One Brickell City Centre by Arquitectonica. Image Courtesy of Swire Properties Inc and Related Companies
Arcquitectonica unveiled the design of One Brickell City Centre, an approximately 1,000-foot (approximately 300 meters) office tower planned to become the tallest commercial tower in Florida. Located in Miami’s financial district on Brickell Avenue, the office building represents the second phase of Brickell City Centre, a 4.9-million-square-foot (450,000 square meters) mixed‐use development that opened in 2016. One Brickell City Centre is developed by Swire Properties Inc. and Related Companies. Construction it set to begin in 2023.
The International High-Rise Award 2022/23 has nominated 34 outstanding projects from 13 different countries to compete for this year’s edition. Selected by the Deutsches Architekturmuseum (DAM), the shortlisted buildings were picked from more than 1,000 new high-rises worldwide dating from the past two years. As in previous years, a considerable decline in high-rises completed was to be observed.
The jury of international experts for this year’s High-Rise Award was chaired by architect Sven Thorissen (MVRDV) and included architects, engineers, architectural critics, and representatives of DekaBank, the City of Frankfurt, and Deutsches Architekturmuseum (DAM). In the fall, five finalists will be announced in the second step of the process, and the winner will be released on November 8, 2022.
The Saudi Arabian government has released visuals of a 170-kilometer-long skyscraper as part of the NEOM project. Announced by crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, The Line is a reimagined urban development linking the coast of the Red Sea to the mountains and upper valleys of northwest Saudi Arabia. The compact structure, 200 meters wide, represents a social and economic experiment. The city aims to be zero-carbon, through the elimination of carbon-intensive infrastructures like cars and roads, and will operate on 100% renewable energy, including the operations of its industries.
111 West 57th Street by SHop Architects. Image Courtesy of SHoP Architects
The world is facing an Urban Century. The world’s population is collapsing into city centers as manufacturing and agriculture need fewer humans because technology replaces the human hand with machines. The world's urban population has grown from 751 million in 1950 to 4.46 billion in 2021 and will grow to 6.68 billion by 2050.
While architects and designers want to define and control the future of our cities, the immediate reality of New York City, now, is a lesson in what may be our future. It’s response can be seen by the advent of The Tower the fabric of Manhattan.
Manhattan's dense landscape has just received another skyscraper, this time designed by a Portuguese Pritzker Prize Winner. At 137 meters high and with 35 floors, 611 West 56th Street, Álvaro Siza's first building in New York, was just completed, on the outside. The luxury apartment complex, which is also Siza's first work in the United States, has several facilities for its residents, such as a swimming pool, a spa, a gym, a playground for children and rooms for events.
Haptic and Ramboll conceptualize a novel structure that hopes to eradicate the need for demolition. The timber high-rise construction is built for maximum flexibility and longevity, being able to change its configuration and, consequently, its functions to adapt to the city’s changing needs. The design concept is based on the idea of maximizing the potential of sites in inner-city neighborhoods. To exemplify the regenerative potential of this model, the architects have applied the concept to a tight urban area in the center of Oslo, Norway.
Büro Ole Scheeren has won an international design competition to build the 350-meter Nanjing Jiangbei New Financial Center Tower in China. The octagonal-silhouette skyscraper merges local tradition and culture within a mixed-use structure, aiming to become an iconic symbol of Nanjing’s new urban identity.
Foster + Partners revealed the design of a new skyscraper at 270 Park Avenue that will host JPMorgan Chase’s New York headquarters. The 60-story tower is set to be the city’s largest all-electric tower with net-zero operational emissions powered by renewable energy sourced from a New York State hydroelectric plant and is designed around high standards regarding wellness and hospitality. The project’s morphology creates extensive ground-level outdoor space with green areas and a public plaza, accompanied by various amenities geared towards the neighbourhood’s residents. Under construction since 2021, the project replaces SOM's Union Carbide Building, which became the tallest voluntarily demolished building in the world.
Overtaking the Tour Firstskyscraper, the 48-story, 220-meter HEKLA Tower will be the tallest building in Paris’s La Défense business district, as well as the second tallest building in all of France. Currently under construction and designed by Pritzker prize-winning Jean Nouvel, it is set to become a powerful architectural statement. Due to complete this 2022 in the midst of the sector’s redevelopment program, the futuristic skyscraper spreads over 76,000 sqm of floor area distributed in offices, services, lobbies, an amphitheater, projection rooms, performance halls, restaurants, bars, gyms and loggias. All of this with the aim of providing a unique user experience with vast, flexible workspaces that promote interaction and well-being.
