Richard Neutra‘s Embassy Building in Karachi, Pakistan is a relic of the Cold War – an effort by the United States to express its authority and wealth in other countries. The building is in the modernist style, designed in 1959, by an architect whose work is still admired today. Until 2011, the Embassy was occupied by the U.S. General Consulate and was a symbol of modernity in Karachi. The Neutra Institute for Survival through Design has begun a petition to help save this building from demolition. It proclaims that this modernist icon is “the only surviving Neutra Structure in the region”.
As Larry Levine and Ben Chou discuss in their NRDC blog post ”New York and Pennsylvania: Among the Best at Planning for the Inconvenient Truths of Climate Change”, we have already seen what the progress of climate change has done to the most recent weather patterns and the harm it has caused to our infrastructure. Rising temperature throws off climate balances making some areas wetter and others drier, complicating water supplies, farmland and infrastructure. In the post, they point out the specific affects on densely populated urban areas and outdated infrastructure that cannot support heavy rains and increased runoff, which inevitably ends up in our waterways: New York City, Albany, Buffalo, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. While many parts of the country lack a comprehensive strategy to respond to these mounting threats, nine states have created detailed reactionary and preventative measures to deal with climate change (see the NRDC report).
However, public policies, regulations and reports are not always in sync with what people choose to construct or what actually gets built. New York’s 2012 Green Infrastructure Grant Program is promising in that respect; it is a step towards bridging that gap that exists between building purely for utility versus building to keep cities livable, functional and safe. The program focuses on storm water management, giving private enterprises the incentive to make responsible decisions that will alleviate the burden on the NYC sewer system. The grant has set aside $4 million for green infrastructure projects, which include green roofs, blue roofs, combined roofs, bioswales, permeable pavers and perforated piping. This money is open only for use on private properties and businesses, or along streets that abut privately owned properties and are located on sites that drain into a combined sewer. The full report is outlined here.
Inspired by the theme of Expo 2015 – “Feeding the Planet, Energy for Life” – the idea behind the design by Ternulomello + Nuno Marcos of recreating a greenhouse for the Service Areas seemed natural and spontaneous This construction method reminded them of the Crystal Palace, designed and built for the 1851 Universal Exhibition in London. The intervention is based on the application of passive technologies, to achieve a complete identification between energetic device and structure. Thermo-hygrometric comfort is achieved through natural ventilation, natural lighting and selective shading. More images and architects’ description after the break.
Buro Ole Scheeren, the architect behind one of the most iconic buildings of the 21st century, the CCTV headquarters in Beijing, recently revealed his design for a new landmark tower in the heart of Kuala Lumpur. The 268 meter tall tower, Angkasa Raya, was unveiled today at an official ceremony in the capital of Malaysia. Now, the country will once again appear on the world stage with a stunning new piece of architecture that alters the perception of what a skyscraper can be and how it connects to the city by inviting life into its balancing heights and visually projecting it back into the urban landscape as a symbol of the multi-cultural society. More images and architects’ description after the break.
Founder and principal of Studio Gang Architects, Jeanne Gang, FAIA, LEED AP, will be delivering a lecture at LACMA on May 8th at 7:30pm. Reveal, the first volume on Studio Gang’s projects and processes, was released in 2011 from Princeton Architectural Press. Recent projects include a proposal reimagining the suburb of Cicero, Illinois, as a part of MoMA’sexhibition Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream; Reverse Effect, a book intended to explore and spark a radically greener future for the Chicago River and Great Lakes; Aqua Tower, an Emporis Skyscraper of the Year; and Nature Boardwalk at Lincoln Park Zoo, an educational project demonstrating how nature and city can coexist. The event is presented by LACMA and organized by Francesca Garcia-Marques, with an introduction by Christopher Hawthorne, Los Angeles Times architecture critic. For more details and information on the event, please visit here.
