The Gates and Hillman Centers for Computer Science completes a computer science complex on Carnegie Mellon University’s west campus. The building houses four departments of the School of Computer Science providing offices, conference rooms, open collaborative spaces, closed project rooms and a reading room for more than 120 faculty, 350 graduate students, 100 researchers or postdoctoral fellows and 50 administrative staff members along with a more public component of 10 university classrooms, a 250 seat auditorium, a cafe and 2 university computer clusters.
Tags: Pennsylvania, Pittsburgh Comments Off on The Gates and Hillman Centers for Computer Science in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania by Mack Scogin Merrill Elam Architects
This project proposed a mixed-use building for the municipality of Muskiz with public functions (a small auditorium and a youth centre) and private functions (offices, bars and retail), organized by means of a public square with a covered gallery. The municipality of Muskiz is dominated by the presence of a big refinery, visible from the motorway from Bilbao to Santander. The public square is opened towards the south, the views and the sun; it is closed towards the north, to protect itself from the dominant winds and severe rainfalls and to conceal the ever-present view on the refinery and its chimneys.
The BOI (Board of Investment) Fair is a major event that aims to demonstrate Thailand’s rebuilding efforts among public and private sectors after last year’s floods. The objective of the Bridgestone Pavilion is to communicate the company’s commitment to the country in manufacturing, research and investment. With an emphasis on showcasing emerging technologies, Architectkidd had the opportunity to implement design approaches and features that are relatively unique among current standard construction practices in Thailand.
41 Cooper Square, the new academic building for The Cooper Union in New York City, aspires to manifest the character, culture, and vibrancy of both the 150 year-old institution and of the city in which it was founded. The institution remains committed to Peter Cooper’s radically optimistic intention to provide an education “as free as water and air” and has subsequently grown to become a renowned intellectual and cultural center for the City of New York.
STEVEN HOLL, FAIA, AWARDED THE 2012 AIA GOLD MEDAL BY THE AMERICAN INSTITUTE OF ARCHITECTS
Profession’s highest honor goes to architect known for humanist approach to formal experimentation
Washington, D.C., December 9, 2011 – The Board of Directors of The American Institute of Architects (AIA) voted today to award the 2012 AIA Gold Medal to Steven Holl, FAIA. The AIA Gold Medal, voted on annually, is considered to be the profession’s highest honor that an individual can receive. The Gold Medal honors an individual whose significant body of work has had a lasting influence on the theory and practice of architecture. Holl will be honored at the 2012 AIA National Convention in Washington, D.C.
Holl and his firm, Steven Holl Architects have completed projects that tackle the urban-scale planning and development conundrums that define success in the built environment throughout the world. He’s able to work with diverse clients to get his projects executed, all while being a tenured professor at Columbia University. His explorations have served as an inspiration to his colleagues.
Higgins Hall
Holl completed two projects located in China in 2009 that are emblematic of his approach to architecture and his innovative method of design inquiry. His Linked Hybrid, in Beijing, is a series of circularly arranged towers, filled with 700 apartments and enough ancillary programming (hotels, schools, restaurants, park spaces) to form its own micro-urban community. The towers are linked by a system of 20th floor skywalks that trace a ring of public programs. In contrast to the mega-block street walls typically erected by Chinese developers, the Hybrid invites the city in with green space, public programs, and playfully varied porous massing.
The Vanke Center in Shenzhen is quite literally a horizontal skyscraper: a long rectilinear mass tipped on its side with arms and branches reaching out from its main stem. Holl’s building hovers above garden and park spaces on eight legs, creating a shaded micro-climate and quality public outdoor space that’s sorely lacking in developing-world cities. Making the building co-exist with the green space below necessitated that this developing nation take a fundamental symbol of its burgeoning prosperity–a new shimmering high rise tower–and tip it on its side. Such depth of inquiry and lack of presupposition in Holl’s work makes this kind of audacious gambit almost common in his buildings.
Knut Hamsun Center
In addition to China, Holl’s work can be seen across the United States and Europe. Examples of his work include:
The Nelson Atkins Museum Bloch Building in Kansas City, Mo., a subterranean art museum expansion that pierces the ground plane with five translucent boxes that materialize light like blocks of ice.
