Architects ONL (Oosterhuis Lénárd) have designed a whale-shaped building between two existing warehouses on the banks of the river Danube in Budapest, Hungary. The project also involves the renovation of the warehouses, which will be shortened by 20 metres to make way for a new square. The 27,000 square metre development will be used as a cultural and commercial centre with a large event hall, retail units and catering units; building is due for completion in 2010.

© FG+SG – Fernando Guerra, Sergio Guerra

Architects: Spaceworkers
Location: Porto, Portugal
Principals in Charge: Henrique Marques, Rui Dinis
Collaborators: José Carlos, Vasco Giesta, Daniel Neto, Sérgio Rocha, Rui Rodrigues
Engineering: Pórtico – Engenharia, Lda
Client: Marta Massada e João Silva
Project Area: 180 sqm
Project Year: 2008-2009
Photographs: FG+SG – Fernando Guerra, Sergio Guerra

section 01

Intervening in a typical habitation of the Oporto urban tissue it’s by itself a reason for the memory theme run through our thought, as the memory itself begins to delineate like a program, a “tool” capable of function as a moderator element between the “old” and the “new”.

© FG+SG – Fernando Guerra, Sergio Guerra

© FG+SG – Fernando Guerra, Sergio Guerra

This project tries to recreate the habitation spaces (an element per se container and generator of memories), preserving the identity of the architectonic object already existent, but with a greater cosmopolitan and contemporaneous touch, searching a symbiosis between two languages chronologically distant, intending  to create an “actualized” architectonic object belonging to the sensorial universe of this place from Porto city.

HWKN has completed their schematic design phase for their recent project, Aging in Africa, which will move toward construction in the beginning of next year.    The project, a retirement community for Catholic priests, (who are excluded from the traditional, family based, model of elder care in Cote D’Ivoire), will be the first age-valued community on the African continent.   This simplistic approach to housing will create an environment which is well-suited for the users-where the elderly will be safe and comfortable, and continue to maintain a meaningful and healthy lifestyle.

More about the project after the break.

The project is specifically geared toward the users, and deploy a holistic set of social, economic and environmentally sustainable theories pertaining to elder living and care.  ”It is about architecture that does not just house caring, it is architecture as the caring device.   Our hope is that it is an inspiration for a new breed of community that values the efficacy of spirit over efficiency of care,” explained the architects.

Situated between the Atlantic and an inland lagoon, the project is organized like a typical Cote D’Ivoire village around a central spine which stretches North/South from existing streets to capture the site’s prevailing winds.  Perforations along the perimeter let the natural vegetation grow into the village and capitalize on the stunning views towards the water.

The single story residential buildings frame the village’s spine whereas the more public buildings are centered on the village axis to reinforce their communal function. Based on simple geometries, the building shapes tilt and fold in relationship to each other, yet with an individual expression.

The peaks of the church employ a simple geometry that yields an iconic form that is at once a novel and familiar type of sacred space.

AGING IN AFRICA

LOCATION: Lagoon Aby, Cote D’Ivoire

ARCHITECT: HOLLWICHKUSHNER, LLC (HWKN)

AGING EXPERT: Emi Kiyota

CLIENT: Foundation Saint Joseph d’Arimathie

SCOPE: Concept Design, Schematic Design, Design Development.

STATUS: Schematic Design Completed Fall 2009; Start construction scheduled beginning of 2011

PROJECT TEAM: Matthias Hollwich, Marc Kushner, Robert May, Marc Perrotta, and KimByung Kyun

Italy-based demogo studio di architettura was one of the winners of the Europan 10 Architecture Competition. Their project, Town Hall of Gembloux is located in Belgium (Between Bruxelles and Namur), in a city of 22,600 inhabitants.

More images and architect’s description after the break.

Description of the site

The site is situated in the medieval centre near the tenth century city wall. It used to house a 13th century dungeon which is currently the location of the Maison du Bailly. With its rocky promontory housing the belfry, the abbey and the decanal church separated from each other by the Grand’Rue (main thoroughfare), these are the control points of the Orneau valley.

The medieval centre is covered by a buffer zone demarcated around the belfry. The belfry itself is one of a series of belfries in France and Belgium which were placed on the UNESCO world heritage list in 2006.

Description of the project

The idea of project is born from the wish to emphasize the symbols of the city of Gembloux, to establish a strong dialogue between the new administrative town pole and the context, in order to imagine the ”Beffroi”, the “Eglise Decanale” and the “Maison du Bailly” as prolongations of the same project.

