Sustainable Schools and Environmental Education Classrooms in Latin America: Building a Sustainable Education System

Tagma

Since 2016, the NGO Tagma has been building sustainable public schools around Latin America in collaboration with companies, renowned architecture firms, local governments and lots of people from all over the world. It all started in Uruguay when a group of friends dreamt about creating a sustainable learning space within the public education system to benefit a rural community. They worked hard to raise the funds needed, arranged meetings with government officials and finally contacted the architect Michael Reynolds, the creator of Earthship Biotecture. Altogether, more than 200 people from 30 different countries (volunteers, students, community members) built a 315-square-meter public school in just 45 days. The school now serves some 70 students, and it has a water accumulation capacity of 30,000 liters as well as the possibility to generate up to 4.86 kilowatts of clean solar energy per hour. To date, it has been visited by more than 40,000 people from Uruguay and overseas.

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The Neutralizing Vessel

Danny Salamoun

This essay is an excerpt from Cornell Journal of Architecture 11: Fear edited by Val Warke from Cornell AAP.

Ryan: And Beirut, doctor? Here you’re keeping an eye on another virus?
(…)
Doctor: …Not a physical virus, but a psychological one even more dangerous than smallpox…We need to know how we can manipulate their emotions, how we can twist the news and trigger off their aggressive drives, how we can play on their religious feelings or political ideals.
—J.G. Ballard, War Fever, 1990.

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The Rural Trend and the City

And The City | Hagar Abiri

Listen to the related podcast: Rural Trend and the City by And the City.

At the beginning of March 2020, the World Health Organization declared the COVID-19 pandemic. By then, some countries in Asia had already closed their borders, and some had implemented a quarantine. In time, other countries adopted the social distancing method to slow the spread of the virus, which seems to be the only way to prevent the virus from spreading with no vaccine or cure on the horizon.

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Solar Greenhouse: Generation of Energy and the Self-sufficient Cultivation of Food

IAAC

Architects: Team of students and researchers of MAEBB of IAAC
Location: Barcelona, Spain
Year: 2022
Photography: Adrià Goula

The Natural Park of Collserola, on the outskirts of Barcelona, is the setting for the Solar Greenhouse project, carried out by a team of students, professionals and experts from the Master’s program in Advanced Ecological Buildings and Biocities (MAEBB) at the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia (IAAC) Valldaura Labs. The Solar Greenhouse was designed for the generation of energy and the self-sufficient cultivation of food, and it represents the next step towards a more ecological agricultural transformation and progress in the fight against food and energy poverty. The aim was to design and build a system that could be replicated in both rural and urban areas.

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Detroit Cultivator: A Civic Commons Site

Akoaki

In Detroit’s historic North End, local studio Akoaki, led by Anya Sirota and the French designer Jean Louis Farges, is working with the Oakland Avenue Urban Farm, founded by Jerry and Billy Hebron, to set up a civic commons site. Detroit Cultivator is a six-acre urban plan with food production, cultural activities, and civic assets that aim to empower the social and economic fabric of the community. The unique effort is grounded in its respect for cultural heritage and social integrity.

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Hotel Maestoso

ENOTA

Architects: ENOTA
Location: Lipica, Slovenia
Area: 7,785 m2
Year: 2021
Photography: Miran Kambič

The area of Stud Farm Lipica is one of the most remarkable natural and cultural monuments in Slovenia. The stud farm was founded in 1580 when the Habsburg court decided to raise horses, a key strategic commodity of the time, in their own territory. The Andalusian horse proved to be ideal: the karst landscape, where the stud farm is located, is very similar to southern Spain in its soil and climate, likely leading Charles II, Archduke of Austria, to use the abandoned summer mansion belonging to the archbishop of Trieste for the court stud farm. Two hundred years of intensive breeding and selecting for desirable traits ultimately produced the renowned Lipizzaner breed.

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Taipei Roofs: Apartment Building for the 21st Century

Akihisa Hirata

Architects: Akihisa Hirata
Location: Taipei, Taiwan
Area: 5,881.34 m2
Year: 2017
Photography: Dean Cheng and Akihisa Hirata Architecture Office

This 12-story collective house was built in the shopping area of Taipei City. People in Taiwan have devised ways of using various intermediary areas to adapt their lives to the hot and humid climates. For example, they skillfully exploit simple places along the roads throughout the city, where you can find people enjoying meals and conversation. Would it be possible to devise apartment buildings suited to Taiwanese people who have created such a rich lifestyle, but at the same time updating it for the 21st century?

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Turó de la Peira: Unique Green Building

AAN Arquitectura Anna Noguera

Architects: AAN
Location: Barcelona, Spain
Area: 4.430 m2 building + 3.952 m2 landscape
Year: 2018
Photography: Enric Duch

The Barcelona City Council held an architectural competition for the landscape planning of an interior urban block and a sports facility consisting of an indoor heated swimming pool and a sports court. The winning proposal was appraised for its landscape integration of a unique green building in an interior urban block and for its commitment to sustainability and respect for the environment.

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Architecture, Naturally

Mason White

Excerpt from MCHAP The Americas 2. Co-published by Actar Publishers, Lots of Architecture –publishers & IITAC Press.

Architecture has maintained an oddly consistent relationship to notions of nature throughout history. Nature is assumed to be muse and metaphor to architecture. Fast-forwarding through history, consider Vitruvius’s 1st century treatise De Architectura that celebrated “the truth of nature” as inspiration to architecture.[1] Or, consider Laugier’s 1755 allegory Essai sur L’Architecture on the primitive hut composed from nature as an origin story of architecture embodying simplicity and purity.[2] And more recently, consider mathematical biologist D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson’s 1917 On Growth and Form, which served as an inspiration to early generative and computational architecture in the 1990s.[3] These are only a few examples that illustrate the envy by which architecture emulates, references, or adopts aspects of nature. However, as notions of nature have expanded to become increasingly complex and multivalent, architecture’s previously singular understanding of its relationship to nature has shifted. In what way have social attitudes toward nature marked and informed architecture’s complex relationship with nature today?

