In 2012, the West Tennessee Solar Farm officially began generating power. The 5-megawatt facility, developed by the University of Tennessee Research Foundation, is located on Interstate-40 about 30 miles east of Memphis. The 21,434 solar panels were arranged around an open meadow intended as the site for a future visitor center designed to educate the public about solar energy in Tennessee. This center would be accessible 24-7 to local visitors, tourists and the millions of motorists who drive by the solar farm annually.
MDO were honoured to be offered the chance to design the interior for a unique piece of architecture situated in the beautiful Liangzhu area, in the northwestern outskirts of Hangzhou.
As designers we are interested in relationships and contrasts; architecture and interior, the rough and the smooth, dark and light, strong and the delicate. Between each is a transition, and opportunity to create an emotion.
The design goes beyond simply extending the school building. Instead, it strengthens the character and status of the existing system as a public space, a school and a municipal center.
Located next to an expressway, the Technical Center of Blagnac was built in the middle of a neighborhood characterized by a highly industrialized program. Nevertheless, a classified forest and a cemetery are located just next to the site. These elements constitute the principal specificity of this program. The architectural and urban will aim to constitute a real urban piece, able to create a strong entrance to this area and able to dialogue with its environment. The idea is to establish a visual identity while answering the main objectives of the program.
There is a Peach Blossom Garden in everyone’s heart. At the end of 2017, China Resources cooperated with Rongor Design to create the Tao Yuan Li Marketing Center, an urban peach blossom garden in the southern landscape style at the Xiangjiang river, which is based on the Peach Blossom Spring written by literati of Eastern Jin Dynasty Tao qian.
Coastal Architecture in the age of climate change has become an increasingly precarious proposition. The Ocean Center project is designed to anticipate massive change: both ground and structure modulate natural systems enabling them to flow through in a measured and calculated way. The effect is that these natural forces activate architectural space at varying material intensities replacing the usual modernist paradigm of autonomous occupation with a feedback model relating human activity to environmental conditions. Markets, local shops, an oceanographic museum, apartments, a convention center and playfields are held together as disparate parts with multiple orientations that create the feeling of being within a micro-village with no outside but instead with a profusion of fractional insides that connect us to other places extending the loop of nature’s deep connectivity.
The plot is located in the urban edge of the small town of Calamonte, on a land platform that visually dominates the surrounding farmland. From this location, which gives it a special value in the city-field-landscape relationship, leave the main formal and conceptual decisions that inspire the project. Furthermore, the presence of the building far from the road access routes, also causes the building necessarily respond to them. Therefore, the roof emerges as the fundamental element of the design. Seen from afar, the building completes its compact presence thanks to it, dialoguing with the landscape of hills surrounding the place. Close-up view, the roof provides greater height spaces that require it, such as the assembly hall, likewise providing dynamism and special character to interior environment. The compactness of the volume required an abstract formalization. The building is implanted in the plot adapting to its longitudinal form. The generator concept of the plant is the opening of a crack-patio in its central axis, which runs through its entire length, becoming the main space of the project. In the north façade, this crack configures the public access between volumes, and after passing the vestibule, continues characterized as a more introspective space. The required program, consisting of administrative uses of support to entrepreneurs, is organized with the highest programmatic rationality and economy of circulation, guaranteeing the required flexibility. Uses are grouped into three clearly differentiated units: the business incubator, support offices and meeting rooms, arranged around the central lobby, center of gravity of the building that facilitates the quick orientation of the visitor. This zoning of the small building solves the problem of the compatibility of use in function of the different schedules that each zone has. Thus, an entrepreneur can have night access to his office without having to open the entire building, which makes it much safer to use.
Other Participants: Antonio Vallejo (arquitecto técnico, presupuesto y control de ejecución de obra), Estanislao Fernández (instalaciones), María Luisa Lorenzo (estructura)
The old colonial neighborhood of Coyoacan comprises some of the more notable cultural institutions of Mexico and the new national Center for Patrimonial Heritage is added to the list. The center´s main concept spins around the need to turn a private complex into a public space; thus, the programmatic idea of breaking the parts in order to organize them in smaller low-rise buildings that could eventually display certain design personality and preserve the existent trees and vegetation, made sense. Therefore the center will be displayed in four different buildings: the museum and workshops, the preservation and office building, the auditorium, and the café / library structure. Once we secured the existent trees and plants, we proceeded to establish the project zoning and arrangement. Within the concept of dispersion, we decided to hinge and organize buildings around the open spaces. Therefore, we aimed that visitors would navigate through a number of interlocked gardens, plazas, paths, patios, etc. that will eventually unfold and reveal a number of architectural elements and gestures. From the overall aesthetic composition, some buildings have been thought as solid and massive creating a deliberate contrast to others that are conceived as translucent or transparent. Decisions made in this sense respond mostly to dealing with finding the right balance between energy savings, aesthetics and human activity.
Article source: Ferdinand and Ferdinand Architects
10- 15 years ago the topic of mobility gained momentum in the Hungarian contemporary architecture. Many young architects realised that a major task of the next generation of architects/enginiers and urban designes will be the redefinition and reshaping of the existing urban infrastructure. Architecture and mobility will have implications not only on the traffic systems (means of traffic) of the 21st century, they will have impact on social spaces, public parks, as well.
Located in the Chinese coastal city of Xiamen, MAD Architects’ design for the Xinhee Design Center is currently under construction. The design center is for the international fashion group, Xinhee, and its six subsidiary brands. It has a site area of 15,000 square meters with building area of 61,000 square meters. “We envision it as a building with skin-and-bones,” reveals MAD founding principal Ma Yansong, “the correspondence of clothing and architecture is they both explore the relationship between the interior and the exterior.”
Xinhee Design Center has the central atrium space at its core; from there, six long spanning structures extend out to different directions, and become a star-shaped layout which formalizes a solid “bone” structure frame. A mix of office spaces and green gardens compose each of the organically-formed arms. A translucent and sun-shading envelope of PTFE hangs slightly off the vertical garden, and provides ventilation during the hot season. At the same time, it lightens the building to be elegant and floating, just likes a piece of delicate thin, soft, skin covering the “bone” structure of the building body. Ma Yansong elaborates, “It’s interesting for a building with such an intrinsically logical structure to look floating and free.”
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