Infrastructures: The Latest Architecture and News

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Moscow-based architectural studio Nefa Architects (Nefaresearch) have been chosen to redesign the Solntsevo metro station. Their project, which is designed to “create a solar spray effect” on the station’s subterranean platform, won an international competition whose winners were ultimately chosen by Moscow’s citizens.

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The following is an excerpt from Keller Easterling's latest publication, Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space, which explores areas of infrastructure with the greatest impact on our world. Easterling is a professor at Yale School of Architecture.

The road between Nairobi and Mombasa is lined with, and virtually lit by, advertisements for the mobile phone companies that have entered the region—all promising new freedoms and economic opportunities. With their images of Masai tribesman in native dress phoning from a remote wilderness, the ads employ an essential trope of leap-frogging—the desire for a perfect collapse between technology and nature, tradition and modernity. The billboards express the enthusiasm of a world turned upside down in which not the developed but the developing world has their hands around a majority of the world’s cell phones.

Over the last 150 years, the ocean floor has been laid with thousands of miles of submarine cable of all types for telegraph, telephone, and fiber-optic infrastructure. In the nineteenth century, it took only thirty years for the British cable-laying companies to string the world with telegraph cable, and a little over a decade from the late 1980s to the late 1990s for most of the world to be connected to fiber-optic cable. Yet until recently, East Africa, one of the most populous areas of the world, had no fiber- optic submarine cable link and less than 1 percent of the world’s broadband capacity. A country like Kenya had to rely for its broadband on expensive satellite technology acquired in the 1970s that cost twenty to forty times its equivalent in the developed world. Before 2009, one Mbps (megabit per second) of bandwidth could cost as much as 7,500 US dollars per month against the world average of $200. The monthly cost of putting twenty-five agents on the phone was $17,000 a month instead of the $600–900 that it would cost in other developed countries.(1)

Stockholm-based practice Utopia Arkitekter has been selected to design a new travel centre in Uppsala after their "sculptural, eye-catching jewel of a building" won the municipal design contest. Featuring a travel centre, fitness centre and restaurant on the lower floors and offices in the floors above, the building aims for LEED Platinum certification. The design revolves around the incorporation of bicycles, providing commuters with extensive bicycle parking facilities as well as changing room and shower facilities for a convenient transfer from bicycle to train.

More on the design after the break

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As part of the Newcastle-upon-Tyne's Malmo Quay development masterplanned by URBED, AWP Office for Territorial Reconfiguration has designed a cycle hub and community hall with a gradually ascending ramp that leads to a lookout platform with views of the surrounding Newcastle Quayside and Ouseburn Valley. Though this distinctive ramp and lookout will be a landmark at a prominent location on the Tyne river, AWP states that "by revealing a new perspective of the city and the Valley, the cycle hub will become a landmark celebrated precisely for the view it creates," rather than merely for its striking appearance above the roofline of the cycle hub below.

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More than 300,000 Moscow citizens have chosen U-R-A | United Riga Architects to redesign the Novoperedelkino metro station. Aiming to revive the tradition of unique designs for Moscow metro stations, the winning scheme plans to illuminate the underground station with a series of lighted metal panels perforated with archetypal Moscow motifs.

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Powerhouse Company and De Zwarte Hond (Team A) have won an international competition to redesign the Assen railway station in the Netherlands. The winning scheme, marked by a triangular latticed canopy, is designed to reconnect the east and west side of the city with an “inviting and recognizable” transit hub.

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COBE, DISSING+WEITLING and COWI have been announced as winners of an international competition to design a 225-meter-long pedestrian bridge, station, 32,000-square-meter park and associated park-and-ride facility for the Danish city of Køge. The winning design, selected over three other invited submissions, will stretch across a unique traffic “hot-spot” where Denmark’s most trafficked freeway, an existing train line and a planned double-tracked high-speed rail line meet.

More about the Køge North Station, which is expected serve 90,000 people daily as a “new gateway to Copenhagen” by 2018, after the break.

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CEMEX has unveiled the international finalists for the XXIII Building Awards, which aim to recognize the best architecture and construction internationally. Spanning across three categories, the awards recognize housing, institutional/industrial and large-scale infrastructure projects that were built during 2013 and stand out for their constructive solutions, aesthetics and innovative techniques.

Both the international and national winners will be announced on November 5. Read on after the break for the international finalists and check out our coverage on the Mexican finalists for the XXIII Building Awards here.

Henning Larsen Architects, in collaboration with an international team consisting of Tredje Natur, MOE and Railway Procurement Agency, has won Frederikssund municipality’s architecture competition to design a regional train station and new quarter in the future town of Vinge. While primarily serving to connect Vinge to the regional public transit system, the undulating, circular urban hub is designed to prevent the railway from dividing the town in two halves.

“The proposal best connects the train station, nature and town structure as one united whole,” lauded the selection committee regarding Henning Larsen’s winning scheme.