ICON unveiled its Vulcan II 3D printer for homes on March 11, 2019 and announced it will begin shipping the award-winning technology next month to a small group of early customers as well as actively accepting orders for 2020.
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.
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.
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.
If we leave technology development to the other because we are not interested enough we won’t be able to drive it in the right direction.
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.
The Albarregas Park represents a major natural reserve, forming an impressive green axis, bounded by the growth of the city.
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.
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.
The “Overpark” neologism identifies a green area built from scratch above a pre-existing urban function.
In the context of an urgent need for permeable soil and vegetation for our cities, it is faster to act by addition rather than by substitution.
In a city that create mezzanines inside its buildings, creating hanging public gardens is our urban regeneration strategy.
We applied the architectural concept of the Overpark in the context of Piazzale Loreto.
Piazzale Loreto is the gateway to Milan; some of the most fast-moving parts of the city gravitate around it.
Piazzale Loreto is a rather ugly place: nothing more than a roundabout surrounded by buildings without architectural value.
Unable to impose on the owners aesthetic upgrades of façades or renovations of the entire buildings, the project radically rethinks the central space to drive the conversion of what belongs to the private sector.
This project for the restructuring of Skanderbeg Square is the result of an international architecture competition won by 51N4E in 2008. The competition’s proposal, conceived in collaboration with Albanian artist Anri Sala, reorganizes Tirana’s central square, a vast ex-communist space, in a simple yet radical way. In a complex and dense urban context, on this site that is both the core of the Albanian capital city and a symbol for the whole country, the project installs a generous pedestrian area. The square presents itself as a void in the chaos of the city, a flat pyramid lined by a densely planted periphery, formed by a collection of old and new public spaces and gardens. The resulting green belt acts as an antechamber, negotiating the transition between the congested city and the square. The oppressive monumentality of Communist architecture is counteracted by the ample and low pyramid making up the square: when standing at its tip, citizens find themselves on par with the authoritarian architecture of the past. They can contemplate the buildings defining Albania’s past, suddenly opened up to new ways of reading, and embrace them as a history on which to build.
In Transitory Urbanism, an early essay within this project, we tried to demonstrate the importance and convenience of thinking about the condition of transience when designing a contemporary public space. We criticized the trend to design public spaces as finished objects and denounced the impermeable attitude of many architects. Over time, however, we came to realize that this position was too simple.
It’s about asking and situating technologies in the right way, in the right use context so that it becomes mainstream.
Interview with Shajay Bhooshan (Senior Associate at Zaha Hadid 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.
Completed in 2008 by Mehrdad Hadighi of Studio for Architecture and Tsz Yan Ng, L-148 houses all of the functions of the Lafayette 148 clothing label. The building is organized around the flow of production, literally from conception to shipment of the final product. Office and design studios are placed at the top. Each stage of production is stacked on the floors below. The entry level functions as showroom and has the ability to transform into a runway. The building is, however, much more than a diagram of production. Throughout the building the architects deftly carved into the block to allow light to penetrate into the core and even provide exterior spaces that one is able to occupy. These spaces also help to mitigate the use of artificial cooling by drawing hot air from the building. Post-tensioned beams span the entire width of the floors, thus removing any need for interior columns. The result is a truly free plan that accommodates the wide variety of programmatic needs as well as offering bright and open workspaces.
The new Research Institute at Hospital de Sant Pau is a building conceived as a technological infrastructure in keeping with parameters of global sustainability. This ensures high comfort, optimal environmental behavior, the reduction of costs and consumption – in terms of both materials and energy – and an optimal functionality that takes into account the entire life cycle of the materials and of the building itself.
A visually distinctive new presence on the Vejle waterfront, The Wave stands as an architectural embodiment of the surrounding landscape.
The main goal of this project was not to build a villa but a case study house.
What is a case study house? R. Neutra, who designed a case study house in Los Angeles in the 1940s, said:
You’re all building with stone, when we should be building with prefabricated modules that can be easily manufactured and assembled in a week.