MIT’s Simmons Hall in Cambridge, Mass., a dormitory that Holl used to develop his ideas about urban porosity, later seen in his Chinese projects. Based around the conceptual motif of a sponge, the building features irregular volumetric gaps and transparencies, as well as vertical, funnel-shaped incisions that act as light and air chimneys.
The Knut Hamsun Center in Norway, a historical museum honoring the Norwegian writer that takes cues from Hamsun’s work to create a wooded vernacular-referenced façade pierced by walkways and glass observation decks, literary symbols of hidden impulses.
NYU’s Department of Philosophy in New York City, which redesigns the interior of a historic masonry building and inserts an open six-story light shaft, taking formal and conceptual guidance from the work of philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein.
Pratt Institute’s Higgins Hall Insertion, an addition to Pratt’s architecture school, in New York City, that join two red brick buildings with a glowing bar-shaped volume of varying transparency and opacity.
Linked Hybrid
“What, in my view, especially commends him as a candidate for the Gold Medal,” wrote Harry Cobb, FAIA, of Pei Cobb Freed, in a recommendation letter, “is his brilliantly demonstrated capacity to join his refined design sensibility to a rigorously exploratory theoretical project.”
Holl is the 68th AIA Gold Medalist. He joins the ranks of such visionaries as Thomas Jefferson (1993), Frank Lloyd Wright (1949), Louis Sullivan (1944), LeCorbusier (1961), Louis Kahn (1971), I.M. Pei (1979), Santiago Calatrava (2005), Glenn Murcutt (2009, and Fumihiko Maki (2011)). In recognition of his legacy to architecture, his name will be chiseled into the granite Wall of Honor in the lobby of the AIA headquarters in Washington, D.C.
NAMA
About The American Institute of Architects
For over 150 years, members of the American Institute of Architects have worked with each other and their communities to create more valuable, healthy, secure, and sustainable buildings and cityscapes. Members adhere to a code of ethics and professional conduct to ensure the highest standards in professional practice. Embracing their responsibility to serve society, AIA members engage civic and government leaders and the public in helping find needed solutions to pressing issues facing our communities, institutions, nation and world. Visit www.aia.org.
Article source: 3XN and GXN
Danish practice 3XN is the architect behind a new experimental conference center and hotel where everything is adapted to the circulation of nature and where guests will get an idea of how it feels to live in a world without waste.
Green Solution House
Architects: 3XN and GXN (design and project management)
Project: Green Solution House
Location: Strandvejen, Denmark
Client: Hotel Ryttergården
Size: 4.500m2
Completion: 2013
Budget: 65 mio. DKK
Partner Architects: William McDonough + Partners (cradle to cradle)
Engineers: Esbensen Consulting Engineers (climate and energy)
“Grieve Gillett have considered and applied Yalumba’s ethos of tradition and innovation with a considered retention and a celebration of existing heritage qualities. The master touch of an experienced design hand can be felt with a celebratory juxtaposition between the sophistication of the new and the industrial feel of the old.” Jury Citation.
The University of Nicosia decided to accommodate the Architecture Department- ARC Architecture Research Center in an existing shoe factory of the adjacent Engomi industrial area. The choice was part of the strategy of the University to expand the campus in the neighboring industrial zone, a vital decision for the regeneration of the area!
The needs of the architecture department, the restrictions of the existing concrete structure and the low budget defined the approach of the design, which was thoroughly filtered by the weight of the responsibility for the identity of the “Architecture Research Center”: this is the sixth year that the Architecture Programme has been running in the Architecture Department of the University of Nicosia and it already claims to be very of high quality, very Progressive, Experimental with critical thinking approach.
Article source: Quartier des Spectacles Partnership
Two new video-projection works showcase the creative potential of the Luminous Pathway in the Quartier des Spectacles
The Luminous Pathway in the Quartier des Spectacles has taken an important step forward with the illumination of the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) design centre and the Grande Bibliothèque belonging to Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec (BAnQ). Using new, permanent video-projection devices that make it possible to illuminate entire building façades, these new lighting designs are a testament to the significant creative potential of this ambitious urban-branding project.