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Rambla Climate-House: Contributing to the Climatic and Earthy Stability of Molina de Segura’s Ecosystems

Andrés Jaque / Office for Political Innovation | Miguel Mesa

Architects: Andrés Jaque / OFFPOLINN and Miguel Mesa del Castillo
Location: Murcia, Spain
Year: 2021
Photography: José Hevia

Since the 1980s, vast stretches of land in the formerly-rural county of Molina de Segura (Murcia) have been exploited to create suburbs. The result of this exploitation is a flattening of the land’s topographies and the destruction of its territorial system of ravines (ramblas). Ramblas constitute a fabric of veins carved by seasonal rainfall in the dry steppe landscape. In them, humidity accumulates and biodiversity flourishes. They constitute corridors of freshness, carbon fixation, and ecological entanglement that play a crucial role in the climatic and earthy stability of Molina de Segura’s ecosystems.

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J-House

AEDS

After 4 years in design, 3 different locations, 2 permits and a zoning variance from the city of New Orleans, the construction on the J-House started on January 24, 2011.

J-House is a speculative residence in the heart of historic New Orleans. It uses a historically standard New Orleans housing lot (30 x 150 feet). The design responds to the context by elevating the main living area 10 feet above ground. Most of New Orleans is several feet below sea level and prone to frequent flooding.

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Ellispsicoon: Immersion in Nature

UNStudio

Architects: UNStudio (Ben van Berkel with Ren Yee and Philipp Meise, Peng Wang)
Location: non site-specific
Dimension: 5.70m L x 4.10m W x 2.60m H
Area: 15m2
Year: 2015-2018

A place of rest, retreat and mindfulness, the Ellipsicoon creates a tranquil nomadic extension to the home: a detached, secluded space of immersion in nature.

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Province Headquarters: Adaptation to Sustainability Standards

XDGA

Architects: XDGA
Location: Antwerp, Belgium
Area: 33,000.00 m2
Year: 2019
Photography: Maxime Delvaux

The new building replaces a complex of modernist building volumes that used to occupy the entire site and that could not be adapted to today’s sustainability standards. As the Antwerp city center has few public green surfaces, the transformation of the site from a merely private, mineral and infrastructural area into a public garden is a crucial requirement of the competition brief.

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Nubuke Extended: Generosity and Specificity of Spaces

Baerbel Mueller | Juergen Strohmayer

Architects: nav_s baerbel mueller and Juergen Strohmayer
Location: Accra, Ghana
Area: 3,200 m2
Year: 2019
Photography: Julien Lanoo

The Nubuke Foundation, founded in 2007, with locations in Accra and Wa, has a wide range of programs supporting the arts, culture, and heritage of Ghana. The East Legon (Accra) grounds are defined by a large variety of day and evening programs that cater to many audiences spanning networks in the city, country and region. The design of Nubuke Extended resolves this programmatic layering through a generosity and specificity of spaces.

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Ferrum 1

TCHOBAN VOSS Architekten

Architects: TCHOBAN VOSS Architekten
Location: Saint Petersburg, Russia
Area: 7,965.00 m2
Year: 2021
Photography: Ilya Ivanov

The office building Ferrum 1 (Block 16) stands on the historic site of the former Rossiya factory in St Petersburg’s Polustrovo district. Situated on the right bank of the Neva opposite the Smolny Cathedral, a palace for Prince Alexander Andreyevich Bezborodko was built in the middle of a spacious park on the site at the end of the 18th century according to designs by the Italian architect and painter Giacomo Quarenghi. For years, this country house was a center of social life. In the late 19th century, the park was a popular recreation and health resort for the upper classes of St Petersburg. On the border between the former garden of the palace and today’s Piskarevsky Prospekt there used to be a summer house, which was rented by the family of the famous Russian art theorist and painter Alexander Benois in 1877/78 and 1882.

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Euravenir Tower

LAN

Architects: LAN Architecture
Location: EURALILLE, ZAC du centre international d’affaires des gares, Lot 4.1-A, Lille, France
Project Timeline: 2010 -2014
Photographs: Julien Lanoo

In 1990, in his preface titled “Quantum Leap” for the work presenting the Euralille project [1], Rem Koolhaas wrote: “In our contemporary world, programs become abstract in the sense that they are no longer tied to a specific place or city. They float and gravitate opportunistically around those places that provides them with the most connections.” And then, “All these facts describe a new condition that is at once local and global, as important for the “Japanese” as it is for the “Lillois.”

LAN_SOGE_HD_21

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Floodplain Marsh Recovery: A Critical Ecosystem

Xiaonian Shen

Excerpt from Yamuna River Project by Iñaki Alday and Pankaj Vir Gupta, published by Actar Publishers.

Jahangirpuri Marsh typifies the landscape that used to make up Delhi’s floodplain before these natural ecologies gave way to urban expansion. Today, the marsh is one of the critical ecosystems that remains in Delhi but it is facing serious issues such as waste dumping, marsh drying, and decreased water quality. In recent decades, informal settlements have encroached upon the marsh, resulting in a dramatic decrease of its land area. The marsh is separated from the surrounding communities by a 2.5 meter wall in an effort to “protect the marsh.” In reality, this wall removes the marsh from the city and public consciousness, turning it into a backyard for which no one is responsible. As a result, the marsh is disconnected from the area’s natural watersheds, its edges are used as dumping grounds, and its interior has be claimed to dump excess from the sewage treatment process.

