Buitenschot: Noise-Reducing Landscape

H+N+S landscape architects

Architects: H+N+S landscape architects
Location: Hoofddorp, The Netherlands
Area: 36 ha
Year: 2013

After the Polderbaan (the fifth runway at Schiphol Airport) was opened for operation in 2003, residents in the area were disturbed by ground noise (low frequency noise caused by aircraft taking off). It was concluded that a 10-dB reduction would significantly reduce the noise. Residents noticed that the noise was less noticeable after farmland had been ploughed. This was the starting point for research into a noise-reducing landscaping.

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Recovery of the Access to Jorba’s Castle: As if Nothing Had Been Done

Carles Enrich

Architect: Carles Enrich
Location: Jorba, Catalonia, Spain
Date: November 2017
Photography: Adrià Goula and Carles Enrich

The remains of the Castle of Jorba, declared a historical monument (BCIN), are located at the top of Puig de la Guàrdia (549m), forming a backdrop for the municipality of Jorba and a privileged overlook onto the Catalan region of Anoia. The whole castle represents a sedimentation of the different uses that it has acquired throughout the centuries. The first construction, the mid-10th century watchtower, was joined by a chapel, which later became part of an initial walled enclosure in the 14th century. At the end of the 16th century, the complex expanded, arriving at its maximum extension on the hill. In its final functional phase, the castle became a house: domestic elements including an oven and a wine press can still be seen today. The project is part of a Master Plan to raise collective awareness of the castle’s origins as a lookout for controlling the former border territory of the March of Barcelona, a defensive barrier between Al-Andalus and the Carolingian Empire, and for controlling the ancient road linking Barcelona to Lleida.

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Moses Bridge: Access Across the Moat

RO&AD Architecten

Architects: RO&AD Architecten
Location: Halsteren, The Netherlands
Year: 2011

The West Brabant Water Line is a defense line consisting of a series of fortresses and cities with inundation areas in the southwest of the Netherlands. It dates from the 17th century but fell into disrepair in the 19th century. When the water line was finally restored, an access bridge across the moat of one of the fortresses, Fort de Roovere, was needed.

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Kullurk/Coolart: Somers Farm and Wetlands

NMBW Architecture Studio

Architects: NMBW Architecture Studio with William Goodsir and RMIT Architecture
Location: Melbourne, Australia
Area: 40,5 ha
Photography: Lucinda McLean and Linda Tegg

The various built and open spaces constitutive of this project – an existing house, a new outbuilding containing an external room and sleeping areas, new wetlands and bird hide – sit within the area of Kullurk,[1] which was the local Indigenous Bunurong peoples’ own choice in 1840 for a reserve of land for their imagined future. A permanent water source is located there and early maps show that aboriginal routes cross through the area. Unfortunately, this wish was not granted. The various project’s interventions are spread out through a property of 100 acres that faces the Westernport coastal reserve and is connected to the Coolart Wetlands and Homestead as a result of a subdivision of the larger Coolart estate on the south eastern coast of Victoria just outside metropolitan Melbourne.

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The Conceptualisation of the Future Urban Legacy Lab

Matteo Robiglio

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.

Matteo Robiglio talks about the conceptualisation of the Future Urban Legacy Lab (FULL) and the introduction of the term legacy to include an urban large scale metropolitan perspective.

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Plasencia Auditorium and Congress Center: Between the Town and the Country

selgascano

Architects: selgascano
Location: Plasencia, Spain
Area: 7.500 m2
Year: 2017
Photography: Iwan Baan

The conference center sits on the boundary between the town and the country, on the outskirts of Plasencia, the edge between what has been touched by a less artificial humanity and what has been touched only by millennia of climate. What has been touched by humanity has covered up the millennia of climate with the sweep of a trowel in just a few years. This is strange, even economically, because to do so, 15-m-high retaining walls had to be built. Thus, from the outset, from the competition design, we saw quite clearly that the work consisted of choosing between one of the boundary’s two sides: the one belonging to the city, to what has been touched by our generation; or the one belonging to slowness. Under these conditions, it was impossible to belong to both.

