Courtesy of Chung Whan Park, Terry Park, Jeong Jun Song, Hyuntek Yoon, Kyung Jae Yu
The mission in the proposal, titled ‘The Grand Opening,’ for the Redesigning Detroit: A New Vision for an Iconic Site competition is to create a vision for a 24/7 timeless, vibrant and walk-able urban neighborhood in downtown Detroit with a catalytic impact on the retail activities of Woodward Avenue Corridor. Designed by Chung Whan Park, Terry Park, Jeong Jun Song, Hyuntek Yoon and Kyung Jae Yu, The Grand Opening will connect the different contexts of the existing urban settings and bring every hour of excitement, crowd and memorable identity to the street life of downtown Detroit. More images and architects’ description after the break.
In the heart of Colombo, Sri Lanka, a lot surrounds a historic British-colonial building. In this country, density is not limited and the program quickly takes on an exceptional scale. Designed by Maison Edouard François, the 450,000m² Heritage Building is planned for offices, apartments, a hotel, a cinema, and a commercial center. As two spectacular bridges unite the three towers, the challenge becomes how to successfully create such a massive program adjacent to a historic monument. More images and architects’ description after the break.
The Miami Beach Convention Center, a giant box of a building constructed in 1957, is in desperate need of a makeover and two design teams have bravely accepted the challenge. Team 1 is dubbed South Beach ACE (Arts, Culture, Entertainment District) and is a collaboration between Rem Koolhaas's OMA firm, Tishman, UIA, MVVA, Raymond Jungles and TVS. Team 2 goes by the name of Miami Beach Square and includes BIG, West 8, Fentress, JPA and Portman CMC. Both proposals completely re-imagine 52 acres of prime beach real estate and cost over a billion dollars in public and private funds. So, who does it better?
London-based practice Farrells will be teaming up with UK developer Stanhope and commercial developer ABP China (Holding) to regenerate London’s historic docklands into a thriving, mixed-use business district. The deal, which represents one of the first direct investment by a Chinese developer in London’s property market, will act as a platform for financial, high-tech and knowledge driven industries looking to establish their business in UK and European markets.
More on the Farrells' masterplan after the break...
Connecting time and space with the ‘lucky cloud’, the Aedas designed Xuzhou Suning Plaza is interpreted as magical and delightful, bringing history to life in Xuzhou. Located in the ‘Imperial Emperor’s Town’ of China, the changing of forms inspires reverie and the oval buildings reflect the union of masculine and feminine qualities as well as power and gentleness. More images and architects’ description after the break.
The Tel-Aviv White City Forum winning proposal by Kimmel Eshkolot Architects is an exhibition center, part of the huge Tel- Aviv wholesale market project currently under construction. Comprising thousands of apartment units, a mall, a school and a sports complex, the Forum will be a platform for genuine urban celebration. More images and architects’ description after the break.
OMA has broke ground on a 27,000 square meter, mixed-use development on the banks of Copenhagen’s historic waterfront in the culturally rich Slotsholmen district. Upon its completion in early 2017, Bryghusprojektet will become the new headquarters for the Danish Architecture Centre (DAC), while also providing housing, offices, retail, a restaurant, and an urban park. These programs will be stacked over and under the busy Christians Brygge, providing city dwellers direct and uninterrupted access to the water’s edge.
OMA Partner-in-charge Ellen van Loon explained: “Instead of stacking a mixed-use program in a traditional way, we positioned the DAC in the centre of the volume, surrounded by and embedded within its objects of study: housing, offices and parking. The urban routes reach into the heart of the building and create a broad range of interactions between the different program parts and the urban environment.”
More images and the architects' description after the break...
South Beach ACE just unveiled their master plan for the redevelopment of the Miami Beach Convention Center site. Currently in a battle with BIG and Portman CMC for the right to overhaul the 52-acre site, national developer Tishman, international architecture firm OMA, international firm TVS, and Miami Beach developer UIA Management comprise the South Beach ACE team. The vision involves bringing to life one of Miami Beach’s most underutilized public sites with a fully-revamped convention center capable of luring major events from around the world, an iconic hotel, inviting green spaces, low-density retail uses, and cultural venues.
More images and the team's description after the break...
Designed by Aedas, their competition winning proposal to design a bay front, mixed-use development in Wu Yuan Wan, Xiamen, China is comprised of a shopping mall, a five-star hotel and two SOHO towers. With a total gross floor area of 175,000 square meters, their design aims to become the centerpiece of a new master plan. Ultimately, it will be a new retail landmark and a well integrated complex that responds to its watery surrounding. More images and architects’ description after the break.