Studio DWTW shared with us their proposal for the Lausanne Planetarium Proposal which creates a place which is devoted to showing and sharing science. Their aim is to make a cultural contribution in the widest sense in a society which is characterized like no other by science and by the desire to understand our world and where we come from. As a result, their design invites visitors to find out about and actively experience themes and correlations that exist within nature, research of space and nature poses a particular challenge. For this very reason, a task of this nature demands due respect, which is successfully demonstrated here. More images and architects’ description after the break.
The collection of Inspiration And Process In Architecture is a new series of illustrated monographs dedicated to key figures in contemporary architecture. This new collection features Zaha Hadid, Giancarlo De Carlo, Bolles+Wilson and Alberto Kalach whose stories are told through notes and drawings never before seen.
We have some great photos from USA and Europe for today’s Flickr Round Up. Remember you can submit your own photo here, and don’t forget to follow us through Twitter and our Facebook Fan Page to find many more features.
The photo above was taken by Chimay Bleue in San Diego, USA. Check the other four after the break.
Emmen Theatre and Zoo, designed by Henning Larsen Architects and Van den Berg Groep, is an unusual cultural building that brings together culture and nature. The building design, which won the first prize in the international competition, will constitute the entrance to a large zoological park of 10 hectares and comprises two main stages with a capacity of 1,150 people in total, an additional stage, exhibition and conference facilities. The building in itself covers 16,000 m2. More images and architects’ description after the break.
72 Hour Urban Action, the world’s first real-time architecture competition, gives selected teams only three days & three nights to design and build interventions in public space in response to local needs. The competition will be the kick-off of a series of major urban interventions around Stuttgart 21, site of the largest urban redevelopment in Europe and the center of a heated 30-year-old public debate. The competition is defined by an extreme deadline, a tight budget and limited space and will challenge participants to rapidly leave a lasting impact on the city’s urban fabric.
Manuel Aires Mateus of Aires Mateus e Associados will be giving a lecture at MIT featuring ‘Latest Works’. The projects of Aires Mateus e Associados are characterised by materiality, mass and an essential muteness or quietness. The Paulo Gomes Archeological Center, Casa Areia and Furnas Monitoring and Investigation Centre are perhaps the most elemental and representative of their projects, seeming to draw power from the connection or contrast with nature.
MONU – magazine on urbanism is a unique bi-annual international forum for artists, writers and designers that are working on topics of urban culture, development and politics.
Each issue collects essays, projects and photographs from contributors from all over the world to a given topic. Thus MONU examines the rural as a strict counterpart to the urban as it appears to be a condition of the past. At least, this is what Kees Christiaanse posits in an interview with us entitled “The New Rural: Global Agriculture, Desakotas, and Freak Farms”. He points out that, today, non-urban spaces interact so frequently and intensely with urbanity that you can no longer describe something as strictly rural. Therefore, we can no longer separate the city from the countryside as these are not polarized entities and each other’s enemies, but rather the result of each other.
They have just released their latest issue on the topic of “Non-Urbanism”. You can see more about the articles on their official website. Also, you can browse the entire issue (video after the break).
Architects:Canvas Arquitectos - Juan Vicente and Pablo Núñez. Location: Salamanca, SpainBuilt Area: 5,750 sqm Completion: 2007 Collaborators architects: José Riesco Urrejola, Francisca Rivera Palma, Marta González Antón, Íñigo Pericacho Sánchez, Jesús Domínguez Miñambres, Carmen Figueiras Lorenzo, Claudia Henao Ocampo, Luís Ferreira Villar and Eduardo Dorado Díaz. Collaborators Surveyors: Tomás Martín Luengo, Domingo Infante Chozas and Andrés García Pinto. Clients: University of Salamanca / Government of Castilla y León Prize: First Prize on Open Competition for project design and site supervision. Photographs: Luis Asín, Pedro Ivan Ramos Martín, Fotografia Nodal
Resonant Chamber, an interior envelope system that deploys the principles of rigid origami, transforms the acoustic environment through dynamic spatial, material and electro-acoustic technologies. The aim of rvtr is to develop a soundsphere able to adjust its properties in response to changing sonic conditions, altering the sound of a space during performance and creating an instrument at the scale of architecture, flexible enough that it might be capable of being played. The project is funded through the 2011 Research through Making Grant, U-M Office of the Vice President for Research, 2011 Small Projects Grant, U-M Center for Wireless Integrated Microsystems, Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada Research Creation Grant. More images and architects’ description after the break.
