The Civic Center in Lohr am Main, Germany, occupies an important urban site at the entrance to the town, creating a cultural destination for music, theater and conference events.
The Civic Center is a seven-cornered polygonal form. Due to the polygonal shape, a house without a back is created, which can respond individually to the diversity of the adjacent urban spaces. Still, a public plaza orients the building towards the town center.
Construction was recently completed on Rigaud City Hall, a new civic administration facility for a small Quebec community fifty kilometres west of Montreal. Located at the confluence of the Rigaud and Ottawa rivers, Rigaud is noted for its natural attractions and historic village center which dates back to New France.
Designed by Affleck de la Riva Architects, the project gives new meaning to public administration and municipal activities in Rigaud through an urban redevelopment plan that proposes both the reorganisation of a section of the historic village center and the new city hall building. A pedestrian promenade connects existing public amenities with new facilities, redevelops several vacant lots and links the heart of the village to the Rigaud River.
Three starting points: understanding the historic value of Lleialtat Santsenca (1928),an old working class cooperative in the Sants neighborhood; knowing to the detail the building’s (physical) state to maintain as much as possible; and being sensitive to the whole collaborative process launched in 2009 by neighborhood organizations to recover the building.
To this end, four basic objectives were set out: first, taking advantage of everything that could be used from the original; second, defining an intervention strategy marking out the essential actions, conservative or not, allowing to recover and increase the potential uses of all those spaces;
third, to establish an intensive dialogue – and tense, if due – with context; and fourth, to develop a sustainable proposal, regarding the work on the existing as well as the new interventions.
New Iconic Tower Will be a Landmark of Manila We have won an international design competition for a new iconic building of Bonifacio Global City, in the heart of Manila, Philippines. The tower is a magnificent high-rise that will transform the skyline of Manila.
The tower features a large public plaza with a canopy of dense trees, state of the art workspaces, restaurants, a civic center with exhibition spaces and a spectacular public observatory at the top. The tower is designed to set an example for how tall buildings should give back to cities and its people and how to revitalize an entire area.
The design proposal has a height of 308 meters, and the novel profile is designed to redefine the skyline of Bonifacio as a global city and of Manila. At night, the tower will resemble a lighthouse for the city with its illuminated pinnacle. During the day, the tower will provide a public observatory with spectacular views.
Vil•la Urània is a small residence of the late nineteenth century that was home to the renowned astronomer Josep Comas i Solà, in the district of Sarrià-Sant Gervasi in Barcelona. The densification of the neighborhood left the building and the small surrounding garden encased between two large dividing walls. The new complex of facilities assumes the challenge of giving a new life to the existing building and gardens by incorporating them into a new building with low environmental impact and reduced energy consumption.
The Ottawa Art Gallery expansion and Arts Court Redevelopment involves the careful integration of a new building and the redistribution of arts organizations within the existing Arts Court complex to create an integrated arts community. The project is a priority of the City of Ottawa Renewed Action Plan for Arts Heritage and Culture (2013-2018). Included in the project are: a new home for the Ottawa Art Gallery (OAG), a new 120-seat black box theatre and rehearsal studios for the University of Ottawa (UOttawa), a new 245-seat OAG multi-purpose screening room, repurposed space within the existing Arts Court complex, and a 21-storey private sector tower that will house a Le Germain hotel and private condominium with underground parking. The project aspires to create a destination for patrons of the arts as well as provide identity for the OAG and the other arts organizations currently housed in the Arts Court. The new exterior north entry court and interior atrium off Daly Avenue shall serve to provide a new accessible entrance and central hub for all of the arts organizations within the expanded Arts Court. Located one level up from the North entry court on Daly Avenue is the OAG lobby with its’ main entrance and associated South entry court off Waller Street. Taken together these two entry courts define a north -south axis of clearly delineated address and circulation. Equally important and working in tandem with these access points is the east-west axis which is defined by the extension of the existing primary circulation corridor in the existing Arts Court building. The new building and the existing complex will be linked along this axis at the concourse, main, and second floor levels. This east-west axis is immediately accessible from the North Atrium at the concourse level and the OAG lobby at the main level and terminates at the SAW Gallery entry court at the west and the UOttawa entry on the east. This linkage is critical to the success of the project and requires the relocation of an existing exit stair that is currently located at the eastern end of the existing corridor effectively blocking the proposed connection.
A catalyst for transformation in the City of Vaughan, Canada, the Civic Centre Resource Library is a visionary makerspace dedicated to community learning, gathering, creating and celebration. Resulting from an extensive visioning process exploring the role of the library in the digital age, the design successfully responds to the client’s brief: to create a destination that would inspire creativity, attract new users, provide a welcoming place to gather and interact, and enrich community life in the rapidly growing City of Vaughan.
The building, which takes in the Civic Centre Joan Oliver, was built in the late 90s. Their services are distributed on the ground floor and their spaces are articulated on both sides of a longitudinal corridor, where they are located, on one side, the classrooms and offices, and on the opposite side, the gym and the locker room.
The NFOE / HCMA consortium, comprised of NFOE et associés architectes from Montreal and HCMA Architecture + Design from Vancouver, announced that it has been awarded the Complexe Aquatique de Laval through a juried design competition. The design, which was unanimously selected from four finalists, was unveiled to the public at a ceremony held on January 18th in Laval, Quebec.
“We are tremendously honored by the opportunity to further explore and develop aquatic architecture on this special site in Laval,” says Darryl Condon, Principal Designer for this project and Managing Principal at HCMA.
Shenzhen Mocape is located north of the Shenzhen Civic Centre; it is also the last major public cultural project in Shenzhen.
The building is an integration of the Shenzhen Museum of Contemporary Arts and the Urban Planning Exhibition Halls. Surface materials of glass, perforated plate, and stone extend and twist along the steel structure, creating a complicated architecture full of vitality. However, the unique façade form also created great difficulties in lighting design. Lighting design conquered multiple challenges and successfully inte-grated within the building, neatly and sharply presented a clear and translucent city “rock”.
Project: Museum of Contemporary Art & Planning Exhibition (MOCAPE)
Location: Shenzhen, China
Photography: He Shu
Client: Shenzhen Municipal Culture Bureau, Shenzhen, China and Shenzhen Municipal Planning Bureau, Shenzhen, China Construction Agency: China Overseas Commercial Properties Co., Ltd
Planning: COOP HIMMELB(L)AU – Wolf D. Prix & Partner ZT GmbH
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