CHYBIK + KRISTOF revealed the design of a skyscraper in the Czech Republic city of Ostrava. The project reframes the typology of the skyscraper as a dynamic social hub and activates public space in support of the post-industrial city’s reactivation and socio-economical transformation. Upon completion, the 235-metre Ostrava Towerwill be the tallest building in the country.
Kowloon Walled City, Hong Kong. Image Courtesy of 'City of Darkness Revisited’
Cities are growing, and they are growing upwards. This is far from just being a contemporary phenomenon of course – for more than a century, high-rises have been an integral part of urban settlements worldwide. This growing of cities encompasses a complex web of processes – advancements in transport links, urbanisation, and migration to mention a few. This growth of cities, however, is all too often linked with governmental failure to adequately support all facets of the urban population. Informal settlements are then born – people carving out spaces for themselves to live amidst a lack of state support.
Embroiled in legal battles for the better part of a decade, a notably tall (not to mention pyramid-shaped) mixed-use tower is a major step closer to joining the famously short Parisian skyline.. Image Courtesy of Herzog & de Meuron
After more than a decade of financing snags, legal scuffles, and more than a soupçonof backlash, initial work on the Herzog & de Meuron-designed Tour Triangle (Triangle Tower) is set to commence by the end of this year at a site near Parc des Expositions de Porte de Versailles in the 15th arrondissement of Paris. However, last-ditch efforts to block the project are underway.
Shenzhen Natural History Museum. Image Courtesy of 3XN
The latest news and reports on China’s construction sector redefine the country’s future architectural landscape. A Cultural Infrastructure Index reflecting the data from 2020 places China and, more specifically, Shenzen as the world leader in investments regarding cultural facilities. Last year saw the announcement of 10 new cultural projects, all designed by world-renowned architects. At the same time, the Chinese authorities announced last month that buildings taller than 500 metres would no longer be approved, marking the end of an era that made the country home to 10 of the tallest 20 buildings in the world.
Australian architecture firm Durbach Block Jaggers has unveiled a design for the Pencil Tower Hotel in Sydney. Designed to be the country's thinnest skyscraper, the project would rise at 410 Pitt Street with a height-to-width ratio of 16:1. With 173 hotel rooms with six suites on each floor, the 100-metre-high tower would be built in the downtown area with street frontage only 6.4 meters wide.
Work has begun for MVRDV's renovation of Shenzen Women & Children Centre, a mixed-use tower featuring an array of public functions, now in need of a comprehensive transformation. Constructed during the city's explosive growth following the Special Economic Zone designation in the 1980s, the building is one of the many nearing the end of their initial lifespan, and MVRDV's adaptive re-use project sets an important precedent for repurposing these buildings by bringing colour, greenery and a new layer of public spaces.
With its Shenzen project, design firm Morphosis reimagines the skyscraper typology, maximizing the flexibility of the floor plan through a detached-core scheme that shifts circulation, services and amenities to the building's exterior. Using a pioneering structural system, the project's spatial configuration diversifies the interiors' functional possibilities while reshaping the circulation routes within the building, with glass sky-bridges and large-scale steel braces knitting the core to the tower's main body. Completed in 2018 with a gradual opening that continues into 2021, the 359.8-metre tower is currently the tallest detached-core building in the world.
Scottish architecture firm Kettle Collective has revealed plans for a 703-metre skyscraper in St. Petersburg, making it the second tallest building in the world after Dubai’s Burj Khalifa. The Lakhta Centre II will have the highest occupied floor, and while the exact site is yet to be confirmed, it will sit alongside Lakhta Centre, currently the tallest building in Europe and the headquarters of energy firm Gazprom.
It would be an understatement to say that architecture is a profession that closely mirrors economic conditions. In this practice, we’ve all heard the stories or felt the experiences of recessions that were quickly followed by projects put on hold, a decreased pipeline of new business, and the unfortunate impact of layoffs and furloughs. The cyclical nature of the design field, paired with the pressure to meet the spatial needs for a growing global population in a time where the value of land has continued to sky-rocket means that architecture is naturally subjected to economic impacts in a significant way. But some economic theories predict that instead of the economy dictating the ebbs and flows of the design profession, architecture might be one of the influences causing economic downturns.