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Geoscope II: Worlds

AKT II

Architects: Daniel López-Pérez and RUR Architecture
Location: Venice, Italia
Year: 2021

Geoscope 2: Worlds reinvents Buckminster Fuller’s pioneering 1960s ‘Geoscope’ concept in 2020s digital form, for 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale visitors.

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NEOM Mega-City

ON-A

The NEOM city project originated with a proposal for the government of SaudiArabia to create a new city on the Arabian Peninsula near the Sinai. The city looks toward the future by basing its organization on technology, audiovisual experiences and communications.

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Electrical Ecologies II

Firas Safieddine

Read the first part at Electrical Ecologies.

This text aims to illustrate a multiscalar validity of the main umbrella term presented, Electrical Ecologies, by going through several fundamental ideas and introducing terms that are central to conceiving the topic. Electrical Ecologies (EE) operate at the smallest scale unit (the electric) to maintain a unified approach to understanding and operating at the scale of the planet. Due to that nature, and because it is a plural term, ecologies vary in size and structure, and hence form “sub-ecologies” and more general ones. The multiscalar validity is meant to demonstrate how this type of operation could happen at various scales, from the microscopic to the urban, and beyond.

The electrical is a manner of functionally and operationally flattening all electrical objects (from charged matter to human brains) in order to define a new design agenda and enable a conception of a planetary-scale nervous system. While a lot of other elements can be capitalized on as a common denominator, the electric is of interest not only as a common ground but, first, as a flexible limiting criterion (as it is also quantitative) and, second, as an operational driver that allows action.

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Museum Küppersmühle: Transformation into an Attractive Focus of Urban Life

Herzog & de Meuron

Architects: Herzog & de Meuron
Location: Duisburg, Germany
Area: 5,000.00 m2
Year: 2021
Photography: Simon Menges

A grain mill was erected in 1860 on the site of the present Museum Küppersmühle by industrialist Wilhelm Vedder, one of the founding fathers of Duisburg’s Inner Harbour. In 1900 the first mill using the most up-to-date technology went into operation in the Inner Harbour, which became known as the ‘bread basket of the Ruhr district’, and in 1908 the earlier buildings were replaced by the three-part structure now housing the museum. The business was taken over in 1912 by the Werner & Nicola works, who added a boiler house with chimney. The adjoining steel silos were constructed in the 1930s. In 1969 the company merged with the Küppers works of Homberg, which gave its name to the mill and the museum. The mill closed down in 1972.

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The Lack of Spatial Data on the Economic Capacity of Places

Hyungmin Pai | Matteo Robiglio | Nina Rappaport

Excerpt of an urbanNext think tank held at the Torre dell'Arsenale in Venice, as an event alongside the Venice Biennale of Architecture 2018, for the Future Urban Legacy Lab (FULL), a research centre of the Politecnico di Torino.
Filmed and edited by Daniel Ruiz.

Hyungmin Pai, Matteo Robiglio and Nina Rappaport talk on the lack of spatial data on the economic capacity of places.

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Day Care Center in Vendrell

bxd arquitectura

Architects: bxd arquitectura
Location: El Vendrell, Spain
Year: 2021
Photography: Aleix Bagué

The project is located in an area of new construction in the municipality of El Vendrell, Tarragona. It sits on a plot measuring 32 x 29 meters, which is totally flat and with easy access from the street. With an almost square shape, the day care center is intended for children between 0 and 3 years of age. The project was designed taking into account that children at this age are learning to walk and that all the classrooms should have access to the outside garden.

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Muku Nursery: 360-degree Visibility Design

Tezuka architects

Architects: Tezuka architects
Location: Fuji City, Japan
Area: 403,51 m2
Year: 2018
Photography: Fototeca - Kida Katsuhisa

The idea behind this project should be called bubbles, rather than a circular plan. In plan, the design looks like bubbles slowly rising into the air, keeping an optimum distance from one another. Each bubble has only one function. There are no walls inside. Like a single-cell organism supported by organelles, mitochondria, ribosomes, etc., each bubble is supported by furniture and low partitions.

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Climate Change Effects

The McHarg Center

Excerpt from The 2100 Project: An Atlas for the Green New Deal.

Certainty is on the tip of every climate activist, scholar and writer’s tongue these days. We are certain we have only until 2030 to rapidly decarbonize the economy. We are certain that even if we do manage to meet this ambitious goal, sea levels will still rise another foot or so, demanding that our cities do the same, or that their people be relocated, away from our shifting shoreline. We are certain things are getting worse – convinced, even, that they are somehow worse than we’ve imagined.

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Crossings / Traversées

Dominique Coulon & Associés

Interview by Pauline Personeni.
Edited by Sara Traba.

Dominique Coulon shares his experience designing public buildings and how the complexity of the context he works in enriches the projects. He also talks about his book Crossings, published by Actar Publishers, and how it allowed him to reflect on his practice.

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Fallow or Failure? Urbanization in the Age of Speculation

Christopher Marcinkoski

This essay is an excerpt of New Geographies 10: Fallow by Michael Chieffalo & Julia Smachylo.

The fallowing of land implies that a process of resource extraction has previously occurred. It suggests a period of intentional recovery and rest for a territory that has recently served an anthropogenically productive purpose. And it also intimates that said productive purpose—or a similar one—will soon be reinitiated on the territory in question as part of an ongoing process of land cultivation and management. In this way, to lie fallow suggests both an active, productive past and—more importantly in the context of design and planning praxis—an equally active and productive future.

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Sustainable Initiatives

ICLEI | Malmö Stad

An ICLEI Member since 1996, the City of Malmö is a climate-smart knowledge city, listed as the fourth most innovative in the world by OECD. Malmö is working actively for sustainability initiatives and is the first city in Sweden that has publicly announced the commitment to implement the UN SDG’s.