ARJM, in collaboration with SUM, recently won the competition for their project, "Square de l'Accueil" (Welcoming Square), which includes a public square of 10,000 m2, 53 flats, a school, commercial spaces and underground parking. Located in a neighborhood at a strategic entry point towards Evere, one of Brussels communes, the project itself includes all the components of the city at a smaller scale. More images and architects’ description after the break.
With the ground breaking ceremony recently held to kick start construction, the Aedas designed Mapletree Minhang Development Project involves two sites – Mapletree Business City and VivoCity. With a site area of approximately 119,000 square meters and a gross floor area of about 297,000 square meters, Vivocity is designed as a double looped mall with high efficiency. More images and architects’ description after the break.
Most parking is free - but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have a high cost. A recent podcast from Freakonomics Radio examined parking in US cities, investigating the “cost of parking not paid for by drivers” - a cost paid not just by the government, but by the environment - due to congestion and pollution caused by people searching for kerbside parking. For example, in a 15 block area of Los Angeles the distance traveled by drivers looking for parking is equivalent to one trip across the USA per day.
One potential solution which they discuss is a San Francisco project called SF Park, which makes use of sensor technology to measure the demand for parking in certain areas of the city and adjust price according to demand. In theory, this would create a small number of empty spaces on each block and dramatically reduce the time that many drivers spend cruising for parking spaces.
Though the idea is certainly an intelligent approach to the problem of kerbside parking, unsurprisingly all this talk of supply, demand and pricing sounds very much like an economist's answer to a problem. But what can designers do to help the situation?
Perhaps, from the designer’s point of view, the real problem with kerbside parking and surface lots is that they are always seen as a provision “coupled with” a building or area of the city. There have been a number of attempts by architects – some successful and some tragically flawed – to make parking spaces less of a rupture in a city's fabric and more of a destination in themselves. Could these point to another way?
Read about 3 examples of parking’s past, and one of its potential future, after the break...
NYCHA, Public Housing. Courtesy of Flickr User agentvladimir. Licensed via Creative Commons
For the past four decades, as cities faced financial pressures, high-rise public housing met its decline. Cities throughout the country demolished public housing that was failing financially and socially, like Chicago's Cabrini-Green Housing Project whose demolition was completed in 2011, to make way for mixed use developments that encouraged economic and social diversity by way of the HOPE VI Program. This strategy resulted in the uprooting and relocation of former residents who faced uncertainty throughout the process.
The New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) stands out among housing authorities in the United States due to its size - 179,000 units in 2,600 buildings across the city - and the fact that the buildings are relatively well maintained. NYCHA has avoided resorting to demolitions to deal with its issues, instead resorting to special police services that costs NYCHA a purported $70 million a year. Over the past decade NYCHA has been underfunded by approximately $750 million causing backlogs in necessary repairs.
To address the mounting costs of public housing, New York City's Mayor Bloomberg has proposed an infill strategy that would attract developers onto NYCHA land and create a new layer of commercial space and residential units in public housing developments. The goal over the next five years is to develop methods of preservation for the housing development and promote mixed-use and mixed-income developments to generate income for NYCHA.
ATENASTUDIO, in collaboration with Archmaster studio, has developed a masterplan for a new district in Wuxi, China, which takes a 200,000 sqm buildable zoning lot to present two main keywords which are the base of all design choices and that can be defined as generator elements of all the project: landscape and waterscape. The intention is to emphasize to the maximum the presence of water making it become a diffuse system, introducing it inside the area and in every part of the project, and using it as if it was a “3D liquid material”. More images and architects' description after the break.
Emerging from a design excellence competition held by the Parramatta City Council, the Aspire Tower, designed by Grimshaw Architects, is a landmark mixed-use tower set to establish a new benchmark for innovative, passive-environmental design in Australian high-rise developments. Designed to act as a catalyst project for Parramatta Square, the tower provides high density, urban residential living which is not only affordable but also sustainable. More images and architects' description after the break.
The revamped Transbay Transit Center in downtown San Francisco broke ground earlier this week, a project that will introduce a 1.5 million square foot development that will be part transportation hub, part public park and urban space, and part offices and retail establishments. The massive undertaking, designed by renowned architecture firm Pelli Clarke Pelli will bring together 11 systems of local and national transportation, serving 45 million people per year. In addition to securing access to myriad transit lines, the project will also provide downtown San Francisco with a 5.4-acre rooftop park, designed by PWP Landscape Architecture, along with numerous cultural programs. The project is budgeted at 4.2 billion dollars and is projected for completion in 2017. It is funded in part by the construction of a 1,070-foot tower that is adjacent to the Transbay Transity Center. It is also designed by Pelli Clarke Pelli and is slated to be the tallest tower in San Francisco. The tower will secure 60 stories of office space and jobs and will contribute to the projected $87 billion of revenue through 2030.
Join us after the break for more details on this project.
