This week's curated selection of Best Unbuilt Architecture highlights conceptual works, competition entries and projects in different stages of development submitted by the ArchDaily community. From a village made of 3D-printed cacao waste for a chocolate manufacturer in Ecuador, the transformation of a shopping centre in Ontario into a sustainable and walkable neighbourhood, to the refurbishment and redevelopment of Brutalist estates in London, the following projects illustrate a wide array of design approaches shaping the built environment.
This week's selection of unbuilt projects highlights worldwide interventions addressing a range of highly-relevant topics, such as circular construction, the adoption of sustainable materials, biodiversity, urban redevelopment of obsolete infrastructure or adaptive reuse and the reconsideration of the existing building stock.
Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and the Museum of Architecture (MoA) have launched a competition to find three exceptional designs to create three treehouses across RBG Kew's UNESCO World Heritage Site as part of a larger ‘Treehouses at Kew’ Exhibition.
‘Treehouses at Kew’ will be Kew’s main exhibition running from April to October 2023, and provide one of the most unmissable visitor experiences of the 2023 London cultural calendar.
Following California's Covid-19 health regulations in early 2020, Metro, the Los Angeles public transit agency stopped collecting fares on its busses as a safety precaution measure. However, the company's decision turned into the United States' biggest free-transit experiment, as ridership never dipped below 50 percent, even with the stay-at-home orders enforced by the government. Following 22 months of the decision and around 281 million fare-free transits, the company has decided to restart collecting fares, but is planning on using the information gathered throughout these two years to implement future improvements and introduce other free or reduced-fare programs in the city.
Founded by the architect and professor Angelo Bucci, spbr arquitetos works in different scales of construction of buildings with a distinct and particular language in its works. Its projects are the result of an intense exercise in architectural thinking, combined with the use of drawing as a tool for dialogue between architects and clients.
The "Casa de los Milagros" (House of Miracles), located in the cloudy forest on the outskirts of Xalapa, Veracruz and designed by Mexican architect Danilo Veras Godoy, is a space conceived with organic forms, earth, unexpectedly shaped openings and mosaic glass in different shades. It was designed to meet the needs of Rosalinda Ulloa, a single mother who would live there with her two young children. It was built in stages, starting in 1995, and was completed in 2002, with some changes being made between then and 2006.
There is so much more to know about architects and their projects when you begin to learn the stories behind their work. When you know where and how they draw their inspiration from and how an idea becomes a reality that you can touch, feel and experience, you get a better idea of why the project ended up the way it did.
Together with photographer Marc Goodwin, as part of his project Atlas of Architectural Atmospheres this time in the city of Berlin, we had the opportunity to meet with German architect Christoph Hesse, of Christoph Hesse Architects, based in Korbach and Berlin, and we spoke about all these things that make up his idea of architecture and his work. Meeting a creator on their own workspace is also an added value; we went through different projects while looking at the physical models and the narrative of his work became a beautiful story about a place, a countryside town in Germany, its people, and their lives, and a sustainable future in nature.
California, as with most American states, has a housing crisis. Unlike the rest of the country, it is actually working to ameliorate the situation, with private and public initiatives that critics can’t help but label inadequate. The Bay Area made accessory dwelling units legal by changing zoning laws, but that has hardly made a dent. Some cities are now pushing for additional upzoning to give developers more room to bring new buildings to market at lower rents. There are all sorts of studies, university sponsored or underwritten by the industry, that recommend more-or-less radical fixes for a seemingly unfixable problem. Environmentalists are naturally cast as villains because they don’t condone greenfield developments. And Californians are tough on their elected officials, as the current governor learned last year.
https://www.archdaily.com/975506/new-construction-is-not-always-the-answerMark Alan Hewitt
Cool lights, wall-to-wall tiles and trivial fixtures. Little by little, public bathrooms have changed this aesthetic and opted for more careful designs. Gone are the days when designs were focused only on functionality, accessibility and ease of maintenance and cleaning. Along with these essential qualities, a good bathroom project can also bring tranquility and show values that the space or the company wants to convey to its users. whether through finishes, lightning, or less material factors such as inclusivity, making users feel good is ultimately the goal of all environments, including bathrooms.
Architecture has long been designed to symbolize and venerate shared values and beliefs. This is especially true in cathedrals and places of worship, structures that exists across environmental, economic and cultural boundaries. These buildings encompass ritual and gathering as they explore the relationship between human experience and the divine. Today, cathedrals are being reimagined for contemporary life and new building traditions.
The outer layer of surfaces and buildings is the interface with the world and communicates much of its appearance, characteristics, and conditions. There are times that, whether due to budget constraints, difficulties, or lack of time, we need to look for quick and easy-to-install solutions. 3M™ DI-NOC™ Architectural Finishes are adhesive decorative films that offer a sustainable, cost-efficient option for refurbishing surfaces, providing less landfill waste, minimal downtime, noise, and dust for use on casework, doors, columns and internals walls. There is also a version for exterior solutions, the 3M™ DI-NOC™ Architectural Finishes Exterior EX Series product line. The finishes can be applied directly over existing façade material, providing high design along with other features. Below we will explore two examples that will highlight the possibilities with 3M surface finishes.
Powerhouse Company revealed its design for the new Tilburg University Lecture Hall, which upon completion, will be the Netherlands’ first academic building made of cross-laminated timber. Set within a wooded landscape, the lecture hall is a nod to the 1960s grade-listed Modernist architecture of the campus, echoing its monastic atmosphere through the rhythm of the windows and the limestone façades.
