Quay Quarter Tower (QQT), designed by 3XN has been declared the World Building of the Year 2022 at the fifteenth annual World Architecture Festival (WAF), held in Lisbon.
The 206-meter tower, located close to the Sydney Opera House, is an office building arranged as a vertical village, creating a sense of community and providing spaces that focus on collaboration, health, well-being and external terraces.
The office building typology has been evolving towards more fluid, spatially diverse and flexible designs in order to accommodate the needs of new generations of workers and business models. This week's curated selection of Unbuilt Architecture focuses on office projects, commercial and administrative buildings submitted by the ArchDaily Community, showcasing how architects worldwide envision working environments and their contribution to the urban environment.
From the retrofit of an outdated office building in London to a commercial and administrative project shaped like an architectural promenade in Iran or an interplay of mass and void within an office building in Turkey, the following projects showcase some of the ideas shaping the office typology. These preoccupations include the necessity to update the existing building stock, an increased indoor-outdoor connection, or a move away from the generic office floor plan.
This week's curated selection of Best Unbuilt Architecture highlights different competition-winning designs submitted by the ArchDaily Community. From large scale urban developments to small interventions in the landscape, from commercial projects to public spaces and urban planning strategies with an environmental focus, this article showcases a variety of design approaches, programs and scales. The proposals featured are the results of local and international competitions, either creative concepts or projects currently in progress.
The award-winning entries include a range of different projects, designed by both young architects and established firms. An adaptive reuse project for office towers in New York, the redevelopment of an industrial site in China, an abstract installation for a Russian festival, or a masterplan focused on climate resilience and ecosystems protection are a few of this week's highlights.
The Kurdish city of Kamyaran - which sits on the transit borders of Kurdistan and Iran - is a developing city that experienced a devastating earthquake a few years ago. The city is located in a district deprived of modern facilities, and the majority of the residents' income is acquired from the transit of products across the common border with Iraq and Turkey. Project developers in the area are faced with several challenges, one of which is the amount of projects needed to ameliorate the city's status.
Instead of designing two different projects on two separate sites, CAAT Studio proposed the Kamyaran City-School, a new concept which merges an elementary school and public space into one large facility that aims to improve the social and cultural life of its residents.
CAAT STUDIO has unveiled Organizing the Forgotten Urban Spaces, a design that revitalizes the Mirdamad Bridge in Tehran, Iran through the creation of an open anthropology museum.
Developed by studying the existing 7-meter-high and 14.1-meter-wide bridge, the design focuses on improving the pedestrian nature of the space. For example, in order to address issues of noise under the bridge, the project utilizes an arch- and dome-like geometry to create “an acoustic mode in the roof […] and body,” along with covered pillars.