The new building grafts him in the urban nucleus on the ”Place de d’Hôtel de ville”, creating a re-stitching with the existing fabric, offering the possibility to devote the whole south side to the “Parc d’Epinal”, a garden thought as an urban park open to the city.

The generating sights on the symbols of Gembloux fragment the new town pole in smaller parts in conformity with the urban staircase and they create a separated functional program in more fields.

The new fragments settle and emerge from the irregular surface of the park exploiting the variations of quota, they constitute two new public spaces complementary one to the other. Established in different quotas the two squares are parts of the ascensional route: city – town hall – park.

The city is enriched by the expression of a new form of centrality: an idea that goes beyond itself , that dialogues, completes and reveals the character of its surroundings.

Courtesy of KSP Jürgen Engel Architekten

Architects: KSP Jürgen Engel Architekten
Location: Nanjing, China
Developer: Jiangsu Province, represented by the Jiangsu Olympic Center, China
Partner Company: Nanjing Kingdom Architecture Design Co. Ltd., China
Structural Engineering: Breuninger Tragwerksplanung, Dr. Ulrich Breuninger
Site Area: 10,605 sqm
Project Area: 27,449 sqm
Project Year: 2006-2010
Photographs: Courtesy of KSP Jürgen Engel Architekten

site plan

Located in the cultural center of Nanjing and in the immediate proximity of the historical Presidential Palace of today’s provincial capital, the new Jiangsu Provincial Art Museum is one of the most important museums in south-east China. It has space for temporary exhibitions and houses a permanent collection featuring traditional Chinese art, which illustrates the cultural wealth of Nanjing – one of the oldest cities in southern China. The sizeable collection is kept in archive rooms in the Museum, which meet today’s techni- cal and strict conservation requirements. Having previously designed the National Li- brary of China in Beijing, the German company KSP Jürgen Engel Architekten has now completed its second significant cultural building in China.

Courtesy of KSP Jürgen Engel Architekten

The eye-catching new museum, which won first prize in a competition in 2006, takes up a several urban references from its deeply historical location. The main entrance faces the main city square, Daxing Gong Shi Min Square. In addition, the two structures of the Museum that stand at slight angles to one another follow the two flanking thor- oughfares: Zhongshan (or Revolution) Road, and Changjiang (or Culture) Road.

The two interlocking u-shaped buildings also create a space that is covered with a light glass roof. This 17-meter high access area, which narrows at its two main entrances, links the two stone halves of the building and guides visitors into the Museum.

Courtesy of KSP Jürgen Engel Architekten

In the northern building, clear exhibition rooms of varying sizes offer ideal conditions for presenting the works of art. Two bridges spanning the glass-covered intermediate space connect the exhibition area with the southern element.

In addition to training, conference and office space, this building also contains the VIP area and the auditorium with seating for around 400 people.

Courtesy of KSP Jürgen Engel Architekten

The travertine natural stone facing with its narrow window indentations obscures the sheer number of storeys and as such reinforces the overall monolithic impression of the museum building. Simultaneously, the alternation between vertical stone panels and window slits with sheet metal jutting out at the sides creates rhythm in the façade. The structural frame and the delicate construction of the glass roof were developed in collaboration with Stuttgart-based German engineers Breuninger.

The San Francisco office of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP (SOM) has received a 2010 “Good Design is Good Business” China Award for the new U.S. Embassy Complex in Beijing, China. Architectural Record and McGraw-Hill Construction recognized 17 projects with their third bi-annual program. The awards celebrate projects that demonstrate the power of design in the advancement of business and civic objectives.

The U.S. Embassy in Beijing, which opened for the 2008 Beijing Olympics, received its award in the Best Public Project category. Working with the U.S. Department of State, SOM responded to the building’s diplomatic role by creating a space that is welcoming, secure, and respectful of local traditions. As a sovereign U.S. presence on Chinese soil, the Embassy reflects American cultural, social and political values while paying respect to the host country’s ancient and extraordinarily vibrant culture.

More images and information after the break.

The awards jury included editors from Architectural Record, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, and Time+Architecture. “Wrestling with tough security requirements,” they said of the Embassy, “the architects used the Beijing traditions of walled compounds and garden design to create a place that represents American values of transparency and cultural diversity.”