We are only 100 days away from the 2012 London Olympics, and LEGO has announced the release of their latest model in the Architecture Landmark series: The Big Ben.
The Big Ben, officially known as the Clock Tower, is one of the UK’s most recognizable buildings and a global symbol of Victorian London and the Gothic Revival style. It was designed by the unlikely team of Classical architect Charles Barry and Gothic Revival pioneer Augustus Pugin and completed in 1859.
Big Ben is the fourteenth model in the LEGO Architecture range, which uses the LEGO brick to interpret the designs of iconic architecture around the world. It is the first model to be designed by Rok Zgalin Kobe from Slovenia who joins Adam Reed-Tucker as a LEGO architect.
Organized by Graz University of Technology, the ‘Advanced Building Skins’ Conference will take place June 14-15 where creative, innovative professionals and researchers at the forefront of skin design will discuss tasks and issues in research, design and manufacturing of high-performance façades and building envelopes. Participants will gain new perspectives on, and an enhanced insight into, developments and research in design and engineering for tomorrow’s advanced building skins. uilding skins have rarely been as fascinating and challenging as they are today. They are the most interesting field in contemporary architecture. Façades and building envelopes are determining the visual identity, character and expression of architecture. The design of buildings’ skins shapes the urban environment. For more information, please visit here.
The project by Morris Architects for a new information technology and media center for Santa Monica Community College in California includes 12,000 square feet of new space and approximately 6,000 square feet of renovation to the existing campus library. The college currently has an enrollment of 30,000 students and is experiencing rapid growth that requires a major upgrade to its current information technology department and computing infrastructure. More images and architects’ description after the break.
After successfully participating in the first phase of the competition as part of a limited group of 9 international teams, the team comprised of Francesco Cellini – insula architettura e ingegneria with Huseyin Kaptan – Atelye 70 was awarded ‘7 out of 8 votes’ by the members of the jury of the competition for the redevelopment of the Yenikapi Transfer Point and Archaeo-Park area. They proposed, for the central area, a close functional and above all cultural integration between the spaces dedicated to users of the subway system – estimated at some 1,700,000 people per day – and those destined for the ‘City Archive’. More images and architects’ description after the break.
Carnegie Mellon University has a building in its School of Architecture that is a lab. No, the building does not house experiments, it is the experiment. It is called the Intelligent Workplace Energy Supply System and it provides the Energy Supply System (EES) for Carnegie Mellon’s Intelligent Workplace, which is part of the School of Architecture’s Center for Building Performance and Diagnostics. It is a physical construction from 1997 that consists of offices, meeting rooms, and work spaces for faculty and students, all located atop the Margaret Morrison Carnegie Hall.
What’s the goal? To study the viability of providing power, cooling, heating and ventilation to a building using thermal energy and renewable, bioDiesel fuel. The specific investigations range from design and installation to evaluation of both individual components as well as their ability to work efficiently in concert with one another. Ideally, once all this information is compiled, more comprehensive design strategies can then be identified and used by architects everywhere.
The project developed by RTA-Office belongs to a large masterplan that includes three different museum buildings surrounded by a big green area. The Anhui Provincial Paleontological Fossils Museum and the Anhui Provincial New Museum are already built. RTA-Office was involved in the design of the third one, the Anhui Provincial Art Museum. Located in a new politic and cultural district in Heifei, China, the new building will occupy the southwest corner of the park. More images and architects’ description after the break.