It was a revolution, cutting costs and providing a path to the middle class. That was R. Neutra’s approach. (There are roughly 200 case study houses in the Los Angeles area.)
Freyming-Merlebach is a town with a substantial industrial past, in a part of Lorraine that developed in the 19th century, driven by the coal mining industry.
Commissioned by Southern and Bosera Funds back in 2010, the project was envisioned to contrast with other high-rises in the vicinity because it is different. With its memorable design, based on an early sketch of how skyscrapers should look in the future drawn by Hans Hollein during his time in Chicago, it becomes a dominant statement amid the high-rises, in an exposed corner position of the cluster.
The iD Town youth hostel, on the hilltop of the seaside valley, originally served as one of the dormitory buildings in the Honghua dyeing factory’s residential area, representing the settlements of the first wave of immigrant laborers after the open-reform policy and industrialization that took place in Shenzhen.
Fluid lines allow greater degrees of freedom to articulate and organize space than rigid lines.
The new Macallan distillery and visitor experience is set into the landscape of the estate that has been distilling the world’s leading single malt since 1824. The Macallan is one of the most sought after whiskys in the world and wanted to create a building that could reveal the production processes and welcome visitors while remaining sensitive to the beautiful surrounding countryside.
Inspired by nature and local building traditions, the Town Hall in Eysturkommuna makes a subtle appearance at first glance. Nevertheless, the impact of the building is anything but minimal.
Imbrication is a metaphor used by a group of architects and the philosopher Henri Lefebvre, when they participated in an international competition on ‘The New Belgrade Urban Structure Improvement’ 1986 (Bitter & Weber 2009). They did not win the competition, but their project is interesting because the group saw imbrication as a ‘method’ to improve the urban structure. They saw imbrication as a “combinatory mode, the situational placement of different elements” (ibid.: 25), and thus tried to reflect on the constitutive forces for both the static, materialised city and the dynamic forces of city life.
They as such implicate an issue that is still crucial to urban planning: How can a structured city have a dynamic socio-spatial form and landscape? How can urban design work as giving space to events and the (everyday) eventalisation of space and place?
Indicating then, but likely not accepting, the ambition of the project points at the crucial role of vitalism and vitalist forces in shaping the use and significance of urban space (Aspen & Pløger 2015), this short article discusses complexity as a reciprocity of forces making interaction, connectivities, and disruptions.
Kampung Admiralty is Singapore’s first integrated public development that brings together a mix of public facilities and services under one roof. The traditional approach is for each government agency to carve out its own plot of land, resulting in several standalone buildings. This one-stop integrated complex, on the other hand, maximises land use and is a prototype for meeting the needs of Singapore’s ageing population.
According to Ando, the cultural role of architecture is the affirmation of individual experiences of physical and spiritual existence in the world. But this process is not being realized through the domestication of buildings or the accessibility of their spatial concept. On the contrary, it is necessary to establish a distance between the individual and the architecture to be filled with his or her existence in that space. Architecture in the conceptual sense may, therefore, not be literally transparent and easily readable, but should be discovered as a process in which an individual maintains an active relationship with the building. Still, a building for Ando may not be an ephemeral, but a permanent participant of the universal development of architectural thought. In his effort to draw the project near to the universal, Ando applies rigorous spatial geometry, as well as the reduction of the building to the minimal set of abstract materials and forms.
There’s nothing alien to use digital fabrication and digital design with addressing problems of the masses. The more knowledge is available the more people will use it to solve their issues.
Interview with Shajay Bhooshan (Senior Associate at Zaha Hadid 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.
“My inspiration always starts from the place where the project will be. I have visited Scotland many times. It is a very beautiful country and I’m truly in love with the Scottish landscape and nature. When we started this competition, the first thing I wanted to do was visit the site. I always want to do this. After all, certain things can be felt there and nowhere else.” – Kengo Kuma
As one of the first new-generation Neighbourhood Centres commissioned by Singapore’s Housing and Development Board (HDB), Oasis Terraces serves the public housing residents of Punggol, bringing together a shopping centre, a polyclinic and community amenities in a single building. The primary architectural challenge for us here is to cohere these diverse programmes into a legible whole, with an architecture that is both familiar and surprising.