The Embassy will be honored at a gala event and conference in Shanghai on March 12, 2010. SOM Design Partner Craig Hartman, FAIA will present the project, and Jay Holleran, Design Manager at the Department of State, will participate in a panel discussion. One “Grand Winner” from each category will be announced at the event, as will one “Project of the Year” and one “Best Client,” selected from among the winning projects.

All of the 2010 “Good Design is Good Business” award-winning projects will be published in the June issue of Architectural Record China and on-line at ArchitecturalRecord.com and BusinessWeek.com.

The U.S. Embassy – Beijing was previously honored by the American Institute of Architect’s San Francisco Chapter with a 2009 Excellence in Architecture Award.

Our friends from CHA:COL shared with us their urban strategy, PARENTHESIS, with us.  When the New School of Planning and Architecture decide to relocate an institution, CHA:COL imagined this new school as an interconnected whole where the plan connects disparate structures with the natural environment.  Set in India, the country already has a rich history of education that synthesizes the exterior with the interior, so CHA:COL’s strategy enforces this pedagogical mentality.

More about Parenthesis after the break.

Set on a site characterized by the South Central Ridge to the North, Residential Development to the South and major Commercial and Institutional buildings to the East and West, the existing terrain was fairly undulated and rocky–conditions that appeared ideal for proposing a zone to recharge groundwater and enhance local flora. These environmental features could then be enhanced to accomodate outdoor program usages and become a social space as well.

The site is diagonally sliced by a feeder road that helps unify the Academic and Residential zones.  Programmatically, the residential zone is located to the West of the road, and a private zone and Academic program to the East.

The Ravine became a primary armature for organizing built structures around it so the design strategy was therefore defined by ‘bracketing’ this ravine. Programmatically, it allowed the school to function as a continuum between the interior and the exterior.

The school component was based on research of ‘vertical studio’ prototypes which allow flexibility for modular studios to be reconfigured based on academic considerations.  The three zones of studio, research and housing were therefore, proposed to be integrated as far as possible by the exterior environment.

© James Ostrand

Architects: Stanley Saitowitz | Natoma Architects
Location: Tampa, FL, USA
Project team: Stanley Saitowitz, John Winder, Neil Kaye, Markus Bischoff
General Contractor: Skanska USA Building
Civil Engineering: WilsonMiller, Inc.
Structural Engineering: Walter P. Moore and Associates, Inc.
Project year: 2010
Photographs: Richard Barnes & James Ostrand

Museums began in ancient times as Temples, dedicated to the muses, where the privileged went to be amused, to witness beauty, and to learn. After the Renaissance museums went public with palatial structures where the idea of the gallery arose, a space to display paintings and sculpture. Later, museums became centers of education, researching, collecting, and actively provoking thought and the exchange of ideas. By presenting the highest achievements of culture, museums became a stabilizing and regenerative force, crusading for quality and excellence. The role of the modern museum is both aesthetic and didactic, both Temple and Forum.

© Richard Barnes

The design of contemporary museum can be characterized by two polar approaches. On the one-hand buildings which aim to be works of art in themselves, independent sculptural objects as signatures of their architects. The new Rome Museum is the most extreme example, where the building opened empty, without any art to compromise its architecture. On the opposite end of the spectrum are museums as containers, as beautiful jewel boxes, treasure chests whose sole purpose is to be filled with art, like the Tampa Museum.

This museum is a neutral frame for the display of art, an empty canvass to be filled with paintings. It is a beautiful but blank container, a scaffold, to be completed by its contents. We are interested in openness, in unknown possibilities in the future, in Architecture as infrastructure. We have created compelling space in the most discreet way, avoiding the building as an independent sculptural object, and using space and light to produce form.

© Richard Barnes

A glass pedestal supports the jewelbox of art above. The building floats in the park, embracing it with its overhanging shelter and reflective walls. It is a hovering abstraction, gliding above the ground. The building is not only in the landscape, but is the landscape, reflecting the greenery, shimmering like the water, flickering like clouds. It blurs and unifies, making the museum a park, the park a museum.

The long building is sliced in the center. This cut divides the programs in two, the one public and open, the other support and closed. Each of the two sections is organized around a court, one the lobby, the other a courtyard surrounded by the offices and curatorial areas.

sections 01

The 40’ cantilever provides a huge public porch for the city, raising all the art programs above the flood plane. The walk along this porch, flanked by the park, focussed on the river, leads to the lobby. The procession through this quiet and levitating space is the preparation for viewing art.