With around 350,000 inhabitants, Malmö might be small in size, but big in ambition. The city has adopted a unique approach to sustainability, with environmental, financial and social effects all forming part of the equation. Everything that happens in Malmö is done with sustainability in mind. New climate-smart city districts are emerging, and old areas are being improved using new environmental technology. And the objectives are ambitious: By 2030 the whole city of Malmö will be supplied with 100% renewable energy.

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Daring Cities: Pittsburgh

Julia Scott

In this episode, we visit Pittsburgh, USA. Despite ongoing challenges, the town that’s still known as “Steel City” has made extraordinary strides in forging a green post-industrial future. Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto says fracking imperils that progress — and reveals his agenda for a healthy local economy.

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Arctic Tourism and Urban Growth

Bert De Jonghe

This essay is an excerpt of Inventing Greenland by Bert De Jonghe. Published by Actar Publishers

The ongoing airport expansion in Ilulissat, briefly discussed in the first chapter, offers a useful moment to examine the town’s history and potential future growth patterns resulting from its new airport and the increasing numbers of tourists. As part of the ongoing reorganization of Greenland’s aeroscape, significant improvements in airport infrastructure can strengthen an airport and town’s pivotal position and create momentum across different infrastructural scales and urban spaces. In Ilulissat, this process of growth is also intertwined with its neighboring ice fjord, propelling the tourism industry in the city and the broader region.

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Arctic Mobilities and the Rights of Indigenous Peoples: Ethics for a Warming Planet

Mimi Sheller

Originally post on The Rule of Law.

Scientists now recognize that the Arctic is heating up more than twice as fast as any other region. As average land temperatures shift to more than 1.9 degrees Celsius (3.4 degrees Fahrenheit) above the historic baseline, Arctic researchers have come to recognize that the “region is moving from a climate that is characterized less by ice and snow and more by open water and rain” (Fountain 2020, A13).

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Climatic Vulnerability

Inter-American Development Bank

Excerpt from Ecological Design: Strategies for the Vulnerable City. IDB 2021. by Felipe Vera and Jeannette Sordi.

On a regional scale, Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) are particularly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. By 2050, it is predicted that the rise in sea level, in temperature, and in the rate of rainfall will translate into an annual cost of approximately 2% to 4% of the GDP.[1] However, the region also contributes to 12% of GHG emissions globally, which is driven by forest, agricultural, and extractive sectors.[2] In per capita terms, LAC generates more greenhouse gas emissions than other developing countries, such as China or India.

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To Defend, Retreat or Adapt? Design Responses to the Excess and Disappearance of Water

Seth McDowell

Extract from Water Index, ed. Seth McDowell. Published by Actar.

Hieronymus Bosch’s “The Hell and the Flood”, a panel from the triptych Deliverance from the Deluge painted on the inside of an altarpiece, reveals an image of a post-apocalyptic landscape. The water has subsided, and rotting corpses of drowned sinners litter the land. This Old Testament narrative depicts water as a device for ethical cleansing. Yet, if the moral connotations are set aside, the Deluge in Genesis 8 is essentially a story of human’s technological adaptation to imposing natural phenomena. The ark, as a response for survival, has become the paradigm for humanity’s response to ecological disaster: construct a mechanism for deliverance. This paper is a catalog of mechanisms that enable the control of, escape from, and adaptation to water. Two hydrological crises are examined here, the rising and the disappearing of water, which present fundamental complications for humanity’s dependence on the natural resource. Each of these extreme conditions for water is evaluated relative to design strategies for defense, retreat, and adaptation.

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TIC Art Center

DOMANI Architectural Concepts

Architects: DOMANI Architectural Concepts
Location: Foshan, China
Area: 18,000.00 m2
Year: 2021
Photography: Vincent Wu

Since 2020, the Chinese government has tightened control over the real estate sector, and the policy of rating real estate firms into four classes based on three key indicators signifies that the period of demographic, land and financial dividend is coming to an end. This has caused anxiety in the land market, and real estate developers in the private sector are taking a wait-and-see attitude. The rules of the game in the real estate market are evolving.

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Forest Sports Park Guang

LOLA Landscape Architects

Architects: LOLA Landscape Architects
Location: Shenzhen, China
Area: 600 ha
Year: 2020
Photography: LOLA, TALLER, LCC

At the very first edition of the World Architecture Festival China, the design of the Forest Sports Park was granted no less than two awards. During the live ceremony the project was first rewarded with the WAFChina 2020 for Excellent Design, later followed by the overall Best Landscape award. This new park for play, sport and relaxation is the result of a mutual design by LOLA Landscape Architects (NL), Taller architects (COL/NL) and Land and Civilization Compositions (CN).

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Kind of Boring

Paul Preissner

This essay is an excerpt of Kind of Boring by Paul Preissner, published by Actar Publishers

There are a lot of pictures and images to look at in the world now thanks to the cultural clearinghouse of the internet and social media, books, magazines, and friends. Some are spectacular, some are gross, some are funny, most are ordinary, and some are pretty boring. This firehose of visual culture captures most of my attention, and as I’ve entered my forty-fifth year looking at things my eyes get a little glossy at interesting things. Where the novel and saturated picture used to occupy my mind for long periods of time, I now find more enjoyment, depth, and attraction with the boring and mundane things. Part of this is exhaustion, I suppose, but another reason is that there is somehow more feeling and complexity in the depictions of the weird parts of the world. The wonderful is obvious and remarkable, but it’s also known and knowable. There’s no wilderness to the spectacle and no confusion with novelty. Those things are immediate and “speak” to us. The interesting aptly communicates what it is, and as a viewer, I like it or don’t, but there isn’t much room for thought, just appreciation. The boring offers more space for thought, or even more space to drift. It doesn’t always have a point, or even a comment. It’s a nebulous body of things that often confuses and makes one curious about motive or composition or points.

