Ensuring a platform for everyone, ArchDaily is rounding up, every once in a while, a curated selection from our readers’ submissions. With proposals coming from all over the world, our aim is to feature the best Unbuilt Architecture out there.
In this article, we are highlighting proposals that were awarded the first prize in international competitions. Each one of these projects showcases a unique conceptual approach and responds to a different program. With a mixed-use project in France, a market in Helsinki, an aquarium in New York and a civic building in Norway, to name a few, the variety of these unbuilt interventions underlines the vast scope of the architectural field.
Read on to discover 10 unbuilt winning projects and their descriptions.
L’arbre de vie
Located in Créteil, France, the project, a hybrid 50,000 m² of mixed-use facilities, puts in place offices, housing, restaurants, amphitheater, classrooms, and a sport-health center. According to the architects, L’arbre de vie or the Tree of Life intervention brings together nature and architecture, representing therefore physical and spiritual bloom. Characterized by its shape, the project is deeply-rooted underground while its ramifications grow and reach the sky. L’arbre de vie won the call for proposals launched by Grand Paris Sud-Est Avenir on the site Ilot Jacquard.
LAND-MARK
LAND-MARK, winner of the first place at Dubai Creek Harbour Design Competition held by Emaar, offers a unique interpretation of urban landscape and presents an innovative harmony between waterways, urban areas and pedestrian walkways. The intervention was conceived to be a public, social environment on the coast for pedestrians to enjoy Dubai Creek Harbor. The geometry of LAND-MARK presents a gentle composition of paths and walls that invite users to wander along its extensions, reflecting the horizontal properties of the desert.
NYC AQUATRIUM
Lissoni Architettura winner of the design ideas contest for a new aquarium and public waterfront park in New York promotes through its project the benefits that this program would bring to Queens and New York as a new platform for cultural architecture and experimentation. In fact, AQUATRIUM creates a dynamic system that interacts with its surroundings, offering multiple ways to experience the water world, represented by eight triple-height transparent biomes: four Oceans and four Seas. Moreover, the North and South Poles are expressed by a readily visible iceberg in the center of the Atrium.
Two to One
While the competition sought ideas to enliven the Töölöntori market square and improve year-round accessibility to it and businesses in the vicinity, Two to One, the winning entry by KonkretArchitects Ltd proposed to improve the functionality of the square and eliminate its current division into western and eastern halves. The space is transformed into an integrated whole by streamlining traffic arrangements and providing uniform lighting, plantings, and surface structures. The functional heart of the square is a simple and graceful yet understated wooden market hall with an impressive interior that will serve customers around the year.
Xingfu Village Pan-Museum
IND architects and DA! architects
IND architects from Moscow, Russia together with DA! architects from China won Public Art and Pan-Museum Design International Competition. Located in Sichuan close to the historic village Xingfu, the design allows nature to penetrate the building and become part of the exhibition. Waterfall curtains and stone-like columns immerse visitors with a natural environment. Wind, sunlight, waterfalls, stones enter the interior through gaps, blurring inside and outside. Each space in the museum offers a unique valley view.
Active Materiality – Vacation Houses Complex in Porto Heli
The project awarded the German Design Awards 2020 in the Architecture category, uses the geo-mythological approach to make a connection between the Lernaean Hydra myth and the natural features of Argolic topography. Working both on a pragmatic and semiotic level, on one hand, the curvilinear nature of the terrain of the Place, and on the other the historical metaphor, the design creates a special configuration, coordinating the “movement” of building volumes as if they were life-size carved stones.
Ciemats - Latvian Paralympic Center
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Latvian Paralympic Center is thought of as an inclusive landscape park for the district of Bišumuiža in Riga, where Sport becomes a shared apparatus, accessible for all. From international competition to daily usage, the project aims to become a meaningful destination for the residents of Riga and the international sport community. Providing a new attractive sports center in the neighborhood for both athletes and residents of the city, the Sports Centre is designed as a park for leisure and sports, specially adapted for people with reduced mobility.
New Era Warfh
Space Travellers Architects, winners of the Europan 15 Competition in Norway for Rødberg, developed a strategy centered on a new civic building, a new landmark for the valley of Numedal. The new structure placed inside the small lake of Rødberg has its main façade facing directly the majestic main building of the old hydropower plant. The New Era Wharf is a three-storied building with each floor accomodating a different program. Strong and elegant social condenser, the project can adapt to every function needed even really different ones such as town hall, meeting rooms, fab-labs or venue.
HEARTH
William Sendor
The College of William & Mary launched a competition to build a memorial for people who were enslaved at the institution, to serve as a gathering spot to reflect on the past. HEARTH, the winning entry, designed by William Sendor, pays tribute to the men, women, and children who were enslaved at the historic institution, by seeking to rekindle the memories, illuminate a space to reflect on our shared and troubling past, and radiate freedom and hope for the future. The memorial will resemble a brick fireplace, representing a place of work for the enslaved as well as a place of gathering and community.
DNS CITY MASTER PLAN
Winner of an international competition by DNS Development to generate a master plan in Russia, the project aims to create a new urban centrality on the 120 hectares site, within the boundaries of the territory of the operating economic development, 30 kilometers North-West of the city of Vladivostok. With the basis of the master plan laying in the integration of the Urban Fabric into the natural and ecological framework, the project includes residential, culture and education, Business Park – DNS future headquarters, and Retail Park.
HOW TO SUBMIT AN UNBUILT PROJECT
We highly appreciate the input from our readers and are always happy to see more projects designed by them. If you have an Unbuilt project to submit, click here and follow the guidelines. Our curators will review your submission and get back to you in case it is selected for a feature.
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