Architecture News: The Latest Architecture and News

Woods Bagot has begun construction on the redevelopment of the former Funan DigitaLife Mall, into a mixed retail, office, and residential project that will expand its previous function as the definitive IT mall in Singapore by incorporating the tech experience throughout its entirety.

The 887,000-square-foot project will be composed of a six-story retail, dining, and lifestyle podium, two six-story office towers, and one nine-story housing block. These programs will be connected vertically, and are designed to appeal to tech- and socially-savvy consumers interested in a creative environment.

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The California College of the Arts (CCA) has selected Studio Gang out of three finalists to design an expanded art and design college campus for the school in San Francisco. Currently split between San Francisco and Oakland, CCA’s expansion in San Francisco will allow all of the school’s programs to be housed in one location.

Over the next five years, Studio Gang and CCA will collaborate to create a new campus to host 2,000 students, 600 faculty members, 250 staff members, and 34 academic programs, and to be a model of sustainable construction and practice.

Serie Architects has released its proposal for the Royal College of Art’s (RCA) campus in Battersea, London. Designed for the campus’ competition—which was won by Herzog & de Meuron—the 15,000-square-meter project would house the schools of architecture, material, and fine art, as well as specialist research centers and entrepreneurial incubators.

In an effort to create a spatial model that encourages collaboration across academic disciplines, the proposal centers on the idea of stacked planes, or “tables,” each of which defines a particular space, but which is not enclosed. The resulting space, through the overlapping of tables and double- and triple-height ceilings, creates an open and highly visible environment.

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Staab Architekten has released its plans for the historic center of Cologne, which will include the research and administration buildings for the Römanisch-Germanisches Museum, the Kurienhaus der Hohen Domkirche (curia house of the high cathedral), and the Kölner Stadtmuseum (Cologne state museum). Through these buildings, the project will redefine the urban space around Cologne’s cathedral and generate a place where the city’s history can be “presented and explored from diverse perspectives.”

Brooklyn-based design studio, workshop and think tank CAZA (Carlos Arnaiz Architects) has announced its plans for Ospital Pacifica de Juan and Juana Angara, a hybrid hospital and trauma center prototype located in rural Baler, Philippines. As the first combined General Hospital and Trauma Care Center in the country, the project will drastically improve medical support in this remote area.

With a daily patient capacity of 75 people, the 6,120-square-meter space will feature a variety of medical services, including maternity wards, imaging, operating rooms, a chapel, and a café.

“The Hospital will also offer patients a therapeutic presence of nature, as the luscious exterior landscape of Baler permeates the facility through a series of undulating canopies that create an architectural figure in an open field of green" - described the architects in a media release.

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In the beginning of 2010, Russian President Dmitri Medvedev announced the creation of a “Silicon Valley for Russia,” to be located in a southern suburb of Moscow, that would feature research facilities, university laboratories, start-ups, meeting hubs, and housing. After an international competition in 2011, each of the districts within this larger project was awarded to its own architect. After careful planning, Agence d’Architecture A. Bechu & Associés has unveiled its design for District 11 of the project.

Concentrating on ecological housing, this district will contain individual houses dedicated to researchers and their families, under the greater goal of positive social interactions.

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Studio Seilern Architects (SSA) has unveiled its design for a new skyscraper in New York, located on the riverfront of the Hudson River, which will offer views to the South West towards the river and Hoboken, as well as to the East towards the Empire State Building and Manhattan skyline.

The 16.107 square meter building (24 floors) will feature commercial units in the form of a gallery in the plinth—which is reduced to form a sculpture garden—at the lower levels, while upper levels will contain residential units.

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Molenaar & Co architecten (Rotterdam), Hebly Theunissen architecten (Delft), and landscape architect Michael van Gessel (Amsterdam) have won the 2016 World Monuments Fund/ Knoll Modernism Prize for the preservation and rehabilitation of the Justus van Effen complex in Rotterdam, the Netherlands.

Originally designed by Michiel Brinkman in 1919-1921 and completed in 1922, the Justus van Effen complex is a strong example of the ideals embodied in the modern movement, particularly with its use of an elevated “street” as a means of facilitating social cohesion, which became very influential for subsequent generations of designers. 

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Architectural competition organizer Bee Breeders has announced the winners of the international Melbourne Tattoo Academy competition, which sought to “recollect and [postulate] principles of architectural humanism in contemporary culture,” asking entrants to consider disciplinary introspection into spatial and material issues concerning culture, society, and individuality.

Successful entries to the competition thus challenged personal and social conceptions of the tattoo as an art form, as well as the cultural and philosophical implications of tattoos in architecture.

Notable among the relationships and juxtapositions established include: critiques on permanence and longevity; the irreversible transformation of flesh and nature; correlation between graphic and retinal expression, graffiti and street art, the scenographic and decorated shed; lastly, body art as boutique parlor fashion, and high couture - noted the compatition organisers. 

The winners of the Melbourne Tattoo Academy competition are:

The winners of the 2016 INTBAU World Congress Excellence Awards have recently been announced. Categories for this year’s competition were Community Engagement, New Building, Urban Design, and Emerging Talent. The awards were given during the INTBAU World Congress 2016, a biennial forum that brings together international participants to debate the most pressing global issues facing building, architecture, and urbanism.