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Rural Community Center: Futuristic and Traditional Approach

Archi-Union Architects

Architects: Archi-Union Architects
Location: Dao Ming, China
Area: 1.800 m2
Year: 2017
Photography: Bian Lin

Archi-Union Architects from China have created a rural community center in Dao Ming Town supported by a 70% pre-fabricated timber frame structure. The center is a configuration of two patios covered by a Mobius roof finished with traditional ceramic tiles. The project is simultaneously futuristic and traditional in its approach.

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Itaim Tower: Shifting from the Traditional Network

b720

Architects: b720
Location: São Paulo, Brazil
Area: 11.533 m2
Year: 2017
Photography: Nelson Kon

The Itaim Tower is an apartment building located in Itaim Bibi (São Paulo), a neighborhood under transformation that is shifting from the traditional network of horizontal detached houses to a skyline of high buildings, mainly residential, that are intended to meet the growing housing demand among the prosperous upper-middle class in the country’s financial capital.

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Ofenwerkstatt: Timber-framed Construction

ma_ma

Architects: ma_ma
Location: Ludesch, Austria
Area: 228 m2
Year: 2015
Photography: Hanno Mackowitz

Ofenwerkstatt Müller is a workshop with five workstations for the production of rammed earth furnaces. The structure of the workshop should be perceived as a simple, monolithic volume. The building, with a floor space of 228 square meters, is built in a timber-framed construction.

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Stimulating the Community

Robbrecht en Daem

There’s totally new ways of living together and it’s an important role for architects to think about how to find not only solutions but ways to stimulate the idea of community in this fast changing society.

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The Stairs to Kriterion: An Impressive Landmark

MVRDV

Architects: MVRDV
Location: Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Year: 2016
Photography: Ossip van Duivenbode

The Stairs to Kriterion are a nod to 75 years of rebuilding Rotterdam. The temporary exhibition offers an impressive landmark for the cultural event “Rotterdam celebrates the city!” At 29 metres tall and 57 metres long, the scaffolding is a response to the angles of the Rotterdam Central Station, connecting the contemporary icon with a historic monument, whilst referencing the reconstruction that the city has experienced through its construction.

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Experiencing Scale: The Diminutive Dimensions of the Space

PLANE—SITE | Space4Architecture

Curated and produced by PLANE—SITE

Space4architecture was invited by the European Cultural Centre to exhibit at the Time Space Existence exhibition in Venice, Italy. PLANE—SITE had the opportunity to talk about the ideas behind their design with S4A principal Clementina Ruggieri and founder Michele Busiri-Vici.

With a focus on the individual and the visitor’s experience, S4A set out to make ‘make sense out of a room without a purpose’. Inspired by the Italian ‘calle’ — the narrow streets present throughout Venice — and the diminutive dimensions of the space, S4A designed a split room with a horizontal wall, essentially creating a room within a room.

The two rooms are distinct from one another in a variety of ways: primarily their size, the lighting, and the way they make the visitor feel. The segmented room is noticeably smaller, filled with natural light, and evokes a personal and intimate experience. The larger entrance room feels more open, with the only source of light seeping in from behind.

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Head in the Clouds: Recycled Plastic Bottles Design

STUDIOKCA

Architects: STUDIOKCA
Location: New York, USA
Year: 2013

Selected and built as the winning proposal resulting from a design competition organized by the American Institute of Architects New York, the Structural Engineers Association of New York and Figment, the Head in the Clouds Pavilion on New York City’s Governors Island originated with the desire to create a “place to dream in the city of dreams”. Made from 53,780 recycled plastic bottles – the number of bottles thrown away in New York City in one hour – it is a space that visitors can enter to contemplate the light and color filtering through the “cloud” from the inside out.

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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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Place & Qualities

João Luís Carrilho da Graça

I like very much to think that in each place or site we are going to work on, there is an enormous number of qualities. Every part of the world is incredible, so one of the things that I like to do in every work is to discover these qualities and to enhance and have the idea that after the intervention, things are better than before.

