On a prominent, highly visible site within Harvard University’s Allston Campus, a celebration of the beauty of infrastructure is beginning to take shape. Designed by Boston-based Leers Weinzapfel Associates, the 58,000 square foot Allston Campus District Energy Facility (DEF) represents a new, highly efficient infrastructure typology, delivering electricity and water for the campus, whilst simultaneously showcasing the intricate complexity of engineering and design.
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The National Infrastructure Commission and Malcolm Reading Consultants have revealed an online gallery of the four final design concepts for The Cambridge to Oxford Connection: Ideas Competition.
The competition, which launched in June, focuses on the 130-mile corridor connecting Cambridge, Milton Keyes, Northampton, and Oxford. It acknowledges the presence of world-leading universities, highly skilled workers and tech firms, but also the corridor’s failure to function as a connected economic zone.
The National Infrastructure Commission and Malcolm Reading Consultants have announced the shortlist for The Cambridge to Oxford Connection: Ideas Competition. The free-to-enter competition focuses on integrating placemaking with infrastructure in one of the UK’s leading growth regions: 130-mile Cambridge-Milton Keynes-Oxford corridor. The region is home to 3.3 million people and hosts some of the country’s most successful cities, as well as the world-leading Oxbridge universities. Launched in June 2017, the first stage encouraged entries from teams with a range of backgrounds - made up of urban designers; architects; landscape designers, planners and community specialists (to name a few).
A new train station in Cambridge is getting a lot of attention from a surprising audience: mathematicians. Cambridge North Station is clad in aluminum panels with a geometrical cutout design. The architecture firm, Atkins, originally claimed that the pattern was derived from Cambridge alumnus John Conway’s “Game of Life,” but eagle-eyed mathematicians soon realized that was incorrect. As the above video points out, the design is in fact based on a mathematical rule studied by Stephen Wolfram, an Oxford alumnus, much to the dismay of rival university Cambridge. Though the firm’s website still references Conway, a Senior Architectural Designer at Atkins, Quintin Doyle, has since confirmed that it was, in fact, Wolfram’s Rule 30 that they used in the design.
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The Herzog & de Meuron-designed global corporate headquarters for pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca has topped out in Cambridge, UK, as the building pushes forward to a series of opening dates beginning in 2018. Developed alongside AstraZeneca researchers and executive architect/lead consultant BDP, the scheme consists of a ring-shaped volume containing a series of open laboratories and transparent glass walls intended to foster the company’s principle of collaboration across disciplines.
In honor of the centenary of MIT's move to the Cambridge Campus, the university has carried out a series of public events this spring, including the installation of two innovative architecture and design projects: Memory Matrix and Biaxial Tower.
Installed in the iconic arch of MIT’s Wiesner Building (designed by Pritzker Prize winner and MIT alumni I.M. Pei), Memory Matrix is a giant screen made of intricate pixel-like Plexiglass elements, arranged to form larger matrix-like screens that reveal an image of the recently destroyed Arch of Triumph in Palmyra. The image is only visible during the day through the movement of wind and light, and at night, through the illumination of the pixels. Spearheaded by Azra Aksamija, Memory Matrix will be on display from April 23 through May 7.
RDH Architects has unveiled the plans for its Old Post Office Idea Exchange, a restoration project in Cambridge, Canada. The post office project will completely restore the existing historic building and transform it into a new space through the use of new glass additions that will increase usable space and improve accessibility.
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In architecture circles, it's a sadly familiar trope: a postwar modernist building by a celebrated architect is slated for demolition, and the only people to come to its defense are not the local community, but the architects and critics who can see past the weathered concrete to the ideals within. But despite this familiarity, it's rare to find a critic with first-hand experience as the user of the building in question, and rarer still for them to have experienced it with the unprejudiced eyes of a child. Such is the case with Alexandra Lange, who went to kindergarten at Josep Lluís Sert's Martin Luther King Jr School in Cambridge. In this article from MAS Context, originally titled "Never-Loved Buildings Rarely Stand a Chance: Josep Lluís Sert in Cambridge" and featuring photographs by Lee Dykxhoorn, Lange recounts her experiences of the school and laments its destruction. The latest issue of MAS Context focuses on the theme of "Legacy" - from the legacy we have inherited from our predecessors to the legacy we are leaving for the future.
It’s a detail too perfect, better suited to a novel. Architecture critic goes to kindergarten at modernist school. Years later, she returns to the city of her birth and discovers the school again, surrounded by construction hoardings, on the brink of destruction. Can she save it? Except that was me, and I was too late.
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Architect and MIT Lecturer Cristina Parreño has created this new prototype for a self-supporting glass facade, entitled "The Wall." The design is the first in Parreño's "Tectonics of Transparency," a series of planned prototypes that will "explore the relationship between formal design, spatial perception, structural efficiency and systems of fabrication."
More details about Parreño's prototype after the break
_Barton_Willmore_and_Malcolm_Reading_Consultants.jpg?1507914709 "© Barton Willmore and Malcolm Reading Consultants")
_Tibbalds_Planning_and_Urban_Design_and_Malcolm_Reading_Consultants.jpg?1507914645 "© Tibbalds Planning & Urban Design, Mikhail Riches, Featherstone Young, Marko and Placemakers, Expedition Engineering & Khaa and Malcolm Reading Consultants")
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_Fletcher_Priest_Architects_and_Malcolm_Reading_Consultants.jpg?1507914594 "© Fletcher Priest Architects and Malcolm Reading Consultants")
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.jpg?1495045929 "© Herzog & de Meuron. Courtesy of Astrazeneca")
.jpg?1495045904 "© Herzog & de Meuron. Courtesy of Astrazeneca")
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.jpg?1436230734 "Courtesy of Proctor and Matthews Architects")
.jpg?1436230527 "Courtesy of Proctor and Matthews Architects")
.jpg?1436230572 "Courtesy of Proctor and Matthews Architects")
.jpg?1436230546 "Courtesy of Proctor and Matthews Architects")
.jpg?1417009941 "© John Horner")
.jpg?1417009867 "© John Horner")
.jpg?1417009859 "© Jane Messinger")
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