Founder of this wonderful platform called ArchDaily :) Graduate Architect. Jury, speaker, curator, and anything that is required to spread our mission across the world. You can follow me on Instagram @dbasulto.
This new building will offer 170,000sqf for studios, rehearsal space, director’s cut screening rooms, state–of–the art acoustical theaters, lecture rooms and set–building shops, that will be shared by many departments including visual arts, theater, music, as well as cinema and media studies.
The project includes a 11-story tall tower, which will become a new landmark at the south of the campus. At the top of this tower we find the Performance Penthouse, a tall space for performances and rehearsals with an amazing view over the city (see render below).
The rest of the complex is distributed on smaller buildings, with an interesting set of skylights to naturally lit the interiors.
As usual in Tod Williams Billie Tsien works, such as the American Folk Art Museum in New York, the Phoenix Art Museum and the East Asian Library at Berkeley, the simplicity of the materials (stone and glass) give the building a contemporary yet ageless look, a building that will stand over time, not just a fad.
Miami has been changing a lot over this last decade, turning into a rich cultural city. Events such as Art Basel Miami Beach (the most important art event in the US) and buildings by international architects are part of this ongoing change.
One of these new projects in the city is 1111 Lincoln Road, a development envisioned by Robert Wennett and materialized by swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron.
This mixed use project is currently being built at the corner of Alton and Lincoln, one of the most active pedestrian areas in the city, and it will include residences, retail spaces and parking. Parking takes a central space in this building, with one of the best views I have ever seen on a parking space.
Jacques Herzog stated that this builing will reinterpret the essence of Tropical Modernism, and somehow it reminds me of the modern movement in Brazil, with huge structures providing shade, while containing smaller enclosing elements. The slabs stand over a set of irregular columns, giving a sense of a precarious equilibrium. This columns also cast different shadows, giving more character to the facade.
I´m very interested on seeing how this project ends up, and how this can affect (in a positive way) the extension of the Miami Art Museum, another project by Herzog & de Meuron for the city.
Photographer Paul Clemence shared with us some photos of this project during construction, on which you can see more about the expressive concrete structure.
More renderings and the construction photos after the break.
Spanish architect Francisco Mangado is currently working on the design of a tower in the capital city of Argentina. The 200m tall building will be the tallest tower in Buenos Aires.
The project, located in the Puerto Madero area, includes over 68.000sqm, for housing, an hotel, restaurants, commercial space and parking.
The big dilema of this kind of project in the city is the public space, most of the times only approached at ground level. Francisco Mangado’s strategy includes public program along the tower, as a vertical boulevard.
After the residences on the first levels, we find a public lobby on floor 27th, with public services and restaurants, where the tower varies in section as you can see on the drawings below. We find more public facilities at the top, continuing with this openness of the program as the tower develops.
And in order to have a complete list, he has asked for the help of ArchDaily’s readers to find “diamonds in the rough” in NY, and I´m pretty sure you can do it:
Site: Vitoria, Spain Architect: Francisco José Mangado Beloqui Work direction: Francisco José Mangado Beloqui Collaborators: Architecture: José Mª Gastaldo, Richard Král’ovič, Eduardo Pérez de Arenaza. Structural engineering: NB 35 SL (Jesús Jiménez Cañas / Alberto López) Ingenieros. Installations engineering: Iturralde y Sagüés ingenieros / César Martín Gómez. Acoustic engineering: Higini Arau. Estudi Acustic. Lighting: ALS Lighting arquitectos consultores de iluminación (Antón Amann). Quantity surveyor: Laura Montoya López de Heredia. Contractor: UTE Arqueología (Dragados SA, Lagunketa SA). Total area: 6.000 m2 Total cost: $9.000.000 € Competition: 2000. First Prize Project Contest Project: 2002-2003 Construction: 2004-2009 Client: Diputación Foral de Álava. Photos: Courtesy of Francisco Mangado
The idea is that people nominate Websites, Flickrs, Facebook Pages or Twitter accounts during a first round, and the top 5 nominees for each category go to the final round of voting to determine the best of the web.
During my trip to Croatia to participate in CIP Talks 2009, I had the chance to meet an interesting group of young architects with very good built works, which we have been featuring on ArchDaily during this days. I also interviewed some of them, and I will be presenting these interview in the following days along with their works.
When we interviewed Jeffrey Inaba at the C-Lab last year, he told us about his research on altruism, which was the base for his new book “World of Giving”.
One of the US practices I’ve been looking forward to meet has been Trahan Architects. Based in Louisiana, the firm has been very involved in institutional projects for the local community (such as the Holy Rosary Church Complex and the Baton Rouge Library), universities and also in Make It Right.
