KSP Engel und Zimmermann Architekten has shared their winning proposal for the new Art Museum for Nanjing, China. The museum lies near the cultural axis which is comprised of Changjiang Road to the south and the “revolution road”, Zhongshan East Road, to the north. These roads are slightly angled toward one another creating a “trapeze-shaped plot of land”. This distinct site inspired the team to respond to its critical surroundings. Components in the museum such as the Revolution Cube and the Culture Cube, are strategically placed to honor the project’s location.
More images and more about the museum after the break.
The new Louisiana State Sports Hall of Fame and Regional History Museum designed by Trahan Architects has just entered its construction phase. The museum’s donated memorabilia embodies “the contributions of the diverse cultures that have shaped the state and are crucial to understanding the unique traditions and legacy of Louisiana and the Gulf South.” Principal Trey Trahan, FAIA, describes the project as “an incredible opportunity to create a place that will celebrate the deep history of North Louisiana, as well as the indelible influence sports have had on our state’s culture.”
More images and more about the Hall of Fame and the Museum after the break.
Carl Hampson and Eunike Design recently designed the Pitch House for Belmont, Massachusetts. The home is the reinterpretation for the ideals of early European modernism as it “evolves the universal machine for living concept into a site-specific contemporary dwelling shaped by the local forces of climate, culture, and sustainability.” The main living spaces sit under a pivoting roof that responds to the changing seasons by providing the correct amount of sunlight and shade to the interior throughout the year. The constantly changing roof “provides a centerpiece for year round outdoor activities.” An open ended site strategy responds “to the transformation of suburban ideals facilitated by the influx of information technology” while the home’s orientation, active and passive solar strategies, thermal mass, and earthen berms collectively reduce year round energy loads.
Visiondivison shared their entry for the Koivusaari Idea Competition to create a new city district on an island just outside Helsinki, Finland. The competition asked participants to organize a master plan for the island that would provide the framework for further planning. Visiondivison’s proposal, Urban Fade, is comprised of a highly efficient city grid that allows users the option of moving around the district to interact with the different areas.
UNStudio‘s new mixed-use Raffles City is situated near the Qiangtan River in Hangzhou, the capital of Zhejiang province, China. This Raffles City marks CapitaLand’s sixth large-scale shopping center, including those in Singapore, Shanghai, Beijing, Chengdu and Bahrain. For UNStudio’s design, a sleek twisting tower will provide residential and hotel accommodates in its 300,000 square meter total floor area. The project aims to highlight the area and attract visitors, “In the chain of events and attractions of Hangzhou, like the West Lake area and the commercial centre, the Raffles City project will be at the core of the Qianjiang New Town area and contribute to the recognition of this area as a new destination in the city,” explained the architects.
More about Raffles City and more images after the break.
KSP Jürgen Engel Architekten recently designed a 77,000 square meter library extension to accommodate the existing National Library of Beijing. The new addition will hold approximately 12 million books and be used by an estimated 12,000 people per day.
Located in Cherry Creek, Colorado, Andre Kikoski’s Second Home is a five star hotel restaurant. Andre Kikoski Architect, PLLC is a multidisciplinary firm that is committed to artistic innovation, material research, and detail-oriented design. For Second Home, Kikoski “created an approachable and comfortable locale…with a playful, contemporary restaurant and lounge. The design strategy embraces textural contrast and celebrates the dissonance of eclectic elements to create a truly memorable patron experience.”
After 6 months and 4 rounds of jurying, Architecture for Humanity, a charitable organization that seeks architectural solutions to humanitarian crisis and brings professional design services to needy communities, just recognized eight team finalists for the 2009 Open Architect Challenge: Classrooms. The competition attracted 10,000 architects, teachers and students who came together to develop designs for more than 500 schools in 65 countries. “This initiative invited the architecture, design and engineering community to collaborate directly with students and teachers to rethink the classroom of the future. Designers entering the competition were given a simple mandate: collaborate with real students in real schools in their community to develop real solutions,” explained Cameron Sinclair, the co-founder for Architecture for Humanity and this competition.
The finalists include: Adaptable Hillside Classroom by Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios & Architecture for Humanity UK, Bamboowood School by Petr Kostner, Martina Sobotkova, Sona Huberova, Classroom for the Saltpan Community by Cohesion Foundation: Rajesh Kapoor, Prashant Solanky, Bharat Karamchandani, Kiran Vaghela, Teton Valley Community School by Section Eight Design, A Sustainable Community Classroom by Gifford, House In The Wood by Built Form, LLC / Northwestern University Settlement House, Justified Architecture in a Landscape of Transformation by Arquitectura Justa: Wolfgang Timmer, Fabiola Uribe, T. Luke Young, and Blurred Classroom by Gensler.
We would like to congratulate not only the eight finalists, but all participants who dedicated their time, effort and design skills for such an importance cause.
Project descriptions and images of the eight finalists after the break.
Our friends from 3LHD shared their awarded competition proposal for a private medical center for Firule in Split, Croatia. The Polyclinic is situated close to the sea and its fresh air, near an existing hospital complex.
Ole Scheeren, a partner for Office for Metropolitan Architecture(OMA) and project leader of the recently completed Beijing’s CCTV Tower, considered among the world’s most imaginative contemporary architectural feats. With the tower complete, Scheeren has moved to design his first skyscraper, entitled MahaNakhon, “a dazzling, pixelated 77-storey tower,” that will rise to be the tallest building in Bangkok. With approximately 150,000 square meters, MahaNakhon will include a lush urban oasis with public gardens and a major transportation hub, luxury retail, residences, a new public square, and a five-star hotel created by New York’s Ian Schrager.