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Al Janoub Stadium: A Temporary Overlay outside the Permanent Footprint

Zaha Hadid Architects

Architects: Zaha Hadid Architects
Location: Al Wakrah, Qatar
Year: 2019
Photography: Hufton+Crow

Inaugurated on 16 May 2019 by hosting the Amir Cup Final of the Qatar Stars national football league, Al Janoub Stadium was the first new stadium commissioned for the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar. Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA), together with Aecom, began designing the stadium along with its new precinct for the city in March 2013. As one of the venues for the Qatar World Cup, the stadium will host the group and quarter-final matches of the tournament. It is located in the city of Al Wakrah, 20 km south of Doha and connected to the capital via the Red Line of the new Doha Metro system.

The client’s brief was for a 40,000-seat football stadium for the 2022 World Cup, which could be reduced to a 20,000-seat capacity in its legacy mode following the tournament. 20,000 seats is the optimum capacity for legacy use as the home field for the Al Wakrah Sport Club professional football team of the Qatar Stars national league. These temporary seats have been designed to be disassembled and transported to a developing country in need of sporting infrastructure for post-tournament usage. Further temporary accommodation such as concessions are required for the additional capacity of FIFA World Cup tournament mode. This has been built as a temporary overlay outside the permanent footprint and enclosure of the stadium in its legacy mode.

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UN Geospatial Information Management Forum: A Window for the World

UAD

Architects: UAD
Location: Huzhou, China
Area: 76.063 m2
Year: 2018
Photography: Zhao Qiang and Cai Jun

The project is located in Geographic Information Town, south of Deqing County, China. It sits, specifically, between Tashan No.2 Street and Tashan No.3 Street, and across Quyuan Road. Built on an island on Phoenix Lake, the grand architecture is a window for the world to see Deqing County. The building’s above-ground area covers 42,556 square meters, with a main structure of three floors and a height of 23.95 meters, and the underground construction area is 29,507 square meters.

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NEST: Interaction with the User

Gramazio Kohler

Architects: Gramazio Kohler
Location: Dübendorf, Switzerland
Area: 4.935 m2
Year: 2016

The reduction of the environmental footprint of buildings is one of the major challenges the construction industry is facing. Intensive research is being carried out in academia and industry addressing all levels from materials to building systems and operations. Special emphasis has to be given to the issue of technology transfer, as the construction sector is known for the slow uptake of inventions. Furthermore, the interaction of the user with the newly developed solutions is generally omitted during the research phase but plays a key role for the acceptance in the market.

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Europe’s most Talked about Cities: Digital Visibility

ING

Digital visibility is key for cities building a global brand.

ING’s new ranking identifies how Europe’s Top 40 cities feature on social media and online news. In a context of rapid change and constantly evolving networks, cities are consolidating their leading positions over entirely new, sometimes digital-only conversations, creating powerful new opportunities for place branding by linking digital visibility into a wider communication strategy.

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An Open World: In a Digital Age

Rufus Pollock

Excerpt from The Open Revolution.

Today, in a digital age, who owns information owns the future. In this digital world, we face a fundamental choice between Open and Closed. In an Open world information is shared by all – freely available to everyone. In a Closed world information is exclusively “owned” and controlled.

Today, we live in a Closed world. A world of extraordinary and growing concentrations in power and wealth. A world where innovation is held back and distorted by the dead hand of monopoly; where essential medicines are affordable only to the rich; where freedom is threatened by manipulation, exclusion and exploitation; and each click you make, every step you take, they’ll be watching you.

By contrast, in an Open world all of us would be enriched by the freedom to use, enjoy and build on everything from statistics and research to newspaper stories and books, from software and films to music and medical formulae. In an Open world we would pay innovators and creators more and more fairly, using market-driven remuneration rights in place of intellectual property monopoly rights.

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Back to the World

Juan Herreros

The work we do is quite pragmatic, collaborative and absolutely obsessed about simplification. So the process of the work we do is usually explained through taking a lot of information, working a long time, having a lot of conversations, to produce something incredibly simple that can be given back to the world.

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Migration and Permanence. Sanikiluaq, Nunavut.

Lateral Office | Lola Sheppard | Mason White

Excerpt from Many Norths: Spatial Practice in a Polar Territory, 2017. Published by Actar Publishers.