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The Augmented City: Urban Transformations in the Digital Era

Flavio Martella | Marco Enia

The digital revolution (Castells, 1999) enables new ways of living and understanding the city, that should fuel a radical change in how architecture conceives the urban and domestic environment. Furthermore, the rise of social networks has been joined by apps that generate temporary micro-domesticities. Social networks and virtual communities, such as Facebook, Instagram and Reddit, provide virtual groups where familiar emotional ties are created (Boltery Gruisin, 2000), founded on shared interests and ways of life. Homes are also being potentially deterritorialized since they are losing the main meaning around which their entire structure revolved: the family. The main balance on which cities were based, the centrality of the dwelling, is changing as a result. The digital revolution, and more generally the possibility of a continuous connection between people and with the surroundings, is engendering lifestyles that involve a constant contact with the community that transcends specific physical limits. That community is continually present, constituting a new social layer, an absolute novelty of the digital era that must be taken into consideration when designing and thinking about the contemporary city.

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Spaces for Learning & Working: Architecture, Humans and Human Activities

CEBRA | Klaudio Muca

This is a podcast from urbanNext talks, the urbanNext series curated by Ricardo Devesa and Marta Bugés.

Klaudio Muca holds a degree in Architecture from Politecnico di Milano and is an R&D architect at CEBRA a Danish architectural office. CEBRA investigates the impact of the built environment on people through two initiatives the tech startup Common Sense and the research unit WISE, which recently launched the WISE Journal a publication on the relationship between architecture, humans and human activities. In this session, Klaudio talks about how his work in the R&D team informs design proposals and why studying working and learning behaviors is key to improve our physical environment.

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HF & VUC Fyn: an Adult Learning Environment

CEBRA

Architect: CEBRA
Location: Odense, DK
Year: 2012 – 2014
Photography: Mikkel Frost / CEBRA

Danish architecture studio CEBRA has completed an adult education centre in the heart of the city of Odense, Denmark. Located next to the central station, the HF & VUC Fyn complex marks an important step towards the realisation of a new city campus that ties the inner city and the harbour together. By combining elements from its coarse industrial neighbours with an embracing and transparent interior organisation, the HF & VUC Fyn aims to create a bridge between the scale of the harbour and urban life. The building’s robust and unassuming exterior is contrasted by an inner spatial diversity of rounded forms that create a varied learning environment for 1,300 students – an inspiring and vivid school that continuously suggests new ways of use and makes room for individual learning needs in a collective building.

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PALM-OASIS: Reimagining a More-than-Human Dubai Waterfront

INCO(g)NTXT

Planned to be the world’s largest waterfront development shaped like a crescent, the Dubai Waterfront is in trouble due to financial crisis, land sinking, and rising sea levels. Furthermore, the ecological controversies surrounding the project run counter to the New Urban Agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals. Thus, the crescent is not included in the 2040 Dubai Urban Master Plan, leaving great uncertainties but at the same time a unique opportunity for design imagination. Assuming the former scheme no longer fits in with the current sociocultural and geopolitical context, what kind waterfront and islands could be built to demonstrate Dubai’s ambition to become the greatest self-sufficient and climate-friendly city in the world?

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Lugano Waterfront: A New Vision

Carlo Ratti Associati

A project by CRA-Carlo Ratti Associati with MIC-Mobility in Chain.

International design and innovation office CRA-Carlo Ratti Associati, in partnership with Mobility in Chain (MIC), has unveiled a new vision for the waterfront of Lugano, Switzerland. The proposed plan envisions a new system of spaces for public enjoyment, featuring a floating garden island connected by a new water navigation system and reconfigurable roads capable of responding to people in real time. The project aims to increase the number of connections between the city and lake by overhauling the main traffic artery cutting through Lugano’s shore.

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Río de la Plata Estuary

BAAG

Following this year’s theme “How We Will Live Together?”, Studio Other Spaces, in collaboration with six co-designers, invites all Biennale Architettura 2021 participants to choose a stakeholder from their local context that must be represented in Future Assembly, the exhibition within the 17th International Architecture Exhibition.

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Tree-ness House

Akihisa Hirata

Architects: Akihisa Hirata
Location: Tokyo, Japan
Area: 331.38 m2
Year: 2017
Photography: Vincent Hecht

The building is a complex of rooms and galleries built in Toshima-ku, Tokyo.

In a tree, the different parts coexist organically: trunks, branches, and leaves. Here as well, those relationships – between boxes and pleated windows – are combined hierarchically to create the regions like a tree creates in the air. I tried to create ambiguous boundaries between interior and exterior.

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Forest City

Stefano Boeri

Shenzhen and other cities, are reaching a population of 60 million people. Shijiazhuang for its part, has a sad record: it is the city with the highest rate of air pollution in China. A pall of smog and soot rising only a few days a year. The Forest City in Shijiazhuang will be a new city for 100,000 inhabitants. A city of a new generation, capable of becoming a model of sustainable growth in a large country seeing, each year, 14 million farmers migrating to the cities.

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Crossing Borders In Macau: The Experience of Manuel Vicente

Jorge Figueira

In 1983, an issue of L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui presented “Huit Architectures Différentes”. The Fai Chi Kei, a project in Macau by Manuel Vicente (1934-2013), was published alongside works by Böhm, Renaudie, Niemeyer, Venturi, Shinohara, Sawade and Foster. Describing the ensemble of the two social housing blocks, the magazine refers to street “animation” which was not foreseen in the project, concluding that: “in contrast to preconceived ideas, a rigorous, even severe architectural writing is not necessarily monumental and sterile” (M.E., 1983, 37). This dichotomy between the “severity” of the architecture and the often suffocating appropriation of the created spaces is recurrent in Manuel Vicente’s body of work in Macau. The Fai Chi Kei, designed and built between 1979 and 1983, was the recipient of the 1994 Arcasia award and was demolished in 2010. It was the high point of Manuel Vicente’s social housing works, a synthesis of a complex itinerary and a mediation project between old Macau and the urban growth that took place in the 1970s and 1980s.