A project for the Commemorative Landmark Pehuenche Commission carried out by the recently graduated Chilean architect Antonia Ossa, is part of the series of small-scale interventions built in the Andean sector of the Maule Region, Chile, as part of the certification process of the School of Architecture of the University of Talca.
Although artificial intelligence is showing the potential to carry out successive iterations with good results, designing the layout of spaces takes up large portions of a designer's time. The organization of elements present within a space determines the flow of movement, the points of view and will largely dictate how it will be used. But the idea of stifling the use of the environment may not work for all cases. Due to space restrictions or supplementary uses that a room can have, some architects have developed dynamic layouts that have more than one possible use. Whether through dividing elements or special modules, these projects allow the space to change radically through movement.
Dübendorf, Switzerland is something of hallowed ground for architectural technologists. There, on the shared academic campus of the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology and the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology, public university ETH Zurich has conducted nearly a decade of engineering and construction experimentation at the ever-evolving NEST research building. In August, ETH Zürich unveiled its latest extension of the building, HiLo (short for high performance-low emissions)—a two-story modular addition to the chameleon structure that harnesses medieval building principles and contemporary digital methods to raise the bar for more sustainable applications of concrete.
With V-Ray 5 for SketchUp, Update 2, Chaos has introduced intelligent new tools that make it easy for architects and arch-viz artists to create incredible renders. You can make use of the free models and materials provided in Chaos Cosmos, customize surfaces with V-Ray Decal, and tune your render with LightMix and post-processing.
In this tutorial, V-Ray Product Specialist Ricardo Ortiz uses an interior scene to demonstrate how these powerful new additions can accelerate your creative processes and add extra details for exceptional photorealism.
Videos
Courtesy of A Broken House, The New Yorker Documentary directed by Jimmy Goldblum
“A Broken House” is a documentary directed by Jimmy Goldblum that highlights the story of Mohamad Hafez, a Syrian native that moved to the US on a single-entry visa to study architecture and was not able to return home. Facing his fate, he channeled his homesickness in his artwork, and started producing miniature sculptures of his hometown, in order to build the “Damascus of his memories”.
“If you can’t get home, why don’t you make home”. Telling the story of the human being that lived within, the architectural project gained a political dimension after the eruption of the Syrian civil war, portraying the extent of the destruction suffered by the city, humanizing refugees, and sharing their stories.
An integrated team led by Foster + Partners in collaboration with Marge Arkitekter have won a design competition for the redevelopment of Stockholm's central station, Sweden's largest transportation facility. The winning design aims to bring together several modes of transport in an integrated hub, while prioritizing pedestrian circulation and creating a new mixed-use urban district that combines old and new architecture.
Over the past year, established practices have continued to champion the transformation of existing structures, with adaptive reuse and renovations increasingly becoming a defining aspect of contemporary architecture From the renovation of landmark structures to the adaptive reuse of obsolete facilities, the idea of giving new life to existing buildings has been embraced as the premise for a more sustainable practice, but also as a means of reinforcing the urban and cultural identity of cities. Discover 8 designs and recently completed projects that showcase a new common practice of reusing existing building stock.
In November 1930, in Indiana, United States, one of the great feats of modern engineering was executed: a team of architects and engineers moved an 11,000-ton (22-million pound) telephone exchange without ever suspending its operations either basic supplies for the 600 employees who worked inside.
Centro Internacional de Conferencias de Katowice / JEMS. Image via JEMS
"Transforming our cities for a better urban future", is the main theme of the next World Urban Forum (WUF) which will take place, for the first time in Eastern Europe, in the city of Katowice, Poland, from the 26th to the 30th of June 2022. This global event on sustainable urbanisation is convened every two years by the United Nations Human Settlement Programme (UN-Habitat), and this time, it is co-organised by the Polish Ministry of Development Funds and Regional Policy and the Katowice City Office.
'Innovation' and 'design thinking' could possibly be two of the most extensively-used phrases both online and offline during the past decade. To respond to the global need of "changing the status quo", established companies, start-ups, and even universities have used this framework to generate novel ways of solving problems and create new products, taking into account their desirability, feasibility, and viability. And with that, a new archetype was conceived: the design thinker, someone who has the creative toolkit to generate something disruptive. So what is the meaning behind design thinking and what is its relationship with architecture?
If Nature had been comfortable, mankind would never have invented architecture. - Oscar Wilde
Architecture is human. Despite their exquisite beauty, burrows, hives, nests and anthills are creations of instinct. Design by humans considers options, means and methods of creation, solving problems of desire, beyond functional accommodations.
How many times have you heard the old claim that “Email is dead”? Surely, more than once. To the surprise of many, and despite the rise of new messaging tools like Slack and Microsoft Teams during the pandemic, Email remains by far the most widely used communication tool in many businesses. Every day, more than 300 billion emails are sent and received globally, and employees spend an average of 5 hours checking their online correspondence. This trend is only expected to rise in the upcoming years, especially within project and client-based industries – like architecture, engineering and construction – that heavily rely on this means of communication.
However, its consolidated use doesn’t always equal efficiency, particularly in companies that don’t set up the necessary internal processes to file emails in a central space. With the silent threat of poor mail management, many architecture firms and other businesses must face unnecessary risks, time and productivity costs, and increased stress among workers.
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