This week’s curated selection of Best Unbuilt Architecture highlights commercial projects submitted by established firms. From art museums to offices, this article explores cultural functions and commercial spaces, and presents projects submitted to us from all over the world.
Featuring a reception center that merges the cultures of China and Italy by aoe architects, and a post-pandemic office building by NBBJ, this roundup explores how established architecture firms have designed buildings that optimize the functions of projects and ensure the comfort of their users. This round up also includes a collection of proposals from KPF Architects, Nordic Office of Architecture, AFF Architekten, along with many other firms, each responding to different spatial needs, facilities, and environments.
Read on to discover 14 curated projects showcasing museums, civic centers, and offices from all over the world, along with their descriptions from the architects.
Bonfiglioli Headquarters
The new headquarters are a recognizable landmark that both rises above and integrates itself with the surroundings. With a radical approach towards sustainability with an intelligent geometry. The starting point of the design was to introduce the courtyard typology of the existent masterplan buildings into our massing. As a reaction to the local sunlight conditions, by sloping the building’s roof, the North facing façade is enlarged to maximize the workspaces with indirect natural light conditions.
Centre for Contemporary Art and Architecture Budweis
The acclaimed gallery of contemporary art and architecture will be revamped by the architects AFF + Malý Chmel, winning team of the architectural competition launched by Budweis, Czechia. By cleaning up the house to its essence, arises new quality – a generous and flexible exhibition space. We understand the gallery as the cultural heart of the city. Proposed roof landscape creates new spaces of “Open platform” with a unique character, it also lowers the house towards the courtyard, which is therefore more pleasant to stay in. We want to imprint the pure visual character of the existing gallery to the whole house. The design allows easy change of function in the future without the need to intervene in load-bearing structures.
Pristina Gërmia Concerts Hall
Pacarizi Studio + Arber Sadiki architects
The project restores and conserves ’70 Gërmia building into Contemporary Arts Center and proposes a new aggregation of freestanding volumes for the Great Concert Hall (1800 places), the Black Box Concert Hall (500 places), Small Auditorium (200 places), an Open Air theatre and all the necessary secondary spaces. New additions are placed carefully to redesign Pristina busy public center. The ensemble will become new urban cultural generator mixing the early socialist modernist tradition with contemporary expressive architecture.
Nanjing Originality City
Originality City is located in Nanjing Jiangbei High-tech Development District, close to the subway and expressway, surrounded by higher education institutions such as Nanjing University, Southeast University and Nanjing University of Information Science & Technology, as well as knowledge industrial parks such as intelligent manufacturing industrial park and bio-medical valley within 5 kilometers. Such a high-planning starting point and the linkage of knowledgeable supporting resources inject high concentration of urban genes into the area regeneration.
Hana Bank
As one of the first workplace environments fully designed since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, NBBJ offers a groundbreaking design focused on enhancing wellbeing and community. Driven by the belief that a day of work should not be emotionally and physically draining, NBBJ has designed the Hana Headquarters to be a restorative workplace where nature is woven into the design and workspaces are flexible, diverse, and inspiring.
Conceptual Plan of Wuhan Nanhu Art Center
The strategy is to lengthen the building maximally along the edge of the site, detached from the ground to connect the lakeshore and the community. Viewed from the lake, an elongated horizontal line floats between the lake, hills and the city integrated with the space where feeling serenity also strength. The main volume is expanded along the edge of site in an arc, while facing the community, another arc is defined with a different center, and a community activity square is enclosed.
17xM
Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates (KPF) and Skanska
Kohn Pedersen Fox (KPF) and Skanska have unveiled the design of 17xM, a striking new office development in Washington D.C.’s central business district. The 11-story, 330,000-square-foot, mixed-use development features office and retail space and is located adjacent to the National Geographic headquarters on one of the few remaining ground-up construction opportunities in northwest D.C. Designed with a tenant-centric, data-driven approach, 17xM will feature a seamless user experience while providing a unique flexible tenant offering.
New Suncheon City Hall
PRAUD, Ether Ship, and OA Lab
An international consortium between PRAUD, Ether Ship, and OA Lab has won the international architecture competition to design the new city hall in Suncheon, South Korea. Taking the city’s beautiful modern low-rise cityscape as the contextual approach, the team proposes a series of new urban spaces that can be integrated into the old urban fabric. Instead of creating a symbolic architecture, the New Suncheon City Hall promotes and catalyzes a variety of civic activities that will fill those spaces.
Stavanger University Hospital
Nordic – Office of Architecture, in collaboration with Aart Architects, SLA and COWI, has completed the preliminary design for an expansion of The New Stavanger University Hospital. The project was chosen by BIM+ as number 1 in the world for the use of BIM. The team also won the Large Project Building Design category of the 2018 AEC Excellence Awards.
Vineyard Hotel
MJARC completed the project of a Vineyard Hotel at Douro Valley in Portugal. The project intends to capture the essence of a place that aims to create an atmosphere of harmony between nature and people. All rooms have a clear view of the vineyard and Douro Valley. The sitting room and dinning room offers not only beautiful views, but also an unobstructed exit into the natural space. The programme includes reception,restaurant, spa with outdoor pool. In addition, the building functions as a winery, where guests experience the whole winemaking process, from grapes selection, crushing, fermentation and pressing, to barrel aging, blending, filtering and bottling.
Low-Tech Office Building
C + S Architects and MMA / Bart Macken Eef Boeckx
Winner of the international competition organized by Vlaams Bouwmeester and Leiedal (Open Call) for the construction of a low-tech office building in Kortrijk, Belgium, the project represents our approach to a holistic and low-tech design and works on the essence construction and minimum plant equipment, obtaining maximum living comfort. The project criticizes sustainable design that aims to add super-performing glass facades, green-washing or photovoltaic panels on the roof to the building, often hiding the lack of quality of the design itself.
415 Natoma Street
Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates (KPF)
Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates (KPF) recently celebrated the topping out of 415 Natoma Street with developer Brookfield Properties. The new, 640,000-square-foot, Class A office building opening in fall 2021 suits major technology companies as tenants with large open floor plates, column-free interiors, activity-based layouts that promote movement, and a variety of creative spaces for collaboration. KPF served as design architect for 415 Natoma Street in collaboration with House & Robertson Architects as architect of record.
Sino-Italian Culture Exchange City Reception Center
The design elements are extracted from the arches and domes of ancient Rome, and the smooth enclosure and series of multiple circular squares are connected to form a rich and changeable space to meet the multi-functional requirements of exhibitions, conferences, receptions, and catering areas. The overall design concept was taken from the "ruyi", a gift for foreign envoys in ancient times, to show the establishment of friendly relations, and imply peace between two countries.
55 Yonge
In the heart of Toronto’s financial district, directly adjacent to the King Street station on the Yonge subway line, 55 Yonge is a landmark 66-storey mixed-use apartment and office tower designed by collaborating architects BDP Quadrangle and PARTISANS for H&R REIT. The building will include approximately 500 new residential units, state-of-the-art offices, retail at grade, as well as an exceptional amenity program which is shared with both the office and residential components. The project is a creative response to the rapid growth of vertical communities in Toronto, while achieving a design that makes a striking addition to the city skyline.
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.