“Nieuw Land will be a new kind of national park, one in which visitor experience is central. The park will be an attractive and educational experience for all generations and will bring the city and nature closer together. It will feature many dikes, marshlands and reed landscapes, new islands, and even more flora and fauna – with space for rest, darkness to view the starry sky, wilderness and adventure.” – Francine Houben
Investigations of the conditions of seabirds such as murres, puffins and cormorants, create maps based on their migratory routes, and the resting and feeding areas for the birds, where each spot and connection might be crucial for the species’ viability. These beautiful patterns of survival are of course invisible in most other maps, as they are nonexistent as physical imprint, but once traced they give important meaning and awareness to the understanding of the landscape.
Since its opening at the turn of the 20th century, Pike Place Market has become a pillar of Seattle’s urban fabric. More than just a public market, this neighborhood turned historic district is home to farmers, craftspeople, small businesses and residents, each an integral part of the area’s history and character.
In 2011, the Pike Place Market Preservation and Development Authority (PDA) was given an opportunity to reclaim the site of a former Municipal Market Building that was demolished after a fire damaged the building in 1974. After a competitive process, PDA and the City of Seattle selected a team to design a new community space that would complement the culture and spirit of the original market, the second addition to Pike Place Market in nearly 40 years.
Mapping both landscapes and seascapes with the same intensity concerning geology, biotopes, flora, habitats etc, creates a continuous map that gives new meanings, showing interconnections transcending the shore-line. Where most maps stop at the coastline, neglecting the sub-sea landscape and its importance to us, this map shows present, continuous, limitless connections.
New Koper Urban Park is set between Piranska Road and the Semedela promenade, and between the canal and the area just beyond the city market. Piranska Road represents a new stage in the development of the town’s infrastructure, while the promenade is one of the more important features of the town having once acted as the link between the city on the then-island and the mainland. As such, it counts among the characteristic elements in the panorama of Koper. The connection ran between the sea and the salt ponds. As the city developed during the past decades, the former salt-pond area was gradually filled in.
If we think of design as a search for solutions, it becomes clear that AI and designers together can explore this design space much faster and make it much wider.
Interview with Shajay Bhooshan (Senior Associate at Zaha Hadid 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.
How to connect the city center of Creil to the edge of the Oise, to a district positioned on a plateau while crossing a remarkable landscape on a vertical of 40 m? That was the main challenge in this project, led with determination by the team at the firm Espace Libre, landscapers and urban planners, with the support of the city of Creil.
On the 13 March 2011 the remote Aboriginal Community of Warrmarn, Gija Country East Kimberley in Western Australia, was struck by devastating floods that overwhelmed much of the town and damaged or destroyed most buildings. Some 350 Gija People were forced off their homelands for two years. The Walumba Aged Care Centre was born out of this disaster. The site, within the Turkey Creek river valley at Warmun, the core township for the Gija People, was selected by the Community Elders as it was adjacent to the school and close to the community centre. This location ensured that the Elders in residence could be easily accessed by the young members of the community to provide cultural and emotional support between the generations. Most of Warmun is within the 2011 flood zone (a 1:350 year event) and is adjacent to the old aged care hostel site. The former hostel was destroyed by the flood, but it was seen as important to the community to locate the new Elders Centre near this zone. The location in the flood zone generated the form of the building, with the prosaic raising of the building off the ground which allows for flood waters to flow below it, while ramps and stairs provide access for people and cars even during a flood event.
The Outreach Foundation currently provides an impactful counselling service to trauma victims in Hillbrow, an area rife with crime and violence. Counselling facilities were previously scattered around the site, and the new building brings them together into one counselling centre.
This design responds to the challenge of combining three different programs into one composite building that stretches along Rue Stendhal in the north-east part of Paris.
