The tower stands at the center of the city’s ambitious regeneration project, Euroméditerranée, located 1km north of the historic center, adjacent to the commercial port.
The site lies 100m back from the sea edge where the elevated motorway viaduct separates as it arrives into the north of the city. At ground level the site is dominated by the sweeping concrete viaducts overhead and the rhythmic colonnades of their supporting columns. It’s dense and noisy but a rich physical context. At high level, the context is the spectacular views over the bay of Marseille, the city and the docks.
Los Angeles, CA—Eduardo Souto de Moura, a 58 year old architect from Portugal, is the jury’s choice for the 2011 Pritzker Architecture Prize, it was announced today by Thomas J. Pritzker, chairman of The Hyatt Foundation which sponsors the prize. The formal ceremony for what has come to be known throughout the world as architecture’s highest honor will be in one of Washington, D.C.’s finest classical buildings, the Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium. In announcing the jury’s choice, Pritzker elaborated, “This marks the second time in the history of the prize that a Portuguese architect has been chosen. The first was in 1992 when Alvaro Siza was so honored.”
The main idea of the project is to create a place of sports and activities, where the qualities of the magnificent surrounding landscape will merge with the bourgeoning urban live of the town of Ulsteinvik.
The new flagship Campus for City of Westminster College by schmidt hammer lassen architects is designed to support new ways of teaching and learning. The 24,000m2 College, won in a competition in 2006, provides much greater amounts of open learning spaces than typical colleges in the UK and holds state-of-the-art facilities for both students and staff. The building is designed to embrace interaction and diversity and allow students to learn from each other, both formally and informally.
First Design Firm Office in DC Awarded LEED Platinum Certification CI 2.0
The Ansel Adams Gallery at The Wilderness Society is the centerpiece of a renovation of the existing headquarters in Washington, DC. The renovation included and update and reconfiguration of the office space, energy savings enhancements, new finishes, and the creation of a special gallery for the society’s treasured collection of Ansel Adams photographs.
Glaciers are a powerful combination of natural elements and weather phenomena. Ice, stone, water, air, fight their battles before our very eyes The visual richness of these unique places comes out of the violent yet slow clash of the elements, inexorably dragged down by gravity forces.
Tags: Argentina, Patagónico Comments Off on Glaciarium – Museo Del Hielo Patagonico in Patagónico, Argentina by Pablo Guiraldes and Santiago Cordeyro Architect designed using AutoCAD and SketchUp
Scientists from around the world gather to help advance the study of the oceans, earth, and marine life sciences at this oceanfront conference center located at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California. The building is located atop an ocean bluff, with strong winds, western sun, and an existing grove of palms providing the natural context. Responding to these forces without impacting their natural beauty was a driving goal in the design of the project. In addition, the uniquely informal character of the Scripps community, with its clear appreciation of the natural environment and outdoors, became an influential factor in the design. The LEED certified project includes a flexible auditorium space, four oceanfront meeting rooms of varying sizes, a student lounge, and restaurant. The program is broken into several buildings connected by a trellised walkway creating a porous structure that preserves ocean views and breezes for the rest of the campus.
Tags: California, La Jolla Comments Off on Robert Paine Scripps Forum For Science, Society and the Environment in La Jolla, California by Safdie Rabines Architects
The Intense City including 45 Homes and Commercial Space in Groningen
The former water supply company site on Bloemsingel is part of the City of Groningen’s housing construction campaign The Intense City. This building festival covers multiple sites in the city centre, whose infill will enrich the diversity of functions. One theme of the festival is “parochial space”, a semi-public space inside an urban block. The location as a whole is typified by the adjacent electricity substation which is listed as an architectural monument, and the ample public green space on the banks of the Ooster Hamrikkanaal (canal).
This project closely articulates three elements : a base for the cultural center ; the church as a contemporary monument rising on this base ; and the central garden as an outdoor space for contemplation and meditation. The rehabilitation of the building located rue de l’Université and the enhancement of the Palais de l’Alma add finishing touches to the urban design part of the whole project.
The danger of digital creations is the virtual worlds they depend on, or rather the lack of constraints in the virtual if compared to the physical world. Most of the time digital creations end in just being crazy flythrough computer renderings. With the Digital origami we wanted to realize concepts. We as studied and research current trends in parametric modeling, digital fabrication and material-science and applied this knowledge to create a space-filling installation. The aim was to test the fitness of a particular module, copied from nature, to generate architectural space, with the assumption that the intelligence of the smallest unit dictates the intelligence of the overall system.