The career of Japanese architect Kenzō Tange features a curious anomaly: he received the same commission twice. In 1952, during the early stages of his career, Tange designed an administrative building in Yūrakuchō, Tokyo, for the city's metropolitan government. Over thirty years later, when the government relocated to Shinjuku, Tokyo, he again won the commission to design its administrative building. Completed in 1991, this would be one of his last, and most ambitious, projects. The second incarnation now dominates the city’s skyline, its highly distinctive design guaranteeing it landmark status. Nicknamed Tochō (an abbreviation of its Japanese name Tōkyō-to Chōsha), its architectural references to both tradition and modernity act as a visual metaphor for the eclectic city over which its inhabitants govern.
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AD Classics: Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building / Kenzō Tange
These are the World's Tallest Twisting Skyscrapers
The past ten years have seen a new twist in tall building design: buildings that rotate as they rise, either for engineering or purely aesthetic purposes. Inspired by this recent trend, the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH) has produced a new graphic entitled Tall Buildings in Numbers “Twisting Tall Buildings” to analyze the “recent proliferation of twisting towers creating a new generation of iconic buildings throughout the world.”
The infographic compares the buildings by height, along with the tightness and total degrees of their rotation. Continue after the break for the full graphic and links to the projects on ArchDaily.
eVolo 2017 Skyscraper Competition
eVolo Magazine is pleased to invite architects, students, engineers, designers, and artists from around the globe to take part in the 2017 Skyscraper Competition. Established in 2006, the annual Skyscraper Competition is one of the world’s most prestigious awards for high-rise architecture. It recognizes outstanding ideas that redefine skyscraper design through the implementation of novel technologies, materials, programs, aesthetics, and spatial organizations along with studies on globalization, flexibility, adaptability, and the digital revolution. It is a forum that examines the relationship between the skyscraper and the natural world, the skyscraper and the community, and the skyscraper and the city.
Perkins+Will To Design Atlanta's Second Tallest Tower
Perkins+Will has released plans for 98 Fourteenth Street, a 920 foot (280 meter) tall residential and commercial tower that, when complete, will become Atlanta’s second tallest building behind Pritzker Prize winning architect Kevin Roche’s Bank of America Plaza. The new tower is an integral piece of a planned development called the Midtown Art Walk, a half-mile pedestrian landscape featuring innovative architecture and interactive art elements between 2 transit stations in the district. The 74-story building will contain 382 luxury residential units and 180 corporate suites, as well as retail space on the ground level.
Call for Entries: Design a Sky Garden System for the Chong Qing Skyline
Competition Theme: Green – Eco - Future Building Systems and Lifestyle
The design intent is to create a system/network of eco-green elevated sky gardens within a soon to be realised super high-rise residential complex, with the aim of drastically improving the living environment and lifestyle of urban dwellers. This competition seeks young architects worldwide to provide innovative ideas to break the existing typology of the super high-rise and isolated lifestyles associated with high density urban living.
Jean Nouvel Unveils Design for Hotel and Residential Tower in São Paulo
Jean Nouvel has unveiled the design of his latest project: a 22-story tower located near Avenida Paulista in São Paulo. The skyscraper, dubbed Rosewood Tower, is part of Cidade Matarazzo, a 27,000-square-meter site containing historic buildings that once made up the Filomena Matarazzo maternity hospital. A heritage-listed site, the Allard Group is restoring the buildings and creating a cultural center, of which Nouvel’s new tower will be a central component.
Set to contain a hotel as well as residential units, Nouvel’s tower is designed to be a vertical continuation of the local landscape. Thus, the nearly 100-meter-tall tower develops at different levels, forming terraces and large gardens with small and medium-sized trees.
Explore the Chicago Skyline With This Interactive Graphic
Chicago is one of the most architecturally rich cities in the world with the history of modernism embedded in its skyline. From the Willis Tower to the Aqua Tower, the skyscrapers of Chicago have led the development of tall buildings, the city becoming a breeding ground for innovations in structure and design. The Windy City has solidified itself among other metropolitan giants like New York and London as having one of the most recognizable skylines in the world.
This new infographic by Chicago Line Cruises offers a look at some of the most visible figures in Chicago’s skyline, with embedded information on each of the buildings. View the infographic after the break.