The Housing First (HF) approach originated in the United States during the 1990s within mental health services, inspired by the model for discharging patients from psychiatric hospitals called ‘Supported Housing’. Based on gaining immediate access to independent apartments with support from a team of health workers for chronically homeless people and groups assessed as at risk of homelessness, it spread from the Pathways to Housing model founded by psychologist Sam Tsemberis in New York in 1992. HF introduces some changes compared to other models. It reverses the institutional-clinical approach from both a health and a welfare perspective. The key element is the direct transition from the street to a home. Very quickly, therefore, HF has also proven an effective and potentially revolutionary intervention to address homelessness in different contexts, including in England, France, Finland, Portugal, Spain and other countries. In Italy, as we argue in the following pages, it has the potential to provide a new direction for homelessness policies in a context in which chronic homelessness has increased: the Italian Institute of Statistics (ISTAT) reveals that there are 50,724 homeless people (roofless and houseless people) in Italy (up 3,071 from 2011), and that 21.4% of those have lived on the street from more than four years (ISTAT, 2014). Since 2011, supply – the number of beds and meals provided by 768 organisations – has increased by 15%, despite a more or less stable number of homeless people. This means that the same person is using the same services more and more times in the same week (three times more for beds and five times more for meals in one week), with severe consequences for the welfare system and costs to local authorities, as well as for living conditions.
Zero Flat is a new typology of apartment for chronically homeless persons with difficulties adapting to any other housing resource due to the high degree of their social exclusion. It is a low-demand apartment intended for persons with difficulty accepting the common, basic cohabitation rules of most homeless shelters.
An innovative indoor sleeping pod for homeless people has been designed by architects Reed Watts. Launching at the 999 Club’s night shelter in Deptford (London), the 10 pods deliver private and secure temporary accommodation that can be assembled by hand and is available to everyone under the Creative Commons license.
With a shortage of public-sector housing, funding, and resource, the architectural profession stands uniquely placed to use its understanding of the built environment to help ensure those who live in it are not marginalised by it. However, housing remains central to the hardships of those most in need with the leading cause of the UK’s growing homelessness problem being the end of an assured shorthold tenancy.
We are missing the opportunity to use digital platforms to create new ventures or activities within the city and to facilitate a new democratic discourse, which can be cultivated through civic technology.
Christian emphasises the need to focus on common approaches to generating language and the need to foster an experimental process to commons-based governance grounded in mapping, prototyping and testing.
Shenzhen has been growing rapidly since being named a “special economic zone” in 1980. High-rise structures have transformed the city’s skyline as its population has grown to over 12 million. Located in the city’s eastern Longgang district, the Cultural Centre contributes a rich and varied cultural programme housed in an iconic urban connector.
The Tuxtla Gutiérrez Children’s Museum was conceived with the aim of creating a project to promote the social and cultural advancement of children in the capital city of the state of Chiapas, in southeastern Mexico.
The Massana School is part of the long transformation process focused on Gardunya Square, located in the heart of Barcelona’s historic center.
Situated in a severely poverty-stricken area, where social services such as clinics and schools have largely remained unavailable to citizens, the African School for Excellence (ASE) is one of the first township-based private schools.
The educational concept of the “Munich Learning House” (Münchener Lernhaus) is the starting point for the development of an intelligent and constructively mature learning house module that consists of four classrooms each, two interconnected rooms for full-day care and a working area for teaching and support staff, all arranged around a central communal space.
Following their competition win in 2013, Walters & Cohen first undertook a masterplan and space audit of the school’s existing facilities, which were spread across two sites. At that time, the small parcel of land between them became available and was the ideal site for the new 1,620m2 library and sixth form centre, funded by the Peter Harrison Foundation.
We have to acknowledge that we – human beings – are here on the planet and we make our mark. But how can we do it in a good way to turn old nature in next nature?
Discussing the need to connect ecology with economy, Koert van Mensvoort talks of a new notion of nature and the roles different mediums play in transmitting that message.