While looking for works to feature on ArchDaily like a year and a half ago, I was going through a norwegian magazine I found at a friend’s house and saw an enigmatic copper building sitting in the snow: the Svalbard Science Centre (pictured above). Since it was in norwegian, all I could figure out was the name of the practice: JVA.
We have received an update on the design of the Baton Rouge Downtown Library by Trahan Architects, which clarifies several aspects of the circulations, the relation with the surroundings and details of the facade.
The facade looks very interesting, and on the diagrams you can see how the exterior envelope varies along the elevation to achieve the folded paper like look. A detail of the section reveals further information about this.
All the diagrams/drawings, courtesy of Trahan Architects, after the break.
Louisiana based Trahan Architects, a firm with expertise in institutional design and religious architecture (check the Holy Rosary Church Complex, remarkable project), recently unveiled conceptual design for the renovation and expansion of the River Center Branch Library.
The project stands at the intersection between civic buildings and the city’s arts and entertainment district, overlooking a new town square. This new building becomes an urban piece, exposing the interior activity to the outside with a rippled translucent skin. But also the library takes care of the exterior, with reading areas and a urban patio.
As with changes on how people consume information, the typical library approach as a storage/reading facility gets obsolete. In response to this, the project is a public place for gathering and sharing around information, with circulation patterns that place stationary structures in the center of the floors and create space for staff and patron interaction, with movable parts and multiple paths along the perimeter.
During this days, the changes of information trough technology challenge library designs, while offering an opportunity to become important public spaces among our cities. In this way, I think this concept has a good start.
The influential figure of Eric Owen Moss doesn´t require introduction… what an interesting conversation we had, Bob Dylan included. A bit long, but worth it.
On a side note, when I came by his office I saw a gigantic book called “Eric Owen Moss Construction Manual”… which I thought was like an internal book for new employees, but is actually a monograph covering design, engineering, fabrication, and construction of 40 projects over the past 20 years. Impressive. See a video after the break.
BIG, in collaboration with AKT, Tyréns and Transsolar, just won the competition for the World Village of Women Sports in Malmo, Sweden, a 100.000sqm complex for research, education and training of women’s sports.
Rather than a program organized around a sports arena disconnected from the city, the project becomes a town inside a town, offering rich public spaces as you can see on the renderings.
The central space of the village offers a large area for public gathering, which can host professional football matches, concerts, conferences, exhibitions and flea markets. Around this space we find a series of sloped buildings, which reduce the visual impact of the complex to the adjacent neighborhood.
Between these buildings we find a pedestrian network around the main sports hall which plugs into the surrounding street networks as well as the interior galleries of Kronprinsen, turning it into a complete ecosystem of urban life.
John Jay College of Criminal Justice, an active college in the City University of New York, currently occupies a former Public School building, Haaren Hall, on 10th Avenue between 58th and 59th Streets. With ownership of the entire Manhattan block, the college has ambitions to grow over two phases into the full Zoning capacity of the block. The charge of this project is to occupy the entire site with an integrated campus while providing a base for future growth.
The Chicago and Shanghai offices of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (SOM) won the international design competition to expand the Beijing Central Business District (CBD). This project was also awarded an AIA Honor Award.
Basically, their plan proposes the creation of 3 new districts anchored by parks and green boulevards as you can see on the renderings. But the an important aspects of this project is on the small scale, a network of walkable blocks to offer pedestrian (and bike) friendly scale for development. Because sustainable doesn´t have to mean just “green”, but also to offer an environment on which people can actually establish social relations on a neighborhood scale.
The plan also proposes an express commuter rail service between the Beijing Capital International Airport, the CBD, and high speed rail service at Beijing South Station. A new streetcar system is proposed to conveniently link all areas of the CBD.
Sometimes, a good transportation system and focusing on the pedestrian scale sound obvious, but they are the foundations to establish neighborhoods that can bring life to parts of the city 24/7, instead of business districts that die at night with dormitory cities with a lack of services.
A few months ago I had the chance to interview Ila Berman, director of the Architecture program at the California College of the Arts. She holds a doctorate in architectural history, theory, and criticism from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design.
A month ago we presented you the finalist entries for Stadskantoor, a new mixed used building at Rotterdam’s City Hall. After a process of public feedback and a presentation to the professional jury, OMA‘s entry was awarded with the 1st prize.
The strategy of the project is very simple: a modular flexible structure spans between existing buildings, supporting the mixed use program, while freeing the space below for public use. The axonometric shown below shows this rich public realm that the offers back to the city.
With this modular structure, units can be added or even dismounted from the structure as demands on the building change over time, and can adapt to either office space or residential parameters as desired. Green terraces on higher levels provide the possibility of an apartment with a garden in the heart of urban Rotterdam.