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Urban Districts on Reclaimed Land

Fadi Masoud

This research is an excerpt of Terra-Sorta-Firma by Fadi Masoud, published by Actar Publishers

Land reclamation has been a part of urban expansion and transformation for centuries. In most cases it was deemed a necessity and systematically linked to broader hydrological and infrastructural networks in other, more recent cases it is a speculative real-estate practice that results in outlandish formal schemes. The Atlas showcases projects or districts from a diverse global and historical perspective. The Atlas illustrates the progression of each site, and traces it back from its current condition to its original hydrological state (pre-infill), highlighting each district’s socio-economic, architectural, infrastructural, and cultural contexts.

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Aquatic Systems: Increasing Productivity and Sustaining Ecosystems

ORG Permanent Modernity

The development of large-scale offshore, multifunctional infrastructures and coastal planning strategies can provide many services, such as blue energy, environmental resiliency, aquaculture, or blue tourism, working to create a successful future for our oceans and lakes. Maritime resources can be harnessed and accessed through systems that increase productivity and sustain ecosystems. While new projects are poised for the future, they require large investment and wide support to get built.

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Daring Cities: Malmö

Julia Scott

In this episode, we visit Malmö, Sweden. This Scandinavian city has plans to form Europe’s first cross-border carbon-neutral zone with its neighbor, Copenhagen. At the same time, Malmö finds itself grappling with how to be “climate neutral” in a connected world where you can only act on the emissions you can control.

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Innovation at ON-A

Ricardo Devesa

Excerpt from InnovatiON-Architecture by Eduardo Gutierrez and Jordi Fernández (on-a), edited by Ricardo Devesa, published by Actar Publishers.

ON-A’s founding partners (Eduardo Gutiérrez and Jordi Fernández) have always oriented their professional practice toward the constant pursuit of innovative and ad hoc solutions for every project. They have relied on cutting-edge technologies and ongoing research into advanced design tools, in the service of the most avant-garde yet at the same time humanistic ideas. Since the very beginning, research has been their leitmotif. A recurring theme, part of their idiosyncrasy. That attitude extends to their team at large and their external collaborators.

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Nou Parc: Renaturation of Urban Areas

ON-A

Featured in InnovatiON-Architecture by Eduardo Gutierrez and Jordi Fernández (on-a), edited by Ricardo Devesa, published by Actar Publishers.

“Renaturing cities and gaining quality space for citizens is no longer just an interesting idea, it is a necessity,” says Jordi Fernández, one of the two founding partners of ON-A Architecture. This smart office based in Barcelona has specialized in renaturation and bioconstruction, conceiving in its 15 years of experience different ways of adapting green spaces in urban contexts, such as the proposed redevelopment of the Llano Amarillo Park in Algeciras or the Taichung Gateway Park in Taiwan.

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The Cultural Hub in Douala

Marilena Laddaga | Paolo Cascone

Architects: CODESIGNLAB / Paolo Cascone / Marilena Laddaga
Location: Douala, Cameroon
Year: 2021
Photography: Francis Tiemeni Ongong, Dione Roach

In our view, access to education and the development of creativity represents one of the major drivers to improve the quality of life in a community, from both the social and the environmental points of view. For this reason, we have accepted the proposal from the NGO COE (which has been involved in social initiatives in Africa for almost 50 years) to design and build the Cultural Hub of Douala in Cameroon. At that time, we were already collaborating with them with our African Fabbers School sessions, implementing a laboratory for self-construction and digital manufacturing for community-oriented projects in the context of the CAMon! project supported by the Italian Agency for Cooperation and Development (AICS).

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The Man Who Thought with His Hands

Paolo Cascone

“Talking about architecture bores me; I prefer making it instead.”

The quotation alone sums up who Fabrizio Carola was. As it suggests, any further description of his architecture would simply be redundant.

After all, it would be simplistic today, almost a month after his death, to see Fabrizio’s story as that of a “simple” architect. At the same time, I believe it is worth thinking about some of the different aspects of a man who was such an atypical figure in Italy and internationally. I hope Fabrizio won’t hold it against me.

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The Evolution of Radical Urbanism

Alexis Kalagas | Alfredo Brillembourg | Ersela Kripa | Hubert Klumpner | ka-au | Stephen Mueller

Excerpt from "Re-Living the City: UABB 2015 Catalogue" curated by Aaron Betsky, Alfredo Brillembourg, Hubert Klumpner and Doreen Heng Liu. Edited by Gideon Fink Shapiro. Published by Actar Publishers.

What does it mean to be radical architect or designer today? Never before have cities mattered as much to the future of humanity. As David Harvey attests, we have sleepwalked unknowingly into a full-blown “crisis of planetary urbanization”, with acute social, political, and ecological dimensions[1]. Cities are fundamentally places of opportunity – after all, urban migrants continue to be drawn in their millions by the promise of security as well as upward mobility. But cities are too often sites of yawning inequality, where land, housing, infrastructure, and services are transformed into symptoms of exclusionary growth. Faced with contemporary urbanization patterns, we are forced to question how cities and city-making have traditionally operated. More to the point, as architects and designers we are forced to rethink how we can operate within the city, learning from its emerging intelligence and shaping its outcomes to radical and tactical ends.

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How to Structure the Workplace after COVID

HASSELL

Excerpt from Remote? In-person? Hybrid? How to structure the workplace after COVID by Daniel Davis.

Along with practically everything else, the COVID-19 pandemic upended a lot of conventional workplace wisdom. Organizations that had previously sworn off working from home suddenly found themselves on Zoom calls, peering into the living rooms of colleagues. Many are now considering what comes next. Should we stay at home forever? Return to the office? Or adopt some new workplace paradigm?

