Blitz’s project includes the complete renovation of two office buildings on the 150,000-square-foot Marina Landing campus in Brisbane, CA, located just seven miles south of San Francisco. The goal of the building repositioning was to transform the location into a sought-after creative office campus. Both buildings, which had remained vacant for more than four years prior to the renovation, underwent complete exterior and interior repositioning. Blitz created a cohesive campus design that visually unifies the two buildings and fosters an instantly recognizable identity. The design embraces the surrounding mountains and marina.
These days we hear a lot about workplaces of the future – but where does the architecture fit into that? This question was our point of departure for Market Lane, a new office project that kicked off a new chapter of experimentation at Elenberg Fraser.
With a massive generational shift underway in the workforce – did you know millenials will make up the majority of Australia’s workforce by 2020? – we wanted to understand exactly what makes people want to work at, and stay working at, a workplace. As you know, our studio is all about art and science, so it makes sense that we conducted an intensive three month research platform into office architecture after embarking on this project, collaborating with a workplace planner and other experts. The end result is a concept that we like to call ‘the non-office office’. What we discovered is that work/life balance is a dead concept: today it’s all about work/life integration. This requires a major paradigm shift, viewing staff members as co-workers rather than employees, knowing what they value in a workplace and translating this to design outcomes that respond to the needs of everyone, from the boss to the newest recruit. Part of this is about understanding what elements of office architecture can meaningfully promote wellbeing at the workplace.
The design for the new incubator and multi-tenanted business premises on the university campus in Wageningen offers knowledge-intensive technological start-ups in the agricultural and food industry a place for research and open innovation.
Plus Ultra’ means ‘ever further’ and symbolises the drive to continue innovating. Kadans Science Partner is developing Plus Ultra in collaboration with the Wageningen University & Research Centre on the southern perimeter of the university campus. The building has a floor area of over 7,000 m² for offices, laboratories, (partly) multipurpose technology halls and various meeting areas.
The Comprehensive Well-being Plan emerged in the middle of the Ad Portas Building as the conclusion to a qualitative anthropological study undertaken by Beatriz Turbay on the La Sabana campus. We prepared a master plan for the civic space and set about building a campus to suit students’ needs. To achieve this, we laid out a system of pergolas that accompanies the façades, plazas and walkways, and structures the footpath network of the community. The furnishings were meticulously designed to provide maximum comfort. This concept, which also balances landscape and infrastructure values, also includes the new classrooms, which function both as venues for teaching and open and spontaneous civic spaces. In the future, the planting of the campus will resemble that of a botanic garden.
Project: Comprehensive Well-Being Plan, University of La Sabana
Location: Chía, Cundinamarca, Colombia
Photography: Alejandro Arango Escobar
Supervising Architect: María Paula Rico
Design Team: Carolina Zuluaga, Camilo Betancur, Daniel Molina, Felipe Delgado, Juan Pablo González, Juan Camilo Solís, Melissa Ortega, Juliana Arroyabe, Stefanía Palacio, Angélica Gaviria, Daniel Rojas, Interns Nicolás Barón, Alejandro Muñoz, Oscar David Pachón, Juliana Pérez, Antoine Piketty
Architectural Supervision: Juan Pablo González, Oscar David Pachón, Alejandra Rincón
Concept design and medical planning for Koc University’s Medical Sciences Campus, located in Istanbul’s Topkapi district, was prepared in collaboration with Cannon Design. From the early stages of the project, design workshops were organized with representatives of different parties, including doctors, nurses, professors and the management team. In addition to the concept design and medical planning, Kreatif Architects also carried out the revisions that became necessary as the planning permission was altered following the completion of the first stage.
The project is based on the idea of creating a spatial organization flexible enough to respond possible future needs and requirements while functioning as an innovative research centre for the medical industry. The design also encourages the integration and collaboration of different disciplines for a better medical education.
Located in the Pingtung Agricultural and Bio-technology Park (PABP) in southern Taiwan, the T-Ham PABP factory is the largest and the most advanced pork meat processing factory in the country. This LEED gold certified factory complex contains a main factory building (22,000 m²), a diner and gift shop building (650 m²), and a waste water treatment building. The factory’s expansive product range covers more than 250 items, ranging from Western style hams, sausages and bacon, to artisanal wood smoked hand-tied hams, to Chinese style stewed, boiled and roasted meats, ready-to-eat meals, as well as vari-ous meat ingredients for chain restaurants and bakeries.
The client T-HAM is the oldest and the largest meat processing brand in Taiwan with over 50 years of history. The design of this new factory has been assigned with four principal goals. Firstly, it is to double the company’s production capacity in order to meet increasing demand from the domestic market. Sec-ondly, to upgrade the production facility in order to meet the export requirements of Japan, Singapore and the United States as it prepares for market expansion in 2020. Thirdly, it is to deliver a statement of the company’s corporate values which are high quality products, sustainable development, and environmental friendliness. Fourthly, it is to upgrade the working environment of their factory workers and their daily working experience – as “happy employees make better products”.
The building serves as the sale gallery for a condominium project in Bangkok. Due to its proximity to a competitor’s sale gallery, one of the requirements from the Client was that the building must disconnect itself from the competitor. Leaving a generous gap was not an option for functional reasons so the design team decided to angle the building’s orientation away from the main road to create distinction. Aside from achieving the main purpose, the solution provides not only a visual break on a dense urban fabric but also a greenery for the passersby. In line with a large green space provided at the main condominium development as a strong selling point, the sale gallery sets aside some of its land along the street to become a pocket park in a bustling urban area. A simple box was then placed facing the incoming traffic to create a focal point and to balance out the whole architectural composition.
Roosevelt High School is a diverse, historically rich campus located in the St. Johns neighborhood of North Portland. Home to approximately 1,700 students, the project was constructed in three phases and was planned and constructed while students remained on campus. The revitalized 17-acre campus consists of the original 1921 brick masonry structure, a 1930s auditorium, and three new additions. The project scope included 95,985-square-feet of building rehabilitation, 138,956-square-feet of new construction, and removal of 97,550-square-feet of outmoded structures.
The Daniels Building at the University of Toronto embodies a holistic approach to urban design and sustainability. As the new home for the John H. Daniels Faculty of architecture, landscape, and design, its purpose is to engage students and the broader community in dialogue about the built environment.
Project Team: John Houser, Amin Tadj, Tim Wong, Alda Black, Marta Guerra, James Juricevich, Parke Macdowell, Dane Asmussen, Laura Williams, Peter Sprowls, Noora Al Musallam, Tammy Teng, Wesley Hiatt, John Mars, Mazyar Kahali, Matthew Waxman, Luisel Zayas
The 11,000m2 Mana Hauora (MH) Building is the first major development at AUT’s South Campus in Manukau, South Auckland. As the first university based in this part of the city, the campus redevelopment is to play a vital role in lifting local uptake of university education. AUT South’s objective of expanding university participation directly supports government policy goals in regard to social and economic development as well as education goals in regard to Maori, Pasifika, and youth.
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