Videos

This past week London’s Royal Academy of Arts (RA) celebrated the opening of, what many claim to be, one of the most “epic” and “enchanting” exhibitions of 2014: Sensing Space: Architecture Reimagined. With a series of large scale installations by some of profession’s most acclaimed architects, such as Eduardo Souto de Moura, and Kengo Kuma, the immersive exhibition creates an atmosphere that encourages visitors to become part of the experience and open their minds to the sensory realm of architecture.

"Architecture is so often the background to our lives," stated curator Kate Goodwin. "We often don't think about it - it's practical and functional, but when does it do something more?"

A preview of the installations, after the break.

Gehry Partners has been selected over David Chipperfield, Adjaye Associates and seven other practices in an invited competition for a 300-unit residential tower in Berlin. The winning proposal, deemed “the most compelling” by jury for its rotating stacks of sculptural, stone-clad cubes that rise up to 150 meters, is expected to be Berlin’s tallest skyscraper and Germany’s tallest residential tower.

“Gehry’s design is strong in visual expression and introduces an unusually eccentric, new pattern for this location. Nevertheless, the façade radiates agreeable tranquility. In addition, the design blends well with the neighborhood and conveys all aspects of metropolitan living,” commented Regula Lüscher, Senate Building Director.

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This past September marked the commencement of ArchiLab 2013 at the newly completed FRAC Centre in Orleans, France. Forty architects, designers and artists gathered for the annual architectural exposition and conference’s ninth edition to discuss the deepening overlap between digital architecture and the sciences, particularly molecular biology. Under the theme “Naturalizing Architecture,” two international symposiums took place which provided the opportuntiy for architects and scientists to present, and debate, the latest research revolving this subject and its ever-evolving role within the living world.

To encourage the continuation of discourse, we have complied a video list of all the discussions from the symposium for your viewing pleasure. Enjoy them, after the break, and feel free to share your thoughts in the comment section below. 

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A unique biotechnology start-up company have developed a method of growing bricks from nothing more than bacteria and naturally abundant materials. Having recently won first place in the Cradle to Cradle Product Innovation Challenge, bioMason has developed a method of growing materials by employing microorganisms. Arguing that the four traditional building materials - concrete, glass, steel and wood - both contain a significant level of embodied energy and heavily rely on limited natural resources, their answer is in high strength natural biological cements (such as coral) that can be used "without negative impacts to the surrounding environment."

In the following interview, which originally appeared in Zawia#01:Utopia (published December 2013), Sir Peter Cook, one of the brilliant minds behind Archigram, sits down with the editors of Zawia to discuss his thoughts on utopia - including why he felt the work of Archigram wasn’t particularly utopian (or even revolutionary) at all.

ZAWIA: It is perhaps difficult to discuss our next volume's theme - “utopia" - without first starting with archigram and the visions that came out of that period. How do you view the utopian visions of archigram during that specific moment of history in relation to the current realities of our cities and the recent political and social waves of change ?

PETER COOK: Actually... at the time I was probably naive enough to not regard it as Utopian. 

A proposal by gmp Arquitectos, L35 Arquitectos and Ribas & Ribas has been announced as winner of an international competition to revamp Real Madrid’s Santiago Bernabéu Stadium in Spain. Selected over an impressive shortlist of candidates including Foster & Partners, Herzog & de Meuron and Populous, the winning gmp-led team is expected to “transform the Santiago Bernabéu into the most advanced and developed stadium of the 21st century,” as described gmp owner Volkwin Marg.

“This building is undoubtedly the most important project of our careers.," Marg added. 

Following our recent news that confirmed Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners (RSHP) will oversee the design and construction of two new stadiums within Caracas' Hugo Chavez Park, details have emerged regarding the Estadio Nacional de Fútbol de Venezuela. Designed by RSHP, in collaboration with Arup and Schlaich Bergermann und Partners, the project will be the practice’s first ever football stadium.

For many people, there is an unfortunate stigma attached to social housing. Fortunately, some countries have realized that one of the best ways to combat this stigma is through good design, leading to some striking and unusual social housing blocks in countries such as Spain, France, Slovenia and Belgium. This article on the blog Best MSW Programs has a list of the top 30 social housing blocks worldwide, but here on ArchDaily we've collected 5 of our favorites: Elemental's Monterrey Housing, the Tetris Apartments by OFIS Architekti, Savonnerie Heymans by MDW Architecture, 24H Architecture's Hatert Housing and KOZ Architectes' Tête en l’air. You can also see the top 30 list here.

We are happy to present the winners of the 2014 ArchDaily Building of the Year Awards, a peer-based, crowdsourced, architecture award where the collective intelligence of 60,000 architects filter and recognize the best architecture featured on ArchDaily during the past year.

In the following article, originally published in Polish in theDecember 2013 issue of A&B, Ewa Szymczyk interviews Vicente Guallart, the Chief Architect of Barcelona since 2011 as well as the founder of Guallart Architects and IAAC (Institute of Advanced Architecture in Catalunya). Szymczyk questions Guallart about his experience in urban design, asking: how can you measure a city's success?

Ewa Szymczyk: When measuring the contemporary city’s success we typically use economic measures. In this sense Barcelona ranks very high, being a top tourist destination and managing its budget in times of global crisis. But there are many other ways to measure its success. What in your opinion makes a city a good city? Isn’t it much more than economic prosperity?