Inuit migration and the establishment of camps or temporary settlements was an adaptive practice that responded to available resource, hunting, and trade opportunities. An area’s suitability was determined by the size of the population to be supported, as well as the duration and frequency of occupation. The location of settlements varied seasonally and annually, though familiarity with the local geography encouraged repeat visits. Leading up to the 1960s, Inuit settlements on the Belcher Islands tended to fluctuate in population composition, location, and degree of interaction with other settlements. The community divided into north and south camps at opposite ends of the islands, and the two groups’ specialized knowledge of the region determined their settlement preferences.

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Save The Children Foundation: Stimulating Affection

elii

Architects: elii - Uriel Fogué, Eva Gil, Carlos Palacios
Location: Vallecas, Madrid, Spain
Area: 483,48 m2
Year: 2016-2018
Photography: ImagenSubliminal (Miguel de Guzmán + Rocío Romero)

The building for Save The Children Foundation is a strategic point in the San Diego neighbourhood for the social work that this NGO carries out in the Vallecas area. The project involves the refurbishment and extension of the current building so as to address the needs of a child care centre. The proposal is based on adding a new body that is suspended over the existing structure. This extends the building and configures a new façade, as well as a new communications and service core.

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Lleialtat Santsenca Civic Center: Defining an Intervention Strategy

H arquitectes

Architects: H arquitectes
Location: Barcelona, Spain
Area: 1.750 m2
Year: 2017
Photography: Adrià Goula

There were three starting points to the design: understanding the historic value of Lleialtat Santsenca (1928), an old working class cooperative in the Sants neighborhood; investigating the building’s (physical) state in detail, in order to maintain as much of it as possible; and being sensitive to the collaborative process launched by neighborhood organizations in 2009 to recover the building.

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Transformed Building

Freek Persyn

We think transformation is very interesting, because a transformed building is always a building that is unadapted; and this lack of adaptation brings a lot of possibilities to find new ways to define how things relate to each other. It’s not written out first, and then built, but it’s like reshaping something and finding new opportunities.

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Architecture and Neurotechnology: The Relevance of Neuroscience

Firas Safieddine

This essay is the first in a series, at the intersection of architecture, neuroscience and technology. Within such a design-oriented context, the first question that stands out is: Why neuroscience? This unfolds into broader territories, posing questions such as: Why is that field of scientific research relevant to a discipline such as architecture?

In the interest of addressing those questions, two objects will be studied. On the one hand, responsive architecture is the object of examination in this piece. On the other, computational neuroscience is the branch of neuroscience that will be looked at. Eventually, both territories intersect in technology, mainly computation. In the following lines, I first attempt to skim through a history of neuroscience and then demonstrate the main architectural problematic and the relevance of neuroscience in that context.

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Architect as Advocate: New Frameworks for Practice

Joyce Hwang

To be an advocate—to defend the cause of another or to support the interests of another—is a form of practice that we tend to associate with the realms of politics, law, and social activism. Debates surrounding human rights, civil rights, women’s rights, disability rights, and even animal rights might be the issues that first come to mind when reflecting upon notions of advocacy, but how might an architect operate as an advocate? How might we consider an architectural project as a form of advocacy?

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METI School: Learning with Joy

Anna Heringer

The philosophy of METI (Modern Education and Training Institute) is learning with joy. The teachers help the children to develop their own potential and to use it in a creative and responsible way. The building reflects these ideas in terms of materials, techniques and architectural design.

The aim of the project is to improve existing building techniques, to contribute to sustainability by utilising local potential and to strengthen regional identity.

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Humanistic Approach

Odile Decq

For me, architecture is an adventure. It has to be a place where people can move, live in good conditions, forget the hardness of the life outside, so it has to have a kind of humanistic approach, whatever the project is.

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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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African Fabbers Lab: Urban Ecologies, Self-construction & Digital Fabrication

Paolo Cascone

Architects: Paolo Cascone / CODESIGNLAB and Coe

The African Fabbers School (AFS) is the first school of urban ecologies, self-construction and digital fabrication in Africa.

Following participation in the Dakar and Marrakesh biennales, the school project was directed by Paolo Cascone and developed with the urban fabrication laboratory. The project was realized in the framework of the CAMon program – an initiative promoted by the NGO CEO (Centro Orientamento Educativo) with the support of AICS, the Italian Agency for Development Cooperation. The educational and research platform is based on the idea of bridging African and European knowledge through community-oriented projects and applied research. Therefore, the AFS will be part of an international network of design schools and research laboratories. The project aims to respond to the lack of design schools in the region in order to investigate the growth of African cities, placing emphasis on an ecological agenda, and exploring the interaction between African material systems and computer-aided manufacturing technologies.