"I join my jurors in applauding the considerable depth and breadth of this year's award submissions," said Anne Fairfax, President a Fairfax & Sammons Architects and jury chair of the Excellence Awards. "We found the projects to be thoughtful in leading by example in the use of traditional design but we were also pleased to see the positive social activism and environmental responsibility that characterized many of the projects, reaching deep into the values of the INTBAU mission."

The winners of the 2016 INTBAU World Congress Excellence Awards are:

The Library of Congress has announced the winners of the 2016 Holland Prize, which recognizes the best single-sheet, measured drawing of a historic building, site, or structure, completed to the standards of the Historic American Building Survey (HABS), Historic American Engineering Record (HAER), or the Historic American Landscapes Survey (HALS).

The prize is awarded annually to “increase awareness, knowledge, and appreciation of historic resources throughout the United States while adding to the permanent HABS, HAER, and HALS collection at the LOC, and to encourage the submission of drawings among professionals and students. By requiring only a single sheet, the competition challenges the delineator to capture the essence of the site through the presentation of key features that reflect its significance.”

Young tech team (Bar Smith, Hannah Teagle, and Tom Beckett) has launched a Kickstarter campaign for Maslow, a four-by-eight-foot at home CNC cutting machine made to assist construction efforts by cutting user-specified shapes out of wood or any other flat material. Designed to be affordable—at under $500—easy to use, inclusive, and powerful, the project aims to share designs digitally so that you can build on the work of others or create your own from scratch.

Based on the design of the hanging plotter, Maslow “uses gear-reduced DC motors with encoders and a closed-loop feedback system to achieve high accuracy and high torque.”

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London-based firm Nex—Architecture has unveiled its plans for a new Royal Air Force (RAF) Museum as a part of the RAF’s 2018 Centenary Program. The new project will revitalize an existing RAF museum in North London that was created in 1972, transforming it into a visitor facility and promoting the airfield heritage of the museum’s location.

The new scheme will put emphasis on improving visitor experience by “establishing a clear route through the exhibition spaces.” A prominent new 40-meter-long entrance and visitor center will be placed inside the Hangar 1 building, acting as a welcome and orientation point.

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Somatic Collaborative has unveiled its design for Neapolitan Housing and Co-working Complex, a new urban block typology located in Gravatai, Brazil, that contrasts the traditional landscape of repetitive housing types that dominate the urban peripheries of Latin American cities. Like a Neapolitan ice cream, the project’s buildings will be layered, housing a variety of residential units and co-working space.

In a drastic shift from typical low-rise residential enclaves, gates, and walled compounds, the project will create high-density urban blocks “that engage the street as a source of urban life” through porous borders that encourage new city centralities. A semi-porous perimeter block with retail and commercial space will allow the project to better interact with its surroundings while designating the distinction between public, semipublic, and private space through the buildings’ masses. 

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In memorial of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, which resulted in the emigration of over 37,000 Hungarians to Canada, architectural studio Hello Wood has created Tunnel Through Time, a contemporary interpretation of the historic event that remembers the heroes of the revolution and especially honoring the Canadian people who welcomed Hungarian refugees.

Composed of 37,565 pieces—one for each Hungarian refugee accepted into Canada—the tunnel begins with a Hungarian flag with a hole in the middle, representing how protesters cut the communist coat of arms out of the Hungarian flag during the revolution. The tunnel then morphs—as a representation of the journey of the refugees—until it reaches an exit, which is shaped like the national symbol of Canada, the maple leaf.

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From the Griffith Observatory to the LAX Airport, LACMA’s Urban Light installation, the Bradbury Building, Walt Disney Concert Hall, The Broad, and more, Los Angeles is full of inspiring architecture. In his new 10K x 4K resolution video, photographer and filmmaker Joe Capra of Scientifantastic captures the beauty of LA through panoramic footage. Over a span of two years, Capra stitched time-lapse footage from two synced DSLR cameras together resulting in a spectacular view of the city.

Find out more about Capra’s work here, or view his timelapse of Rio de Janeiro here.

Made from a combination of tangled and woven red wool, Brazilian artist Tatiana Blass’ installation, “Penelope,” flows inside and out of the Chapel of Morumbi in São Paulo, Brazil.

The installation was inspired by the Greek myth of Penelope, who was Odysseus’ wife in Homer’s Odyssey. In the story, Penelope weaves and destroys a burial shroud for her husband, in a tribute to the power of love and to weaving. 

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Architectural research initiative arch out loud has announced the winners of Tokyo Vertical Cemetery, its international open ideas competition that sought solutions to Tokyo’s rising issue of burial space.

Sited in the Shinjuku district of Tokyo, the competition challenged architects and designers to develop proposals for a vertical cemetery that explores the relationship between life and death in the city while taking into account the cultural identity that is tied to death.

From 460 proposals representing 54 countries and six continents, one winner and three runners-up were selected by a jury including David Adjaye, Tom Wiscombe, Alison Killing, and more.

The winners of the Tokyo Vertical Cemetery competition are: