OODA in Taipei City

It’s another in a series of cutting-edge projects designed for the blooming Asian market. The competition for the Taipei City Museum of Art has drawn a large number proposals, including the one by Porto-based OODA Architecture, which received a merit award. The aim of the competition was to provide a new landmark for the urban center.

The proposed concept is based on two hypercubes; a 90 degree angled cube suspended within a larger contorted volumetric box. The main museum is located within the cube, and above the Children Museum of Art. The latter is positioned below the open public space and sheltered by the main building. The Museum of Art itself flows on a continuous ramp between the outer skin and the hyper core cube inside, all the way to the top. The galleries are located along the ramp, which spirals upwards, around the art resource center. The administrative units are situated at the top.

Structurally, continuous steel frames run from corner to corner and support the entire object. The double skin system provides a double curvature of the façade, suitable for facilitating mechanisms for harvesting rainwater and sunpower. Optimal ventilation is achieved by inserting atrium spaces within the volume.

 

Toxic by Kadri Kerge

Toxicity/contamination/mutation/distortion is a hybride which synthesizes a library and garden into a one spacial continuum. The project designed by Kadri Kerge at the University of Applied Arts Vienna is located in the Burggarten, Vienna – which served as a private royal garden for the Habsburg family. It is situated between the Austrian National Library and a large greenhouse called Palmenhaus that sits at a right angle to it. The roots of the plants from the greenhouse grow out of the container, break the sealed ground and as a mutants combine nature and building. They overlap with the context in housing part of the program of institutions nearby like The Austrian Film Museum, the National Library, and the Albertina Museum.

Toxic Garden is a self-sustainable building generating heat and power through the plants which are growing in the building. The energy design concept provides a range of microclimatic conditions as interfaces between user, information and nature. The building of the Austrian National library is an opulent baroque structure that has housed the Imperial book collection between 1721 and 1918, that was then nationalized.
Since 2011 the National Library archive has been fully digitized, and therefore the physical space of books has been abstracted. The extension of the library is a new type of social environement. It creates different types of atmospheres forreading, working, discovery and community.

The Toxic Garden is an integration of nature and the artificial, of garden and information that has no body. The vegetation of the Burggarten becomes part of the library space and according to the four seasons it transforms atmospheres and functions. In the could season when the Burggarten is naked, the library becomes a green house. In summer the building is naked and opens the program to park activities .
 

Skyricketing Housing

In China, the number of young bachelors is drastically raising because of the skyrocketing housing prices and women are unwilling to marry men without a property. As a result, young graduates spend most of their time working hard but remain single until they can afford a property. In order to cater for this trend, developers start launching smaller housing units to the market. This project designed by Kellen Qiaolun Huang from Cornell University aims at exploring different ways of how these bachelor housing units can be designed other than just being smaller.

Home activities can be divided into two categories: private activities (sleeping, bathing, etc.) and public activities (cooking, eating, reading, relaxing, etc.). Researching and remapping the topological relationship between these two categories are the keys to this project. An X-shaped pattern is generated as result: a private space is being placed in the center with four quarters of public spaces in the corners. The pattern may seem meaningless to individuals until all units are aggregated to form a large interconnecting social network. This network becomes the prototype of X-House.

Several studies have been carried out to investigate the evolution from an X-pattern to the spatial prototype. The mature X-spatial prototype is a model with bedroom and bathroom space in the center and four quarters of sharable space in those four corners. A typical sharable space includes living room, reading/study room, dining room and a multifunctional room.

Another issue addressed by this X-spatial prototype is the concept of connectivity. There are three degrees of connectivity within this model. The largest degree is allowed by a staircase at the back of the design which provides direct and physical connection. The intermediate degree allows visual connection among people in different spaces at the front of the model. The smallest degree lies in the middle of the X-spatial prototype and gives people some privacy.

e Volo

eco Manhattan

New York-based architects Chimera unveiled a proposal for a new skyscraper in Manhattan that explores the emergent logics of adaptation and evolution that are constitutive of ecosystems in nature. The architects’ vision is to define an urban ecosystem which supports housing and cultural programs and has the ability to adapt, transform, mutate, and adjust according to the specific urban and social character of the site. This urban ecological system is taking as a model an organism in nature, specifically the mangrove plant. The mangrove plant and its collective the mangal, provide examples of social associative principles as well as structural capacities and hybrid responses to environmental and contextual conditions.

The project deals both with the complex topography of the site and its connectivity to the Manhattan. The new ground has been defined by creating an elevated plateau  generated by the potential directionality of human fluxes on the site. This oriented space is being partitioned following a logic of cellular aggregation, embedding neighbouring relationships at different scales, and is also the ground reference of the urban housing massing negotiation. Models from nature such as phyllotaxis and branching have been our driving paradigms to define a parametric machine which is able to create a responsive urban ecology.
 

a new eating Down

Περαιτέρω κάμψη παρουσίασε η οικοδομική δραστηριότητα στη χώρα τον Απρίλιο, με τις οικοδομικές άδειες να σημειώνουν νέα πτώση της τάξης του 25,3%, όπως προκύπτει από τα στοιχεία της ΕΛ.ΣΤΑΤ.

Πιο αναλυτικά, το μέγεθος της συνολικής οικοδομικής δραστηριότητας (ιδιωτικής - δημόσιας) στο σύνολο της χώρας μετρούμενο με βάση τις εκδοθείσες οικοδομικές άδειες διαμορφώθηκε σε 2.789 οικοδομικές άδειες, που αντιστοιχούν σε 494,3 χιλιάδες m2 επιφάνειας και 1.903,4 χιλιάδες m3 όγκου.

Παρουσίασε, δηλαδή, μείωση κατά 25,3% στον αριθμό των οικοδομικών αδειών, κατά 36,4% στην επιφάνεια και κατά 32,3% στον όγκο, σε σχέση με τον αντίστοιχο μήνα του 2010.

Το μέγεθος της ιδιωτικής οικοδομικής δραστηριότητας, στο σύνολο της χώρας, διαμορφώθηκε σε 2.772 οικοδομικές άδειες, που αντιστοιχούν σε 476,1 χιλιάδες m2 επιφάνειας και 1.847,5 χιλιάδες m3 όγκου. Παρουσίασε, δηλαδή, μείωση κατά 25,2% στον αριθμό των οικοδομικών αδειών, κατά 35,7% στην επιφάνεια και κατά 30,3% στον όγκο σε σχέση με τον αντίστοιχο μήνα του 2010.

Αντίστοιχα το μέγεθος της δημόσιας οικοδομικής δραστηριότητας κατά το μήνα Απρίλιο 2011, στο σύνολο της χώρας, ανήλθε σε 17 οικοδομικές άδειες, που αντιστοιχούν σε 17,7 χιλιάδες m2 επιφάνειας και 55,9 χιλιάδες m3 όγκου.

Το ποσοστό συμμετοχής της δημόσιας οικοδομικής δραστηριότητας στο συνολικό οικοδομικό όγκο, για το μήνα Απρίλιο 2011, είναι 2,9%.

Κατά την περίοδο των τελευταίων δώδεκα μηνών, δηλαδή από το Μάιο 2010 έως τον Απρίλιο 2011, το μέγεθος της συνολικής οικοδομικής δραστηριότητας μετρούμενο με βάση τις εκδοθείσες οικοδομικές άδειες, στο σύνολο της χώρας, διαμορφώθηκε σε 42.891 οικοδομικές άδειες, που αντιστοιχούν σε 8.644,9 χιλιάδες m2 επιφάνειας και 31.296,7 χιλιάδες m3 όγκου.

Παρατηρήθηκε, δηλαδή, μείωση κατά 22,2% στον αριθμό των οικοδομικών αδειών, κατά 29,7% στην επιφάνεια και κατά 30,7% στον όγκο σε σχέση με την αντίστοιχη περίοδο Μαΐου 2009 - Απριλίου 2010.

naftemporiki.gr

by Takasaki in the Mining History

The Everrest project designed by Simon Takasaki is a  monument that commemorates the end of mining in Duhamel, Germany. The design characterizes by its careful integration to the landscape, urban context, and historical site..
The 30 meters-high, walk-in sculpture, holds the ‘path of the history’ of the site.
As a memorial, the sculpture offers the viewer a path within a mountain appearing as part of the natural topography.
The path leads over a natural base of broken bricks, boulders, and a well lit and airy great hall -a space designed for contemplation and inspiration.
It serves for exhibitions or smaller events such as chamber of music or reading room .

The project’s geometry gives the impression of being  a cave that communicates to the outside world through a series of openings.
The syncretic inversion of the mountain surrounds the visitor as continuos space that extends to the observation deck.

Seen from outside, the sculpture seems to be formed by invisible forces of nature: an amorphous entity.
On the one hand strong winds have been compressed and formed a dynamic,
harmonious formation,
on the other, destructive forces and dissonances are at work and fragment the choreography of the monument.

into a Science Center

Award-winning architects KSP Jürgen Engel Architekten International has won the first prize in an international competition for the new Beijing Science Center. The original building housing the Museum was opened at the same location in Beijing in 1988 and at the time was the first national science and technology museum in China. The museum building will be constructed on behalf of the Beijing Association for Science and Technology, China.

In the south and east the building opens onto a spacious public plaza, shielding the adjoining residential quarters in the north from the busy roads. At the same time the museum forecourt is not only the place where visitors arrive but also somewhere the inhabitants of the neighbouring districts can spend time. Trees and expanses of greenery create a natural transition and a visual dividing line between the exhibition building and the road.

The new building’s key element is a floating structure measuring 133.5m x 133.5m, which rises above the pedestal building at a height of around 20m. This roof is supported by numerous, extremely slender columns, which, based on the image of a bamboo grove, form a concentrated forest of columns. They create a spatial transition from the public road to the scientific exhibition area.

e Volo

in north Jeddah, the Highest

Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture just unveiled their proposal for the new world’s highest skyscraper. At over 1,000 meters (3,280 feet) and a total construction area of 530,000 square meters (5.7 million square feet), Kingdom Tower will be the centerpiece and first construction phase of the Kingdom City development on a 5.3 million-square-meter site in north Jeddah. The tower’s height will be at least 173 meters (568 feet) taller than the world’s current tallest building, Dubai’s 828-meter-tall Burj Khalifa, which was designed by Adrian Smith while at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. Kingdom Tower will feature a Four Seasons hotel, Four Seasons serviced apartments, Class A office space, luxury condominiums and the world’s highest observatory.

Design development of the tower is under way, with construction to begin imminently. Foundation drawings are complete and the piling for the tower is currently being tendered. Kingdom Tower will cost approximately $1.2 billion to construct, while the cost of the entire Kingdom City project is anticipated to be $20 billion.
AS+GG is leading an interdisciplinary design team that also includes building services engineering consultants Environmental Systems Design, Inc. (ESD) and structural engineering consultants Thornton Tomasetti. The developer of Kingdom City, Jeddah Economic Company (JEC), selected the AS+GG scheme after a lengthy competition process in which SOM, Pickard Chilton, Kohn Pedersen Fox, Pelli Clarke Pelli and Foster + Partners also participated.

“Our vision for Kingdom Tower is one that represents the new spirit of Saudi Arabia,” said Smith, whose experience in supertall tower design at SOM also includes Jin Mao Tower in Shanghai, Nanjing Greenland Financial Center in Nanjing, China, the Trump International Hotel & Tower in Chicago and Pearl River Tower, now in the late stages of construction in Guangzhou, China. “This tower symbolizes the Kingdom as an important global business and cultural leader, and demonstrates the strength and creative vision of its people. It represents new growth and high-performance technology fused into one powerful iconic form.”

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a Design by Lu and Joongsik Yang

This project for a new bus terminal near San Francisco’s Bay Bridge was conceived as an investigation on parametric design and Voronoi algorithms. The project was developed by Bin Lu and Joongsik Yang at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (Sci-Arc) as a urban strategy that considers scripting, parametric design, and sustainable technologies as a design tool that produces form through the analysis of environmental, urban, and economic data.

The architects used voronoi patterns that analyzed the main stream of people coming to the bus station from different directions at various points in time. The result is a tree-like structure with a cellular pattern that opens to the sky, catches solar energy, and directs the visitors to specific views.