Lofoten is a history of extremes: extreme nature, extreme weather conditions, extreme natural resources and extreme survival. The islands of Lofoten float in a timeless mythical narration of battling between man and nature, dating back to the origin of human presence in these territories. The fact that Lofoten has hosted the world’s most precious fisheries of codfish for centuries in the same areas where the seabed is assumed to hide a prosperous amount of oil and gas, and which are now experiencing a significant influx of tourists, signifies a latent and incommensurable conflict that could irreversibly change the landscape. The people living in these territories have been connected to the landscape and its resources for innumerable years. They are therefore facing not only external threats from global economies and climate changes, but also national political decisions and structural changes in the fisheries which threaten to deprive local communities of their resources. These ongoing processes have long altered the way people have used and inhabited the landscape, but now more than ever there is a need for awareness and knowledge to build resilience – to maintain flexibility in the face of change – but, at the same time, to be in control of the changes’ impacts on the complex ecology of landscapes and societies.
urbanNext interviews Philippe Rahm on technology, climate and how architecture aims to cater human’s physiological needs.
The health and wellbeing of people and their surroundings are the keys to HAUS – a responsible, creative way of approaching architecture with the aim of bringing added value to standardised construction.
The construction project manager Marcove and architects BAILORULL combine their experience and reliability to create HAUS, an innovative proposal that applies healthy criteria to the spaces we live in with the aim of improving the lives of people and the environment.
urbanNext interviews Dan Lewis on the Cities Adapting to a More Extreme Climate, within the Smart City Expo World Congress 2017.
The fact that quality of life is deteriorating in numerous cities all over the world and urban systems are having an impact on our planet’s ecosystems means that we must change how we currently create cities and the bases underpinning change processes. A new theoretical and instrumental framework must be established for designing new urban developments and above all, the regeneration of existing ones. Urban ecology is a discipline which has a necessary theoretical framework for facing the urban reality holistically and systemically and it is the only discipline which can harmonise urban transformation processes with the laws of nature.
The challenge of the project was to develop a climate adaptation which could also promote improved urban living: connecting fragmented urban areas, creating new attractive meeting points, and bringing nature closer to the residents.
SCAPE is working with the City of Boston on a comprehensive and transformative vision that will invest in Boston’s waterfront to guide open space investments toward more resilient and accessible communities. In October 2018, Mayor Martin J. Walsh announced the plan in his annual speech to the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce, laying out strategies along Boston’s 47-mile shoreline that will increase access and open space along the waterfront while better protecting the city during a major flooding event.
In my opinion the city should not be a corporate infrastructure; the city should be a social infrastructure. It is a fantastic challenge to start designing this social infrastructure and there is a rising awareness against the omnipresence of digital infrastructures.
Discussing the constantly evolving meanings of ideas such as the ‘smart city’ and ‘start-up’, Willem Velthoven went back to the beginnings of Mediamatic and the promising potential that can be found in the intersections of technology and biology.
The field of freedom shrinks with speed. And freedom needs a field. When there is no more field, our lives will be like a terminal, a machine with doors that open and close.
Paul Virilio [1]
“Construction,” Walter Benjamin has written, “fulfills the role of the unconscious.” He was writing in the 1930s, describing the development of cast-iron construction in the early decades of the nineteenth century. In those years, cast-iron, coupled with glass, made possible the Parisian arcades and with them a transformative new space of social encounter was created. But, as Benjamin accurately observes, the integration of these new building technologies was not seamless. The arcades, with their hidden mid-block locations, entered by passing behind the limestone street walls of the Parisian boulevards, precisely mapped Benjamin’s divide between a collective conscious and unconscious of the city. In the nineteenth century railroad terminal these two worlds remained even more resolutely separated. Iron and glass were extensively used in the vast long-span sheds that housed the platforms and the rail lines, while the terminal building itself–the face to the city–took the form of an ornate palace, deploying all the apparatus of monumental classical architecture to mark entry into the city.
The representational logic of the beaux-arts architect and the functional logic of the engineer faced off without intermingling.
