revit platform for BIM, ensuring clear execution of design intent.
Project Vasari is focused on conceptual building design using both geometric and parametric modeling. It supports performance-based design via integrated energy modeling and analysis features. This new technology preview is now available as a free download and trial on Autodesk Labs. More videos and information on the software after the break.
Over 500 people from all across the country and around the world participated in the National Ideas Competition for the Washington Monument Grounds. From a field of twenty-four semifinalists, a distinguished jury chose six top ideas. Now it is the public’s turn to choose the top two People’s Choice winners. More information on the finalists and their proposals after the break.
A wall is a binary condition: in/out, old/new, here/there. Blurry Wall, a proposal for a culture complex in Nanjing, China is a project that confuses these distinctions through conflicting bodily sensations. The intention of team members, Yaohua Wang, Scott Chung, Qing Cao, and Lennard Ong, is to tune the architecture into an instrument that channels the different urban energies flowing through it, blurring the boundaries between them. More images and project description after the break.
re:CONNECT open ideas competition invites the citizens of Vancouver, to join with local and international designers to ignite discussion and dream new possibilities for the future of the Viaducts and the City’s broader Eastern Core. The utility and necessity of the Georgia and Dunsmuir viaducts has been an issue of polarized debate since they were reconstructed in their present form in the late 1960s. As the first piece of a larger freeway system that was planned but never realized, they stand as a symbol of an era of city-building that thankfully never more-fully materialized.
The future of the viaducts should be contemplated in the context of the broader Eastern Core of our city, which includes the strategically important industrial lands of the False Creek Flats. How we connect the downtown and Eastern Core is crucial to how our city functions and its economic future. More information on the competition after the break.
The Architectural League of New York recently announced its Fall 2011 Lecture Series. Jeanne Gang, recently awarded a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant, will give the annual Ulrich Franzen Lecture on Architecture and the Environment, delivered by an international figure whose work has significant implications for understanding and reconceiving the relationship between architecture and the environment. Past Franzen lectures have been delivered by Renzo Piano, Shigeru Ban, and Werner Sobek.
The League’s Current Work series annually presents prominent architects and designers, who help to shape current architectural discourse with their work and ideas. This year’s series includes Michael Van Valkenburgh, designer of the recently opened Brooklyn Bridge Park; Francine Houben of the Dutch firm Mecanoo; Jesse Reiser and Nanako Umemoto, the recent winners of the major international competition to design the Kaohsiung Port Terminal; Michael Maltzan of Los Angeles; and Bernard Khoury of Beirut. More information on the lecture series after the break.
A week-long festival celebrating forward thinking and promoting awareness of local arts and architecture, the first annual ArchiNATI, put on by the Young Architects and Interns Forum, is a huge opportunity to showcase the true beauty of the city of Cincinnati. Cincinnati has an excellent architectural history, vibrant contemporary practices, a collection of strong cultural and arts institutions, and world-class design education. While these entities are each individually excellent, we wanted to propose an event that brings them all together from October 14th to October 21st.
The aim of the sustainable residential complex, designed by Morfearch, is not only the production of new buildings able to satisfy living space requests, but the will to offer public services to the new settlement and open to the “outer” population. The project area, crossed north to south by divergent paths, generates trapezoidal spaces that become the generating principle of the different parts of the whole complex: every secondary parcel is indeed composed by different size tanks, 30 to 120cm high, open to different uses, materials, and patterns: green areas, water, paved spaces, vegetation and gardens, available for residents with a leisure, but also social, function. More images and architects’ description after the break.
CHYBIK+KRISTOF Associated Architects won an international architectural and urbanistic competition on 33 apartment buildings close to Bratislava. The project aims to create quality housing with direct contact with water surface. It also sets a considerable part of the house into the riparian forest in the river-bed of the Danube. They have designed for each object a group of four materials which create together a common atrium as well as a scenic jetty near the water. The resulting combination of two- or three-floored buildings makes ideal conditions for social life inside each villa house whilst at the same time it provides enough privacy in each apartment. They did not design an ensemble of anonymous apartments, but a place with a bountiful view on water surface and with sojourning areas in the semi-private space. More images and architects’ description after the break.
The project’s site is located within the boundaries of the southern part of Zagreb which is divided by the national railway. In many ways, this site was thought as part of the new Zagreb city urban concept. There are two important facts: the position on the margins of the traditional lower City and the structural composition and reference within the future new City. Both in this case determine the composition and character of the project, designed by SANGRAD Architects & AVP_Arhitekti. By raising or lowering the railway, several possibilities are opened in terms of linking the site with the central and northern part of the City. More images and architects’ description after the break.