More images and more about the skyscrapper after the break.
With more than 300,000 sqm dedicated to almost every possible brand name, the CentralPlaza is the biggest shopping mall located in Bangkok, Thailand on Chaengwattana Road. Manuelle Gautrand‘s office took over the project with studies already well advanced by another firm because the client was looking to improve the overall design. Gautrand adopted a pragmatic approach that consisted of modifying contours and overhauling façades. The firm “concentrated on asserting a graphic presence strong enough to change the way volumes are perceived, innervating and expanding them to increase their legibility.” In an interview with Florence Accorsi about shops and leisure facilities, Gautrand explained, “We live in a consumer society, so business is all important. At the same time, retail outlets have become rendezvous places where people go to do more than just shop. They are there for an outing, to have fun, relax, meet other people… This gives us an opportunity to re-think these places and renew their identity codes, to redesign their architecture and space so as to introduce variety and unusual things in their programming.”
Albert M. McDonald, an associate architect from PBC+L Architecture, just shared his winning entry for the AIA 2009 COD Competition, Listening to the Past, Looking to the Future: A House for Today. The sketch competition asked participants to design a sustainable home to replace the demolished Rachel Raymond House designed by her sister Eleanor Raymond, FAIA. The new 2,500 sq ft home would be placed on the original site using the same program brief as the original, yet it would be a contemporary interpretation and implement sustainable strategies.
The jury noted that McDonald’s proposal was ”the most thoughtful and sophisticated text considering the history of the site and the original Raymond House. This submission had the best integrated sustainable strategies in terms of the Living Building Challenge and was very thoughtfully done with the site in mind. This project created a sense of place and a place that could be enjoyed for both communal and individual experiences.”
J. Mayer H. Architects and Art + Com Berlin were commissioned to design a permanent exhibition to highlight the topic of sustainability for the Autostadt in Wolfsburg, Germany. The 1,000 m² exhibit design, entitled Level Green, creates a complex webbed form that slowly reveals information to users. The exhibition material argues for scientific research and the use of latest technological development as necessities for survival in the future.
More about the exhibit and more images after the break.
KSP Engel und Zimmermann Architekten was awarded first prize for their Tianjin Art Gallery proposal. The Chinese government has been investing in new cultural buildings in an effort to battle the economic crisis by creating this new form of investment plan. The 33,000m2 art gallery will be one component in the city’s 90 ha cultural and leisure quarter, which will also include an opera house and other recreational centers.
We shared Aboutblank‘s honorable mention housing project for the Istanbul Kayabasi Housing Design Competition earlier, yet the firm was also awarded first prize for their second design scheme. Aboutblank created “a non-centralized rhizomatic urban tissue” that promotes interaction between users by providing large green areas running the length of the building complex.
With the countless number of ridiculously tall skyscrapers planned for around the world, it is remarkable the controversy an 82-story skyscraper for Midtown Manhattan can create. Three years ago, MoMa completed an $858 million expansion, yet the museum is still in need of additional room to house its growing collections. The Modern sold their Midtown lot to Hines, an international real estate developer, for$125 million. Hines, in turn, asked Pritzker Prize Laureate French architect Jean Nouvel to design two possible solutions for the site. “A decade ago anyone who was about to invest hundreds of millions on a building would inevitably have chosen the more conservative of the two. But times have changed. Architecture is a form of marketing now, and Hines made the bolder choice,” reported Nicolai Ouroussoff for The New York Times.
“Bolder” is certainly fitting to describe Nouvel’s Torre de Verre which is planned for 53 West 53rd Street. The 1,250 foot tower will offer approximately 40,000 sq feet of new gallery space for the MoMa, in addition to 150 residential apartments and 100 hotels rooms. The tower’s unique silhouette will dominate the Midtown block, rising higher than the iconic Chrysler Building. Its irregular structural pattern has been called “out of scale” on numerous occasions by opponents of the project. Some complain that the tower will “violate the area’s integrity” noting that its height will obscure views and light. Shadow studies show that the building may plunge apartments in the area and the ice-skating rink at Central Park into darkness.
The aesthetic is definitely foreign to Midtown and, yet, while most are quick to reject change, the tower will sit in an area surrounded by highly revolutionary buildings. Its new neighbors include Philip Johnson’s “Lipstick Building” at Third Avenue; Hugh Stubbins’ Citicorp Building at Lexington Avenue, Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building and SOM’s Lever House at Park Avenue. At some point in time, each of those buildings exemplified a change in style, and yet now, they are staples in the area’s heritage.
With controversy still surrounding Nouvel’s design as it moves through the city’s review process (ULURP), John Beckmann and his firm, Axis Mundi decided to do something about it. A few short days ago, Axis Mundi unveiled a conceptual alternative design for 53 West 53rd Street. The alternative features a 600 foot, 50 story mixed use building that ”rethinks the tall buildings that have become synonymous with New York City’s identity.” Beckmann explained, ”Historically, the skyscraper was a unitary, homogeneous form that reflected the generic, flexible office space it contained…The Vertical Neighborhood is more organic and more flexible–an assemblage of disparate architectural languages. It reflects an emerging reality for tall buildings as collections of domestic elements: dwellings, neighborhoods, streets.”
More images and more about Axis Mundi’s alternative after the break.
Critically acclaimed international practice Rafael Vinoly Architects recently announced their addition to the Cleveland Musuem of Art (CMA) in Ohio. The museum is currently undergoing a multi-phase renovation and expansion project. RVA’s 139,200 sq foot East Wing addition, which unites the historic 1916 Beaux-Arts building and the 1971 Marcel Breuer addition, is the first of three planned wings.