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Slow Offices in Sant Cugat: Urban Frictions and Health and Climate

BAILORULL ADD+

Architects: BAILORULL
Location: Sant Cugat, Spain
Area: 15,000.00 m2
Year: 2021
Photography: Duccio Malagamba and José Hevia

Cities are formed from urban frictions, from street corners. In his book Cities, Corners, Manuel de Solà Morales explains how cities are built at intersections, at the sites of urban frictions. “The corner is the place where lovers meet and the space where barricades are formed. The corners of two streets make a city and the city appears when it is built on the intersection, which is its real support” (Manuel de Solà Morales 2002). 

The design for this office building arises from the urban consideration of its context, while also proposing open exterior working spaces – an advanced solution to the COVID pandemic.

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Roskilde Festival Folk High School

COBE | MVRDV

Architects: MVRDV and COBE
Location: Roskilde, Denmark
Area: 5578 m2
Year: 2019
Photography: Rasmus Hjortshøj - COAST and Ossip van Duivenbode

Roskilde Festival Højskole is the first purpose-built folk high school of its kind in Denmark in 50 years, based on the ideals of the Roskilde festival. The ideals and values are very much influenced by the volunteer engagement, the humanistic focus and the creative power that characterizes the Roskilde festival and its community every year.

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Sociocultural & Sports Centre Pôle Simone Veil

K ARCHITECTURES

Architects: K ARCHITECTURES
Location: Havre, France
Area: 4,800.00 m2
Year: 2021
Photography: Sophie Oddo

The city of Le Havre immerses us in a moving atmosphere full of powerful stories.
The new cultural, associative and sporting facilities are being established as one of the centerpieces of the Danton district, which is in the process of being upgraded. It responds to the policy of the city of Le Havre and more closely to the expectations of the inhabitants who were consulted to compose its program.

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Adaptive Assembly: Collaborative Robotic Reuse in Construction

Jeffrey Anderson | Ryan Johns

A new era of automation in which humans and small-scale industrial robots work side-by-side on the same tasks has the potential to bring high-value production back to urban cores. New forms of urban metabolism in which materials are processed, used, and reused in creative ways by both humans and machines are establishing “Making” as a new urban common. This project explores the potential of using robots and computer vision to assemble a structure of irregular parts using a human operator in concert with adaptive assembly algorithms.

By developing software and hardware interfaces which incorporate machine vision, structural intelligence, and interactive visualizations, it is possible to create a collaborative construction process which balances the aesthetics and efficiency of natural materials with algorithmic intelligence, robotic dexterity, and human creativity. We have developed an intelligent system that operates with a fixed logic, but can be modified with material variation and strategic offerings, allowing us to use both the strengths of the robot (precision, stamina, and computational intelligence) and the strengths of the human operator (creativity, decision making, spontaneity) to achieve a shared goal. Further, by using found materials to assemble our structure, this project appeals to the light manufacturing industries already in place in Seoul, demonstrating the possibility of reusing scrap materials with low embodied energies and site-specific materiality in construction. By demonstrating principles of collaboration, reuse, and adaptability in the context of urban production, this project is a first step in understanding the potentials and limitations of collaborative robotics.

Roof, 2004-2005. Andy Goldsworthy
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Base4Work Bratislava

DF Creative Group | Studio Perspektiv

Architects: Studio Perspektiv
Location: Bratislava, Slovakia
Area: 3,900.00 m2
Year: 2021
Photography: BoysPlayNice

There are only a few buildings with industrial history left in Bratislava that have managed to adapt to the current needs. One of them is the Jurkovič Heating Plant functionalist building, which has been opened to the public as a modern coworking center, Base4Work, following a three-year renovation, with interiors designed by Studio Perspektiv. The architectural solution in the form of new interior spaces and new structures is the work of DF Creative Group. The PAMARCH, specializing in the protection and reconstruction of monuments, oversaw the building envelope renovation.

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LocHal Public Library: An Intensive Redesign

Civic Architects

Architects: Civic Architects
Location: Tilburg, The Netherlands
Area: 11200 m2
Year: 2018
Photography: Stijn Bollaert

Visitors to Tilburg’s newly modernized station district will notice an exciting addition to the city: the new public library which was officially opened in January 2019. A former locomotive shed – the ‘LocHal’ – has undergone an intensive redesign to become the beating heart of the district. It has been transformed into a public meeting place with a distinct railway theme. Its rugged steel structure provides the perfect backdrop for all manner of events and exhibitions. Much of the elegant industrial building has been conserved. With the addition of robust new architecture and huge textile screens, it has been transformed to showcase the new concept of Midden Brabant Libraries. It is a place in which knowledge is not only ‘consumed’ but produced by partners such as the arts organization Kunstloc, Brabant C and the co-working facilities of Seats2Meet. The building’s design is the result of close collaboration between Civic Architects, Braaksma & Roos Architectenbureau and Inside Outside/Petra Blaisse, while the engineering consultancy Arup advised on aspects such as sustainability, re-use and acoustic design. The furnishings of the library, the various ‘laboratories’, the café and offices are by Mecanoo.

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Danone Headquarters: An Office Model for Health and Sustainability

Powerhouse Company

Architects: Powerhouse Company
Location: Hoofddorp, The Netherlands
Area: 8.400 m2
Year: 2019
Photography: Sebastian van Damme

The leading global food company Danone has officially opened the doors of its new offices in Hoofddorp. Designed and built for Danone in a strategic location of the Amsterdam metropolitan area, the office will serve as the new headquarters for Early Life Nutrition and Advanced Medical Nutrition, two of the company’s leading businesses, and for Danone’s global procurement function: Cycles & Procurement. In 2017, Powerhouse Company won the competition for the 8,400 m2 office building in collaboration with developers from RED Company. Nanne de Ru, founder and leader of both organizations, led his teams to deliver a building that strongly reflects Danone’s vision, “One Planet. One Health”. With its focus on sustainability and health, the new building gives shape to the belief that the health of the planet and people are interconnected.

