MVRDV has just introduced its comprehensive plan and architectural vision for the construction of the Gate M West Bund Dream Center in Shanghai. Formerly home to a cement plant factory, the design uses the existing structures for cultural programs and combines them with new structures to house new functions. The Dream Center aims to revitalize the riverbank area into a thriving cultural and recreational district.
Apropos Architects has won the competition to design the Czech Republic Pavilion at the Universal World EXPO 2025 in Osaka, Japan. The architecture of the intervention prioritizes movement as a crucial component of preserving physical health.
The pavilion's content demands a creative connection with spiritual and cultural ideals while openly urging visitors to engage in physical activity. It focuses on the concept that the movement of the body and the soul can shape a place, with a dynamic ascending spiral designed as a metaphor for the ideal life path. As visitors actively move within the pavilion, the cultural content materializes, culminating in a journey that generates lasting inner energy.
The Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam, The Netherlands, opens The Energy Show and the Solar Biennale on Friday, September 9, 2022. In collaboration with The Solar Biennale designer and curator Matylda Krzykowski and solar designers Marjan van Aubel and Pauline van Dongen, the exhibition presents a series of projects that explores the sun's meaning and possibilities in society, the environment, and design. With Europe in the midst of an energy crisis, The Energy Show and the Solar Biennale is an opportunity for designers and the general public to examine the transition to solar energy and technology as we move towards a post-carbon future.
All architecture movements throughout history spur from shifts in society that demand a new style that better reflects the way that technology has advanced the practice and how people express their political, religious, and moral beliefs and practices. While some shifts occur over a period of several years, others are experienced as a sudden revolt. The Vienna Secession was undoubtedly the latter. At the end of the 19th century, a group of artists and architects aimed to explore what art should be as it pertained to filtering global influences in a way that could introduce new modernism.
Alterity is essential to human development. If deprived of a variety of stimuli, the brain is unable to develop, losing plasticity and deteriorating like an atrophied muscle. This reasoning is widely accepted when it comes to social relations or cognitive and physical activities. But what about the stimuli promoted by the built environment?
Architecture, and all aspects of the design world, has experienced numerous movements throughout time that have defined the way we express ourselves through buildings, art, and other mediums. Created out of a dissatisfaction with the status quo or the emergence of new technology, there have been particularly notable design shifts and emerging ideologies over the last 100 years. This leaves us to ask the question- what design moment are we in now, and what characterizes it? How will we retroactively reflect on this moment of time in design, and will the COVID-19 pandemic accelerate innovation to bring us to our next design era?
Architectural space as we know it is left largely empty even when it is inhabited. We have become accustomed to this empty space, take it for granted, and most likely could not imagine a life in which we are forced to occupy only the space that we use. Through cataloguing our everyday activities and analyzing our body movements, Stavros Gargaretas of Why Factory studio at TUDelft sought to examine the question of ultimate space efficiency with a project entitled “The Evolving Room: Inhabiting Zero Wasted Space.” The work was completed under the supervision of Ulf Hackauf, Adrian Ravon and Huib Plomp, along with Why Factroy founder Winy Maas and won TUDelft's Best Graduation Project of the Faculty of Architecture award.