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Flight Patterns: Routes Connecting Cities across Africa

Urban Age / LSE cities

The map of African commercial aviation has been transformed beyond recognition since the turn of the millennium. From very few international flights within the continent, and routes beyond the continent restricted almost entirely to century-old paths of colonial influence to European metropoles, Africa has quickly become criss-crossed by intra-continental flights run by African airlines, and connected by a widening range of intercontinental routes served by African and other non-European airlines. Breaking from decades of strict regionalism, airlines now race with each other to open non-stop services from east Africa and a range of cities over the full spread of the continent. More airlines connect more cities across Africa, and across the oceans, than ever before.

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Droneports in Lake Victoria: Mobility Solution in East Africa

Aerial Futures

East Africa’s Lake Victoria basin, home to 35 million people, is the most densely populated rural area in the world. Yet the prohibitive cost of road and rail transport impedes mobility, meaning that cargo, medicine and blood packs often cannot reach those who need them most. Drones are providing an affordable, sustainable and life-saving mobility solution for the region, which is why AERIAL FUTURES has joined forces with the Lake Victoria Challenge, a World Bank initiative, to examine the potential for drones and their associated architecture in Tanzania.

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Red Line Project: Cargo Drone Routes

Foster + Partners | J.M. Ledgard

Cargo drone routes have utility wherever there is a lack of roads. Just as mobile phones dispensed with landlines, cargo drones can transcend geographical barriers such as mountains, lakes, and unnavigable rivers without the need for large-scale physical infrastructure. Just a third of Africans live within two kilometres of an all-season road, and there are no continental motorways, almost no tunnels, and not enough bridges that can reach people living in far-flung areas of the continent.

P12006_FP552669_indesign

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Jara Cimrman School: Working in Dialogue

PROGRES ATELIER

Architects: PROGRES ATELIER
Location: Prague, Czech Republic
Area: 1.124 m2
Year: 2018
Photography: Alex Shoots Buildings - Alexandra Timpau

The original building of the elementary school was completed in 1934, according to the design by the architects V. Vondrášek and J.Kubín. Over the course of its existence, the building has gone through several modifications, of varying technical and architectural quality.

In recent years, several architectural studies have been carried out to address the lack of capacity for new students, in addition to functional collisions and the poor technical condition of some parts of the building. The proposals have all been based on adding volume into the school’s garden. After a thorough analysis, we decided to use a different approach.

We think it is only right for the project to address the problematic spots that were created by previous insensitive interventions along with the new functional demands. Therefore, we do not take on the poorly designed parts of the building, nor do we add any other appendix; rather, we work in dialogue with the historical building.

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Mikhailovskaya Embankment: Bringing New Life to Novosibirsk

Adaptik-A | Strelka KB

Architects: Strelka KB and Adaptik-A
Location: Novosibirsk, Russia
Year: 2018

Novosibirsk is the capital of Siberia and one of Russia’s largest cities, with a population of more than 1 million. This meeting point of Russian traditions and modern industry is bisected by the Ob River and the Mikhailovskaya Embankment running alongside it. The embankment is a two-part terrace park, divided by transit bridges, and the whole territory is delineated by the river, a cargo port, and a major highway. In 2018, a team from Strelka KB, together with Strelka Architects and local architectural bureau Adaptik-A, reimagined the embankment as a center of attraction for the heart of Siberia.

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SESC 24 de Maio: Transformation and Development

MMBB

Architects: Paulo Mendes da Rocha + MMBB
Location: São Paulo, Brasil
Area: 27.865 m2
Year: 2017
Photography: Nelson Kon

We believe that the transformation and development of cities such as São Paulo takes place by slowly adapting to the changes in customs and lifestyles in the societies that inhabit them.

