Bab Al Bahrain Urban Oasis explores the value of the cultural and natural landscape inheritance as a design opportunity to address climate issues in public space, while catalyzing the urban potential of the site in the emerging new city urbanity. Urban Oasis is called to be the most important public space of Manama, embodying its dynamic character and showcasing its new sustainable identity.
While national property markets still struggle to recover, the slowdown in home-buying is bolstering demand for apartments—and creating more work for Irvine-based MVE & Partners, one of the nation’s premier residential and mixed-use architecture firms.
“Domestic real estate remains iffy, but there are pockets of recovery, including multi-family,” said Carl McLarand, AIA, chairman of MVE & Partners. “Of course, we have been designing apartments and community developments for nearly 40 years, so this is playing to one of our strengths.”
Lightemotion Illuminates Revel Casino, The New Benchmark For Casino Resorts
Montreal, April 19, 2012 – As one of Canada’s leading lighting design firms, Lightemotion, combines theatrical lighting with architectural lighting design to create a truly immersive environment for Atlantic City’s newest mega-casino resort, Revel. Described as chic, sophisticated and as setting a new benchmark for casino resorts, Revel is garnering much praise ahead of its grand opening on May 25th. The US$2.4 billion project is Atlantic City’s most expensive casino ever. It is currently the largest construction project on the east coast of the United States and is destined to revive the gaming and tourism industry in this historic ocean-front city.
The presented single-family house is built in the village of Suha, in the suburbs of a famous medieval town, Škofja Loka in Slovenia. The building is built as a replacementstructureon the site of a former farm buildingwhich represented the eastern side of a unified space of a farm courtyard. Due to the cultural heritage regulations the new building has a gabledroof and follows the gauges of maximum allowed building dimensions of the demolished structure. The investor of the new building is the farm owner’s son, who is academically educated and therefore has very urban housing needs in terms of the program of the house, which is located in a traditional rural area.
The Complex in Barreiro has been designed for recreational and sporting use, besides being a leisure and aquatic centre. It has three swimming pools: one with 6 lanes of 25 metres in length, a swimming pool of learning and other one with water beds, Jacuzzi and massage jets. What particularity stands out is its large central space linked to the sports activities and it’s a glass prism with maximum use of natural light and allows the best ventilation of the spaces.
Umarmung is inspired by the long tradition of floor-sitting culture in Japan where the connection between the body and conversations is not restricted to universal seat height and conventional definition of sofa. Much to our surprise, through our research and conversations with local manufacturers, the floor-sitting couch is unknown and non-existent in Japan furniture design other than the zaisu chair (legless chair) used for tatami room.
Emerging designer Chiara Ferrari masterminded the interior concept and fit out of a new studio space in South London, for photographer John Ross. When Ferrari was invited to work on the photographic studio’s interior design, the large, 400-sq meters space was just an empty concrete shell with no partitions. The designer’s concept plays with the contrasts between the existing space’s rough- and-ready quality and the sophistication of a new, neutral (black, white and grey) and contemporary material and colour palette.
At the higher level is the house. The metal cantilever looks for lagoon views Its undulations talk to Pampulha. The built volume mixes structures: Steel, concrete, wood complement each other defining supports, closures and roofs. The internal integration of the coexistence space connects to the exterior bringing inward the idea and the distance of the Belo Horizonte’s edge.
This quiet meditation garden completed in 1992 is located in the ‘town without a history’ of Almere, The Netherlands.
The garden consists of an observation platform, three narrow water canals, and a fourth dry channel on which an oblong volume is resting. These lines direct themselves toward three particular locations: Salamanca, Paris, and Almere. They signify a world location in which love (Juan de la Cruz) and fire (Paul Celan) intersect in Almere’s future. The inscribed ciphers refer to the encounter between Juan de la Cruz and Paul Celan in the newly reclaimed land. They become readable at precisely those times when the materiality of forms dissolves into oblivion.
The project is situated in the heart of the old town of Mestia, next to the newly built city-hall. Its towerlike shape pays homage to the medieval stone towers which are traditional to Mestia’s mountainside region. The facade is comprised of prefabricated textured concrete and large openings which offer a maximum of transparency.