Overground railway stations constitute a brusque interruption of urban continuity, leaving an empty space in the city that often brings social segregation with it. Undergrounding the tracks with the station at street level, conversely, is an opportunity to develop a new project that restores connectivity to uncommunicated areas, creating a large, central public park on which the station roof makes its geometric, topographic imprint.
urbanNext interviews Marijke de Roeck on “Smart Ways to Antwerp”, a programme that combines urban planning and mobility to encourage more sustainable transport choices.
A tangle of highways splits neighborhoods and parks throughout Queens into disjointed fragments impeding safe travel by foot or bicycle. Joby Jacob, a biology professor at LaGuardia Community College, and John Kelly, an IT consultant, are two residents of Eastern Queens working to reclaim the erstwhile Vanderbilt Motor Parkway, using its right-of-way to create a bike network that will reconnect the borough and link it to both Brooklyn and Long Island. We speak to them about the history of the Motor Parkway, the diverse communities it now traverses, current challenges to its rebirth, and the curious alignment between vintage motorcar enthusiasts and greenway bikers.
In 2008, an international architectural design competition was held to select the best project for the New Passenger Terminal at Franjo Tuđman International Airport Zagreb. In order to ensure architectural excellence, an international competition jury invited 10 world-renowned architects, together with 10 accomplished Croatian architects, to participate, ultimately awarding first prize and commission to the entry designed by Croatian authors-architects Branko Kincl, Velimir Neidhardt and Jure Radić.
Reiterating Houston’s long-standing relationship with space travel, Ellington Airport is now home to the Houston Spaceport. The Spaceport is within a 15-minute drive of the central business district, making it the most urban commercial spaceport to date and positioning Houston as the most cosmically connected city in the world. A new short video from AERIAL FUTURES explores the spaceport as a new kind of architectural typology, and asks what kind of impact a spaceport is likely to have on the city and its population.
The new rail station at Napoli Afragola is designed as one of southern Italy’s key interchange stations, serving four high-speed intercity lines, three interregional lines and a local commuter line.
Development is currently starting on the central axis of the new multimodal hub, which will channel all the flows of traffic meeting here, creating a new centrality for the site.
The traffic flows include the new tram system, buses, bicycles and pedestrians – different movements with different needs.
urbanNext interviews Juan Carlos Sánchez Tappan on Paul Virilio’s thoughts about the impact of speed and technology in cities.
urbanNext interviews Juan Carlos Sánchez Tappan on Paul Virilio’s thoughts on migration and ecology and its impact on the urban environment.
This project is about the integral remodeling of Aura’s insurance company building, located in the urban center of Santa Coloma de Gramenet, inside the metropolitan area of Barcelona.
The creation of the new headquarters of Gide, the top French international business law firm, is one of the most important redevelopments in Paris in recent years. Situated on Place Saint-Augustin, the headquarters embody the “metabolic” reconstruction of Paris within itself, as well as the creation of new corporate spaces for fostering collective intelligence.
The 96,000m2 office development for the state-owned Shenzhen Energy Company is designed to look and feel at home in the cultural, political and business center of Shenzhen, while standing out as a new social and sustainable landmark at the main axis of the city.
Currently the world’s largest residential building in modular timber construction, “Woodie” offers micro-appartments for 371 students. The building is part of a new residential district in the Wilhelmsburg area of Hamburg, which builds on the experimental character of the 2013 International Building Exhibition and embodies the principles of universal design: sustainable, simple and inclusive.
KAAN Architecten has designed “CUBE”, the new Education and Self Study Center at Tilburg University (Netherlands). This compact and ostensibly low structure blends into its surrounding green landscape and into the larger architectural ensemble of the Dutch educational campus, which includes the quintessential Cobbenhagen building of the Catholic College of Economics, constructed back in the 1960s.
If the United Nations are right and Finland is the happiest nation in the world, architecture plays at least a small part in that. In Finland, architecture and design are considered every person’s right, a means for creating wellbeing. New libraries, museums and schools are places for learning, relaxing and meeting. Finns have always improved their society with new ideas and innovations.