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Container House: A Family Residence Outside of Stockholm

Måns Tham Arkitektkontor

Architects: Måns Tham Arkitektkontor
Location: Stockholm, Sweden
Area: 150.00 m2
Year: 2021
Photography: Staffan Andersson and Thomas Jacobsson

This family residence was built from eight assembled 20′ and 40′ re-used, high cube shipping containers. The house is built on a steep lot next to a lake, outside of Stockholm. There was a ban on dynamite for the site and there was no room for a slab, just a steep canyon where a lot of rainwater flows toward the lake. That is why the house stands on pillars and is light on the terrain. The structural walls of the containers allowed the upper level to be larger than the entrance-level footprint. This way, the building adjusts to the V-shaped natural canyon of the site. The clients, a truckdriver and a therapist with three kids, built the house mostly by themselves with help from their father and father-in-law, a skilled welder who used to run a mechanic’s workshop. The interior is a composition of rare finds and re-used building components.

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Isla Intersections: Future of Housing in the City

LOHA

In 2018, the City of Los Angeles made available over 1,700 city-owned parcels to affordable housing developers. Many of these sites are difficult, lying along heavy traffic corridors or next to freeways. In other instances, the sites are made up of composite parcels that have been left untouched for decades. It is in this kind of liminal space, fraught with ambiguity, that we see opportunity – and a potentially significant next step for the future of housing in the city.

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Temporary Thread Installations

Jenny Sabin Studio

Architects: Jenny Sabin Studio, R&D by Sabin Design Lab, Cornell University.
Location: New York, USA
Year: 2017
Photography: Bill Staffeld, Jenny Sabin, Matt Flynn and Jordan Berta

Jenny Sabin Studio investigates the intersections of architecture and science, and applies insights and theories from biology and mathematics to the design, fabrication, and production of material structures and spatial interventions. 

The studio collaborated with scientists and engineers, institutions and student laboratories to create these two textile structures, applied to temporary installations.

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MycoKnit: Lightweight and Biodegradable Material

Ali Ghazvinian | Andre West | Benay Gürsoy | Farzaneh Oghazian | Felecia Davis | John A. Pecchia

This project was supported by the SOM Foundation, Research Awards 2021.

Mycelium is the vegetative root of fungi by which fungi absorb nutrients from organic matter and bind them. The treatment of mycelium results in a foam-like composite material that is lightweight and biodegradable, called mycelium-based composites. The material properties of this composite material depend on various factors, such asthe substrate mixture, the fungal species used for inoculation, and the environmental conditions of growth. By modifying these factors, it is possible to obtain graded materials that have different properties. Furthermore, this composite material can be shaped using formworks, as well as additive and subtractive manufacturing techniques. In recent years, various scholars have explored the use of mycelium-based composites as load-bearing structural agents in architecture (Heisel et al., 2017; Benjamin et al., 2014).

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Cantina Antinori: Enhancement of the Landscape

Archea Associati

Architects: Archea Associati
Location: San Casciano Val di Pesa, Italia
Year: 2013

The site is surrounded by the unique hills of Chianti, covered with vineyards, half-way between Florence and Siena. A cultured and informed customer has made it possible to pursue, through architecture, the enhancement of the landscape and the surroundings as an expression of the cultural and social value of the place where wine is produced.

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Modular Pavilions

S-AR

Architects: S-AR
Location: Jeløya, Noruega
Area: 265.00 m2
Year: 2021
Photography: Eivind Lauritzen – Galleri F 15

S-AR has developed a project of three temporary wooden structures for HOUSE OF COMMONS. These pavilions are respectfully placed in the natural landscapes at Alby and in the Alby Park on the island of Jeløya. Produced from local wood and recycled materials, they are designed to avoid causing any permanent damage. Each will be used to present projects and performances over the course of the biennale. The Platform Pavilion is placed in a dense spruce forest and houses the work of Siri Hermansen. The Staircase Pavilion is situated below Alby Farm, where a former workers’ home was located, and it houses the work of Daisuke Kosugi. The Cylinder Pavilion is located in Alby Park and will host local projects, mediation, outreach and education activities.

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Anagram City: Space and Place

A-001

Throughout the history of mankind, space and place have been studied as part of a physical, mental, or social dimension, but never all at the same time; the lack of vision that this generates represents the main problem of disconnection between conceived and lived space within our urban territories.

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Polycentric Pavilion: New Idea of Active and Participatory Public Space

nARCHITECTS

Architects: nArchitects
Location: Milan, Italy
Year: 2016

nARCHITECTS is one of fourteen international firms invited to participate in the Architecture as Artexhibit at the XXIst Triennale di Milano International Exhibition (XX1T), entitled Design After Design.  Participants were asked by the curators to build full scale architectural installations as “the architectural equivalent of entries in a possible dictionary, such as Portico, Entrance, Rehabilitation, Roof, Shelter, Pavilion, etc.”

nARCHITECTS’ Polycentric Pavilion responds to the curators’ challenge to “unlock the expression of architectural ideas with regard to new paradigms, such as the new idea of active and participatory public space….”

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Amsterdam Walkability Mapped

SpaceTraces

Text by Julia Ubeda

Making cities more walkable has been an emerging challenge for many cities. In the case of Amsterdam, 30% of people walk in the city as their first mean of transport. Therefore, the challenge for the City of Amsterdam is not to promote walking but mainly to improve the walking experience of the residents, workers, recreational walkers and city visitors. 

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