Structures: The Latest Architecture and News

Located in Trafalgar Square in London, the BE OPEN Sound Portal focuses on an experience that would be all about the sound. Designed by Arup, they thought it would be great if people could really concentrate on sound in Trafalgar Square, which would take people away form hustle and bustle into a space where they can concentrate and immerse themselves in sound. The original idea was that they would be able to take people away from London to another place, to hear the sound of a melting glacier or an acoustic model of the big bang. The plan is effectively two concentric circles: the inner circle for the sound and the outer circle forms the entrances. Both pieces mask the background noise. They are shells to shield the noise. More images and architects’ description after the break.

Staten Island, arguably New York’s most often forgotten borough, may finally be getting its moment in the spotlight. Talks are in the works of creating a giant 600 ft Ferris wheel near the Staten Island Ferry Terminal to generate activity for the waterfront. To put 600 feet in perspective, think bigger than the Singapore Flyer at 451 feet and the London Eye’s 450 ft marker, and much bigger than Coney Island’s Wonder Wheel at 150 feet. While millions enjoy the free trip across the harbor on the ferry every year, few venture far from the boat. The Ferris Wheel is intended to capitalize on the Island’s amazing views of Manhattan and build up the Island’s visitor flow. “It’s the greatest thing that has been proposed for Staten Island, especially on the waterfront. This could landmark us. We have 2 million tourists a year on the ferry, so we have a built-in audience to use it, and it’s a different audience every day. Once you can attract them off that boat, you got them here,” James Molinaro, the borough president, stated.

More after the break. 

The disappointment generated by the Shard’s opening laser light show is not so surprising for a project that has been grounded in controversy for over a decade. Since 2000, when Piano sketched his initial vision upon meeting developer Irvine Sellar, the project has consistently met obstacles such as English Heritage and the financial crash of 2007. But, the biggest opposition of the tower has been its height. English Heritage claimed that the tower, formerly known as London Bridge Tower, would “tear through historic London like a shard of glass” (ironically, coining the new name of the tower), and Piano counters that, “The best architecture takes time to be understood…I would prefer people to judge it not now. Judge it in 10 years’ time.”

Leading us to wonder…does the Shard simply need time to be fully appreciated?

Yesterday, the final steel beam rose 977 feet into the air and was placed atop 4 World Trade Center – the 72-story tower designed by Pritzker Prize-winning Japanese architect Fumihiko Maki. As gospel singer BeBe Winans sang “God Bless America”, the 8 ton beam, signed by all members of the team and adorned with an American flag, reached its final destination atop the city’s sixth tallest tower.

At over 80 years of age, Maki is making his New York debut in an elegant manner. The tower was designed to serve as a “respectful backdrop” to the National September 11 Memorial and not to compete with 1 World Trade. ”This is a special place with a sacred meaning and we felt we had to be respectful,” explained Osamu Sassa, Maki’s project architect, to The New York Times. Such a ideology offers a strong contrast with the other architectural statements that will eventually rise as part of the World Trade Center complex, such as Norman Foster’s 2 World Trade and Richard Roger’s 3 World Trade. While the minimalism of Maki may have kept the design under the radar during its design and construction stages, the grace of its simplicity will craft a dignified presence while visiting the site. ”The design of the tower at 150 Greenwich has two fundamental elements – a ‘minimalist’ tower that achieves an appropriate presence, quiet but with dignity, and a ‘podium’ that becomes a catalyst for activating the surrounding urban streetscape as part of the revitalization of lower Manhattan,” explained Maki.

More about 4 World Trade after the break.

The exploratory mud structure project, designed and built by Architecture for Humanity Tehran (Rai Studio) + Architecture Faculty of Razi University, demonstrates a strong focus on humanitarian design through sustainable and low budget construction methodologies. The workshop not only provided the students with an enriched academic experience, but the opportunity to reach out to an underdeveloped region. More images and their description after the break.

15:15 Raincatcher by YS Groundwork is the result of a competition entry for the contemporary design of one of Hong Kong’s oldest urban traditions: the Hawker Stall – Dai Pai Dong. A Hawker Stall is a kitchen, a dining room and a living room – a space for passersby to enjoy public space, interact with strangers, and grab a bite to eat on their way to their next destination. Initially exhibited at the 2009 Hong Kong Shenzhen Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism and Architecture, YSGroundwork has won the opportunity to realize their design and prove that their twist on tradition will add vitality and innovation to the Hong Kong’s streetlife.

More on the project after the break!

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Under the guidance of David Mah, Carl Koepcke and Marshall Prado from Harvard Graduate School of Design created a system for constructing a rapidly deployable ice shelter using snow and ice as building materials. The temporary shelter is intended for cold environments and utilizes the insulative properties and inherent compressive strength of the proposed building materials to craft a spatial catenary volume.

More about the ice shelter after the break.

ArchDaily announced the winning proposal for the 2012 MoMA PS1 Young Architects Program (YAP) in February. In order to bring you full coverage of the annual competition, we are featuring the other four creative designs that competed against HWKN’s Wendy. Cameron Wu(Cambridge, MA) proposed Coney Inland, an architectural strategy which formally unifies and spatially modulates the challenging MoMA PS1 courtyard site. A series of developable surfaces (cones and cylinders) and their base structures normalize the contingencies of scale and shape of the three courtyard spaces, while their legible transformations register the idiosyncratic nature of the overall site geometry.

For generations of New Yorkers, Coney Island has served as the quintessential local retreat from the city. Unfettered access to sky, land, and sea makes it a clear contrast to the urban metropolis, drawing crowds in search of spatial and social release. Through the architectural translation of qualities inherent to this ocean-side precedent, Coney Inland imports the culture of casual beach leisure into the courtyard at MoMA PS1.

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ArchDaily announced the winning proposal for the 2012 MoMA PS1 Young Architects Program (YAP) earlier this month. In order to bring you full coverage of the annual competition, we are featuring the other four creative designs that competed against HWKN’s Wendy. Ibañez Kim Studio (Mariana Ibañez and Simon Kim) proposed a Mechanical Garden that enjoyed a unique partnership with artists and engineers in Philadelphia.

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ArchDaily announced the winning proposal for the 2012 MoMA PS1 Young Architects Program (YAP) earlier this month. In order to bring you full coverage of the annual competition, we are featuring the other four creative designs that competed against HWKN’s Wendy. Virtual Water, a collaborative design brought to you by UrbanLab, endrestudio and Method Design, formally manifests what is hidden in plain sight: RAIN. The project reveals and plays with thousands of gallons of summertime rainwater that would otherwise be discarded from the PS1 courtyard.

Virtual Water refers to water hidden in everyday products. A pair of jeans, for example, has a 3000 gallon Virtual Water footprint because 3000 gallons of water are consumed in the various steps of its production chain (growing the cotton, dyeing the fabric, etc).

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This article, recently seen on The New York Times, was kindly shared with us by the author Sarah Williams Goldhagen.

A REVOLUTION in cognitive neuroscience is changing the kinds of experiments that scientists conduct, the kinds of questions economists ask and, increasingly, the ways that architects, landscape architects and urban designers shape our built environment.

This revolution reveals that thought is less transparent to the thinker than it appears and that the mind is less rational than we believe and more associative than we know. Many of the associations we make emerge from the fact that we live inside bodies, in a concrete world, and we tend to think in metaphors grounded in that embodiment.