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.
The site chosen for this small addition of a children’s library to a school in rural Maharashtra was a sliver between existing buildings and the school boundary, a site that almost implied a linear building footprint to adjust the program to the chosen site. Alluding to the impetus that children have towards landscape over a building, we imagined the library building to be a formal extension of the ground plane: a place inside for study and a place above for play. With the limited teaching resources available in the larger vicinity, we needed the inspiring spatial experience to be a magnet to attract students, and hopefully other residents from the nearby settlements, after school hours.
What is the ontology of architecture? One way to understand this question is to take it as asking after the basic elements of architectural practice. Another is to take the question as directed at the being of architecture, its proper limits and grounds. It is in this latter sense that I wish to put the question here. When taken in this sense, it seems there can be only one answer: more so than any other mode of human activity, architecture has its being in the human engagement with place, and more specifically, in the engagement with place as opened through building.
urbanNext interviews Juan Carlos Sanchez Tappan on Paul Virilio and the space-body relationship.
Mapleton Crescent SW18 neighbours Wandsworth’s River Wandle and was completed in 2018. This distinctive slender tower is clad in 3 profiles of beautiful turquoise terracotta. Metropolitan Workshop collaborated with local artist Loraine Rutt to develop the special glazing and colour.
Wohnen ohne Auto (or “Living without a car” in English) is a co-housing project, developed in a process of participatory design with a community of future residents. The project features a series of strategies intended to minimize the superfluous, establish a collective attitude towards sharing, and facilitate more sustainable behavior in general.
The aims of Greencity are set very high. With the completion of the cooperative housing development a basic part of the foundations for the project of creating a communally-oriented district in the sense of the ‘2000 Watt Society’ will be laid. The building regulations and the specific challenges of the building plots (traffic noise, distances to street and train) leave only limited room for manoeuvre in terms of urban planning. This made it seem all the more important to us to develop a powerful building figure that can give the new quarter a definite face. The elongated plot A forms the start to the new urban district Greencity and is strongly influenced by the neighbouring infrastructure elements of the street and the Sihltal railway line.
On Avenue de Clichy Avenue, at the corner with rue Bernard Buffet, the architects Stéphane Bigoni and Antoine Mortemard recently completed a social housing project that points toward one of the entrances to Martin Luther King park.
Totaling over 1.9 million sf, Aqua Tower is an 82-story mixed-use high-rise that includes a hotel, apartments, condominiums, parking and offices. Unlike a tower in an open field, new towers in urban environments must negotiate small view corridors between existing buildings. In response to this, the Aqua Tower is designed to capture particular views that would otherwise be unattainable. Among the building’s notable features is the green roof terrace atop its plinth—which at 80,000 sf is one of Chicago’s largest—that contains an outdoor pool, running track, gardens, fire pits and yoga terrace.
Spirit of Space captures the story behind the design of Aqua Tower.
As the centrepiece of Copenhagen’s redeveloped Nordhavn (North Harbour), Danish architects COBE and clients Klaus Kastbjerg and NRE Denmark unveil the completed transformation of The Silo. The former industrial silo was originally used as a storage container for grain. Fifty years later, the 17-storey silo has been converted for new use as a residential apartment building with 38 unique units, ranging from 106 m2 to 401 m2 in size, and with public functions such as event and dining facilities on the upper and lower levels. 
Wafra Vertical Housing introduces a new concept in urban living that adapts to the evolving lifestyle of 21st-century Kuwait. Considering the increasing demand for land in the city, the transformation of single-family dwelling typologies becomes a must, where tenants should be able to enjoy privacy as well as benefit from vertical solution amenities and prime locations.
I think the starting point is that technologies are not neutral. Technologies are systems, instructions, algorithms that are based on certain assumptions, and we have to talk about these assumptions within these systems. If we talk about these principles our technologies can become more inclusive, open, societal and accountable.
Marleen Stikker discusses the professionalization of language and how the Waag Society aims to bridge the gaps in this has created in democraticing technology.