Vincente Guallart: A good city is a place where the citizens live well. So the best measure for a good city is how the citizens live. The truth is that the city is a physical representation of a social agreement. If you think for instance about Phoenix in Arizona, maybe people live there the way they want and the way they like to live. Obviously there are also questions related to cost. I mean, questions related to environmental and economic costs. Therefore the cost of a city like Phoenix is very different from the cost of a city like Hong Kong, which is the densest city and probably the most efficient urban structure in the world. So the question is the economic efficiency and also the quality of life of the citizens. And the best way to know is to ask citizens how happy they are to live in a place like this. The truth is that if you are a citizen of Barcelona you are quite happy. We have been evaluating this over the past few years and the average rating is seven out of ten. So that is in general very good! The people are proud to live in a place like this.

Daylight is a highly cost-effective means of reducing the energy for electrical lighting and cooling. But architectural education often reduces the aspect of daylight to eye-catching effects on facades and scarcely discusses its potential effects - not just on cost, but on health, well-being and energy.

This Light Matters will explore the often unexplored aspects of daylight and introduce key strategies for you to better incorporate daylight into design: from optimizing building orientations to choosing interior surface qualities that achieve the right reflectance. These steps can significantly reduce your investment as well as operating costs. And while these strategies will certainly catch the interest of economically orientated clients, you will soon discover that daylight can do so much more.

More Light Matters with daylight, after the break…

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• Architects

  NBBJ

• Design Collaboration

  CCDI

• Area

  270000.0 sqm

• Project Year

  2016

• Photographs

  NBBJ

• Project Year

  2016

• Photographs

  Courtesy of NBBJ

• Area

  270000.0 m2

NBBJ has unveiled a 250-meter-high, two-tower campus that will become Tencent’s main headquarters at the Shenzhen High-Tech Industrial Park upon completion in 2016. As the world’s third-largest internet corporation, and 2013’s most innovative Chinese company according to FastCo, Tencent hopes the new campus will serve as a vibrant workplace for an expanding workforce of 12,000 employees.

Originally appearing in Metropolis Magazine as "Hitchcock and the Architecture of Suspense," this article by Samuel Medina reviews Steven Jacobs' book The Wrong House: The Architecture of Alfred Hitchcock, which uses expert analysis and reconstructed floor plans to examine how the master created suspense with his sets.

In the films of Alfred Hitchcock, things happen, but the events that gave rise to them are easily forgotten. You quickly forget how A leads to B or, say, by what elaborate means Roger Thornhill ends up at Mt. Rushmore in North by Northwest. But as the French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard observed, the Hitchcockian cinema compels not with story, but with images—the open-palmed hand reaching for the door, the simulated fall down the staircase, the whorling retreat of the camera from a dead woman’s face. These stark snippets imbue the films with their uncanny allure and imprint themselves in the mind of the spectator much more effectively than any of the master’s convoluted plots.

Read on for more on the role architecture plays in Hitchcock's films

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Six public-interest design projects have been announced as this year’s winners of the International SEED Awards, held by the SEED Network, Design Corps, and Parsons The New School for Design. According to the jury, these six are those which most creatively and successfullyaddress the pressing social, economic, and environmental issues of our world today.

See the six SEED Award winning projects, after the break...

Working independently since 1988, Roland Halbe started out shooting commercial architecture, but quickly became one of the most recognized professionals in architecture photography, earning international commissions from architects, agencies and all kinds of media outlets.

In 1996 he co-founded Artur Images, an online archive of architecture and interior images, representing over 200 photographers from all over the world including, of course, himself.

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This article by Samuel Medina originally appeared in Metropolis Magazine, titled "Eero Saarinen's Bell Labs, Now Devoid of Life" and features stunning photos of the abandoned leviathan by Rob Dobi.

At its peak, thousands passed through its massive, light-filled atrium. Today, Bell Labs Holmdel stands empty, all of its 1.9-million-square-feet utterly without life. An iconic example of the now-disparaged office park, the campus in central Jersey, was shuttered in 2007 and vacated soon after. Years later, it remains in an abandoned, if not unkept state. The grounds are cared for, the floors swept clean, and the interior plantings trimmed, however haphazardly. (That's saying something; in the laboratory's heyday, plastic shrubbery filled its glorious central hall.)

More about the building's future, and more photos by Rob Dobi, after the break

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Originally posted in Metropolis Magazine, Samuel Medina reports on the irreparable damage caused by vandalism at Le Corbusier's Chapel of Ronchamp.

On Friday, a nun gave warning that the Chapel of Ronchamp, considered by many to be one of the key architectural works of the last century, had been vandalized. When police arrived on the scene, they found signs of forced entry: a stained-glass window, one of many executed by Le Corbusier, was broken and a concrete trunk was missing. As Le Monde reports, the intruders had also attempted to gain entry via a door. The overall damage was, according to some, "priceless" because the stained-glass had borne an original illustration by Le Corbusier. An initial assessment from the department of historical monuments found the window to be irreparable.

What does the workplace of the future look like? Shawn Gehle, of Gensler, explains in this TEDx Talk that with over 10 billion square feet of existing office space in North America, we may not even need to envision new buildings. Rather, by "hacking" existing buildings, architects can transform them into something completely new. For more on Gensler's "hacker" philosophy, read our article here.