China’s Newly Completed Shanghai Tower Is Now the 2nd Tallest Building in the World
Gensler's recently completed Shanghai Tower is now the 2nd tallest building in the world, and the tallest building in China, according to The Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH). At 632 meters tall, it is the third building in the world to exceed 600 meters and be designated “megatall.”
CTBUH Names Stefano Boeri’s Bosco Verticale “Best Tall Building Worldwide” for 2015
The Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH) has selected Stefano Boeri’s Bosco Verticale as the Best Tall Building Worldwide 2015 for “its extraordinary implementation of vegetation at such scale and height," according to a press release. The tower was selected from a shortlist of four buildings, which included SOM’s One World Trade Center, Toyo Ito and RSP Architects’ CapitaGreen and Foster + Partners’ Burj Mohammed Bin Rashid Tower.
These Interactive Graphics Show the Evolution of Tall Buildings in New York
The Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat has released a new research study called New York: The Ultimate Skyscraper Laboratory, which utilizes data to “develop graphic features showing the progression of tall building development in New York City.”
The Timeline of Skyscrapers in New York City Region 1906-2018 graphic illustrates “how skyscraper construction aligned with social or political events in history” in the context of key events, for example, building inactivity around the period of World War II.
MVRDV Designs 3-Tower Development for City of Amsterdam
The City of Amsterdam has selected MVRDV and OVG Real Estate to realize a new mixed use development in its Zuidas Business District - "P15 Ravel Plaza." Chosen through an international competition, the design calls for three asymmetrical towers grounded by office and retail, topped with housing and intertwined by an expansive public green space that wraps itself in and around the building.
"This plan effectively increases the attractiveness of Zuidas," said Klaas de Boer, director of Zuidas, Amsterdam City Council.
AD Classics: Woolworth Building / Cass Gilbert
The Woolworth Building, an innovative and elegant early skyscraper completed in 1913, endures today as an iconic form on the New York City skyline. A historicist exterior sheaths a modern steel tower, embodying both the era’s modern spirit of progress and its hesitation to fully break from the past. Cass Gilbert, selected as the architect, believed the designer should “weave into the pattern of our own civilization the beauty that is our inheritance.”[1] An ornate monument to the growing economic dominance of New York City, the building was dubbed the “Cathedral of Commerce.”
The Case For Tall Wood Buildings
Michael Green is calling for a drastic paradigm shift in the way we build. Forget steel, straw, concrete and shipping containers; use wood to erect urban skyscrapers. In a 240 page report - complete with diagrams, plans, renders and even typical wooden curtain wall details - Green outlines a new way of designing and constructing tall buildings using mass timber, all the while addressing common misconceptions of fire safety, structure, sustainability, cost and climate concerns.
SHoP Architects' Super Tall Tower Approved, Sets Precedent for NYC
UPDATE: SHoP Architects' ultra-thin, 100-unit apartment tower has now won approval from the New York City Landmarks Commission. Once complete in 2016, the 1,350-foot structure will offer luxury apartments that peer down at the Empire State Building and rise just above the One World Trade Center’s roofline.
When Vishaan Chakrabarti, principal at ShoP Architects, spoke recently of building high-density cities, he meant it.
Renderings from the architecture firm show Manhattan's skyline will soon welcome its newest "super tall" building, a strikingly skinny residential tower rising 411 meters (1,350 feet) on a puny 13 meter (43 feet) wide site just two blocks south of Central Park.
Invisible Skyscraper Unveiled for Seoul
California-based GDS Architects' new proposal, dubbed Infinity Tower, is designed to disappear from its Korean skyline. How? Cameras will be mounted at six strategic points; thousands of LED screens on the facade will then broadcast the real-time photos captured and logged by the cameras. Though no estimated completion date has been announced, the developers have received construction permits to break ground. More about this incredible vanishing act and how it's done at Fast Co-Design.
VIDEO: Five Great Buildings in Chicago
A short and sweet animation displaying 5 of Chicago's great buildings - including, the John Hancock Center, by SOM, The Willis Tower (formerly known as the Sears Tower), also by SOM, and Marina City by Bertrand Goldberg. Enjoy!