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Streetmekka Viborg: Breathing New Life into Abandoned Industrial Buildings

EFFEKT

Architects: EFFEKT
Location: Viborg, Denmark
Area: 3.170 m2 + 2.000 m2 landscape
Year: 2018
Photography: Rasmus Hjortshøj - COAST

The existing building originally served as a windmill factory and is a typical example of one of the many mass-produced warehouse or factory buildings from the late 1960s and 70s found in almost every suburban industrial zone in the western world. Typically constructed from prefabricated concrete panels or corrugated steel, these industrial leftovers are perceived as having little or negligible historic, cultural and architectural value.

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The Mill: Reconstructing the Mlynica Building

GutGut

Architects: GutGut
Location: Bratislava, Slovakia
Area: 3.695 m2
Year: 2016
Photography: Jakub Skokan & Martin Tůma / BoysPlayNice

The Mlynica building is part of a large post-industrial area in Bratislava focused on light building materials. Beginning in the 1960s, porous prefabricated concrete blocks, slabs and panels were produced here. Production was halted in 1992. After privatization, the new owners sold off the complex and a gradual disintegration of the structures began.

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Valby Machinery Halls: Transformation into a Lively District

C.F. Møller

Architects: C.F. Møller
Location: Copenhagen, Denmark
Area: 5578 m2
Year: 2018
Photography: Mark Syke

The new Assembly Hall is in a former industrial hall, located on an old industrial site in Valby, which has now been transformed into the lively district of Valby Maskinfabrik. C.F. Møller handled the transformation of the Montagehallen (Assembly Hall), where the original industrial expression has been preserved, while the interior has been refurbished to house modern commercial premises and homes, and also an event and community building.

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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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Materials’ Improvement: Adding Value

Fabio Gramazio

Filmed and edited by Daniel Ruiz.

Interview with Fabio Gramazio (co-founder of Gramazio & Kohler Architects) conducted by the IaaC students of the Master in Robotics and Advanced Construction, MRAC 2018-19, at the Seminar in Theory and Context, lead by Ricardo Devesa, Senior Professor at IaaC.

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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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Treet: Sustainable Housing

ARTEC

Architects: ARTEC
Location: Bergen, Norway
Area: 4.500 m2
Year: 2015
Photography: ARTEC, David Valldeby and Morten Pedersen / Inviso

Inspired by Norway’s considerable history of wood construction, and driven by a desire for sustainable housing, Treet (The Tree) by ARTEC became the first engineered-timber high-rise building to capture the world’s attention. Built by housing developers BOB and completed in Bergen, Norway in 2015, the 14-story residential structure is a hybrid combination of a glulam timber framework, balconies and staircase in CLT, and apartments in prefabricated modules stacked together on site.

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Trade Fair Hall 10: A Curved Character

wulf architekten

Architects: wulf architekten
Location: Stuttgart, Germany
Area: 20.900 m2
Year: 2018
Photography: Roland Halbe

The special challenge of the design was to create an exhibition hall that takes up the curved character and scale of the existing halls, but its dimensions do not match those of a standard hall (10,500 sqm) nor those of the high hall (20,900 sqm). From this starting point, we developed the concept of the three-nave exhibition hall, with a strikingly curved wooden roof over the naves. The size of the central nave takes over the scale of the standard halls.

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110 Rooms: Eliminating Spatial Hierarchy

MAIO

Architects: MAIO Architects
Location: Barcelona, Spain
Area: 2.795 m2
Year: 2016
Photography: José Hevia

This project aims to stress everything we considered valuable from the typological housing tradition of the Barcelona’s Eixample. Thus, the type plans are formalized following the distribution of equal (or almost equal) rooms that traditionally characterized the housing blocks of the late s. XIX in the area. A characteristic that has allowed the apartments to modify the way they have been used over the decades without substantial architectonical changes. A seemingly rigid system has allowed nevertheless to change their use in the course of time.

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Affordable Housing Prototypes in Maputo

Casas Melhoradas

Casas Melhoradas is a collaboration between the Department of Human Settlements at the The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts Schools of Architecture, Design and Conservation, Faculdade de Arquitectura e Planeamento Físico at Universidade Eduardo Mondlane, The Mozambican NGO Estamos and the Danish branch of Architects without Borders.
Architects: Johan Mottelson and Jørgen Eskemose.
Photography: Johan Mottelson.