© Richard Barnes

The lobby is at first horizontal, with entirely glass walls, two clear, two etched. The clear walls allow the site to run through the space, linking the Performing Art Building on the north with the turrets and domes of the University of Tampa on the south. Above the glass, the perforated ceiling wraps from the exterior into vertical perforated walls that turn into an upper ceiling, perforated again by a series of skylights. The galleries are reached from the lobby below via a dramatic cinematic stair reaching up. Below the stair is a bed of river rock.

Off the lobby is a long glass room that houses the café and bookstore in a storefront along the riverwalk.

We have built the most expansive and generous field of galleries as instruments to enable, through curation, a world to expose art. They are arranged in a circuit, surrounding the vertical courtyard void. The galleries are blank, walls, floor and ceiling all shades of white, silent like the unifying presence of snow. The floors are ground white concrete with a saw cut grid to echo the illuminated white fabric ceiling above. Linear gaps in the ceiling conceal sprinklers, air distribution and lighting.

© Richard Barnes

The second segment, around the open court, contains all the support for the museum. Offices surround the court on three sides. A bridge on the lower level is a secondary crossing from preparation to storage, a place for museum staff to be outside.

The image of the museum results from the nature of its surface – it does not symbolize or describe. It disengages through neutral form, providing a kind of pit stop in the attempt to represent. It is a moment to savor things in themselves.

By day the surfaces appear to vary almost, but never quite. They are smudged and stammering, with moray like images of clouds or water or vegetation, a shimmering mirage of reflections. It is an expansive and illusive image of a museum about things we don’t quite know, about things we don’t quite see.

By day, light reflects on the surfaces.

© Richard Barnes

© Richard Barnes

By night, light emanates from the surfaces.

By night the exterior become a canvass for a show of light. The art from within bleeds out onto the walls and escapes into the darkness. By night it is the magical illumination of the skin changing colors and patterns in endless variations which turn the building inside out, revealing it secrets as it broadcasts light, color and form into the city, duplicated in its reflection in the water.

This museum is both timeless and of our time, an electronic jewel box, floating on a glass pedestal, a billboard to the future, and a container to house works inspired with vision and able to show us other ways to see our world. The museum hovers in the park, a hyphen between ground and sky.

This little magical summer house was built in England in 2005 by architects Ullmayer Sylvester. It’s got a very DIY interior, and the exterior is the perfect, minimalist folded mirror. The house is further accentuated by being inside such a great landscape: a thin lot with lots of decking and flowers and ornamental grasses. It also looks like it didn’t cost a fortune, like anyone could have one. If they have a little slice of pretty England to built it in.

© FG+SG – Fernando Guerra, Sergio Guerra

Architects: Comoco
Location: Castelo Novo, Fundão, Portugal
Project Team: Luís Miguel Correia, Nelson Mota, Susana Constantino with Vanda Maldonado
Client: Fundão Municipality
Engineering: Direcção-Geral dos Edifícios e Monumentos Nacionais (DGEMN)
Building Contractor: General Contractor: STAP – Reparação, Consolidação e Modificação de Estruturas, S.A.
Landscape: Serrasqueiro e Filhos, lda
Project Area: 3,650 sqm
Project Year: 2003-2008
Photographs: FG+SG – Fernando Guerra, Sergio Guerra

The project’s brief requested the conservation and valorization of Castelo Novo’s Castle and surroundings. Moreover, it suggested also the creation of a space where people and visitors could enjoy it as a place of permanence. To answer these demands, the design solution created a “body” without a rigid boundary, organic, working independently of the existing structures but using them as a support. The construction was designed as a continuous abstract object, non-identifiable with a unique and specific purpose.

site plan

© FG+SG – Fernando Guerra, Sergio Guerra

The object changes with the characteristics of the site. While in the church’s square it acts as a volume defining the limits, in the interior of the Castle’s walls, its shape is transformed into a pavement layer with ramps and stairs creating a pedestrian pathway which is suspended from the ground by metallic structure. This solution allows the visitors to admire the archeological findings without damaging them. The pathway finishes in the castle’s Main Tower where a “steel box” was inserted in its interior containing a multimedia room. This box allows also the creation of a platform where visitors can enjoy a panoramic view of the landscape. All the construction was made using lightweight metal structures which can allow a clear distinction of the new object from the existing structures and, at the same time, the reversibility of the operation.