Mozambique is located in Southeast Africa and is one of the poorest countries in the world. The capital, Maputo, is characterized by urban development without effective planning, without enforcement of regulations, without appropriate infrastructure provisions and plagued by urban sprawl. All this causes increased infrastructure deficit, decreased mobility, loss of farmland and decreased access to employment, health and education systems.

G0028217

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Shangwei Plugin House: An Urban Village

People’s Architecture Office (PAO)

Architects: People’s Architecture Office
Location: Shenzhen, China
Area: 15 m2 / 20 m2
Year: 2018
Photography: People’s Architecture Office, Zhan Changheng

The Shangwei Plugin Houses are renovated houses that are hundreds of years old, left vacant and in ruins for decades as Shangwei Village suffered from heavy disinvestment. The rapid urban expansion of nearby Shenzhen engulfed villages like Shangwei, turning them into urban villages, or rural islands surrounded by a sea of new development. Half of the properties in Shangwei lay abandoned as villagers fled in search of higher standards of living in neighboring areas.

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Future Towers: Pressure to Expand

MVRDV

Architects: MVRDV
Location: Pune, India
Year: 2018
Photography: Ossip

Future Towers is a part of Amanora Park Town, a community created in 2007 thanks to legislation passed in 2005 by the state of Maharashtra to encourage the development of residential “townships” near its cities. In Pune, these townships help to house the young professionals attracted to the city by its auto-manufacturing and technology sectors but, as with much of the rapid development all over India, many of the new buildings on Pune’s outskirts are generic, repetitive residential towers. In just 11 years, Amanora Park Town has grown to over 25,000 residents by focusing on a diverse, high-quality mixture of towers alongside low-density villas. But the pressure to expand faster with more high-density, low-individuality housing was ever-present.

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Social Housing at Can Batlló

Espinet / Ubach

Architects: Espinet/Ubach Arquitectes
Location: Barcelona, Spain
Area: 3.949 m2
Year: 2018
Photography: Pedro Pegenaute

The residential building of Can Batlló is the result of a public competition organized by the Patronat Municipal de l’Habitatge de Barcelona (PMHB). It is located on a residual site, bordering the former textile factory of Can Batlló (which has been classified as ‘of public interest’), in the heart of the Sants district. The plot has three sides that look out onto varying urban landscapes.

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The Bentway: Harnessing the Void Underneath the Infrastructure

PUBLIC WORK

Landscape Architects: PUBLIC WORK
Location: Toronto, Canada
Date: 2019
Photography: Andrew Williamson, Nic Lehoux and Nicola Betts

The Bentway is transforming a 1.75km space under Toronto’s Gardiner Expressway into a vibrant public place where visitors can experience a diverse mix of activities and programs. The initial phase – from Strachan Avenue to Bathurst Street – reinvigorates the area beneath the expressway into a vital artery for pedestrians and cyclists, stitching together seven neighbourhoods, expanding access to key areas such as the Fort York National Historic Site, and creating a new gathering place for Toronto’s growing population. The multifunctional space is an expression of Toronto’s unique creative energy and serves as an example of how the re-use of infrastructure can support new forms of public life.

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The Vessel: A Public Landmark

Heatherwick Studio

Architects: Heatherwick Studio
Location: New York, USA
Area: 2.210 m2
Year: 2019

Vessel is a new type of public landmark – a 16-storey circular climbing frame, with 2,465 steps, 80 landings and views across the Hudson River and Manhattan. It is the central feature of the main public square in the Hudson Yards development, one of the largest real estate projects in American history, which is transforming a former rail yard in Manhattan’s Upper West Side into a completely new neighbourhood, with more than five acres of new public spaces and gardens.

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Cultural Production Zone: Transformation of a Vandalized Construction

Pico Colectivo

Architects: Pico Colectivo
Location: Guácara, Venezuela
Area: 550 m2
Year: 2019
Photography: José Alberto Bastidas

Cultural units involve a center of urban creation and experimental economies, based on the transformation of a vandalized construction.

The intervention proposes addressing the need for collective spaces, as evidenced by huge gaps and precarious structures common in the center of the city. It centers on occupying a building damaged during street protests for its use as a cultural infrastructure, articulating a series of initiatives led by groups of artists and local communities.

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