The architect Stefano Boeri designs Palazzo Verde in Belgium, a little gem in Antwerp’s Nieuw Zuid district. He and his partners at Stefano Boeri Architetti (Francesca Cesa Bianchi e Marco Giorgio), officially presented the brand-new building realized together with construction partner Triple Living.
“I believe that our cities must play a leading role in the battle against the dramatic consequences of climate change. We must urgently make them greener if we wish to succeed in turning the tide”, says the architect Stefano Boeri with great commitment when describing his vision of the future.
A quarter featuring urban villas in a residential area
Na Nikitina isa residential quarter comprising eight urban villas and a tower block in Novosibirsk, Russia. It exemplifies how historic urban fabric can be restored and revitalised.
In the early 20th century a market square and wooden cottages were sited in the area. The city structure degraded in the Soviet times with high-rises and industrial buildings replacing private housing. It resulted in chaotic construction, district amalgamation and shrinking streets. The two-storey houses built just after WWII had fallen into ruin by the early 21 century and their residents were relocated. In 2016 Brusnika development company proceeded to design and construct a new housing estate on the site.
MVRDV, in cooperation with the Fugger Foundations, is adding its expertise in urban planning and housing architecture to a dynamic, forward-looking, interdisciplinary conversation about the future of social housing. Undertaken as part of the celebrations marking the 500th anniversary of the Fuggerei social housing in Augsburg, Germany, MVRDV’s contributions include visions for future Fuggereien, as well as the design for an exhibition pavilion to open in Augsburg in May next year.
The Fuggerei is the world’s oldest social housing complex. The brainchild of merchant Jakob Fugger, since 1521 it has provided a place for people to live with dignity, charging a constant, unchanging rent of just one guilder a year – or 0.88 euros in modern currency.
London-based AI Studio completes ORDYNKA, a high-end residential project in Central Moscow.
The project occupies the site of a famous chocolate factory in the historic heart of Moscow. It consists of seven high-end residential buildings connected by a spacious internal courtyard. The original facades of the factory were renovated to retain its historical appearance. In contrast to the original buildings, the facades facing the courtyard have an emphatically modern design, with polylines, panoramic windows, large modules of white architectural concrete, natural stone and anodized copper. These elements give the development an unequivocally modern character. In addition, ORDYNKA features a carefully restored 19th century merchant mansion, specifically a classic manor house with a portico and two outbuildings.
Wafra Living‘s design by AGi architects proposes an innovative housing organization in Kuwait, a new type of multi-family living as a social response to housing needs in the country. The design is guided by the requirements contemporary life while balancing traditional norms, and reintroduces urban life to the building level.
Wafra Living is designed as a high-rise building set back from the street, with an L-shaped building defining the street edge. It is conceived to maximize privacy within the community, whilst providing ample natural light and usable indoor and outdoor common spaces. Cuts have been made on the ground floors of the front building to provide better views for the tower apartments.
Clifton Terraces apartments on Victoria Road, Cape Town, designed by SAOTA, makes a striking but sensitively integrated architectural statement in the area’s distinctive cliffside setting.
The development recedes from the street in a series of stepped, articulated terraces that follow the site’s natural contours, boasting panoramic views of the Atlantic Ocean and local landmarks such as Table Mountain and Clifton’s series of sheltered beaches.
SAOTA Project Team: Philip Olmesdahl, Mark Bullivant, Edward Peinke, Jo Nel, Christian Liebenberg, Melissa de Freitas, Peter Harel & Lichumile Monakali
Żorro was inspired by the basic principle of creating architecture, i.e. improving the functional, aesthetic and spatial standards found in a given place and context for future residents. Situated in the vicinity of the housing estate of prefabricated buildings, it is shaped by applying the principle of modifying the cubature of a typical building from that time and giving it uniqueness and architectural features of a “superhero” in its location that differs in quality and standard from the surroundings, creating a new model for further transformation district and this part of the city.
Article source: Pavel Hnilicka Architects+Planners
The house knowingly presents itself as a metropolitan building with fixed street line. Facades with open parterre make these buildings a natural part of the street. Together with the alleyway they create a pleasant city environment, in which wide pavements are a necessity.
There are only several houses of this type in this part of the Holešovice district in Prague, dating back to the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. They stand out like ruins after bombardment. Insensitive interventions from the era before 1989, namely transport infrastructure projects, have nearly destroyed the urban character of the area.
The first apartment sales have been closed for the ‘O’, an MVRDV-designed high-rise that – as one of four letter-shaped apartment buildings that together spell out the word HOME – forms one of the standout elements of Mannheim’s Franklin Mitte neighbourhood. The 15-storey building mixes 120 apartments with ground level commercial units and a bar and terrace. With its playful shape, the building also functions as a local landmark, and a key contributor to the character of the neighbourhood at large.
Design Team: Jeroen Zuidgeest, Markus Nagler, Christine Sohar, Philipp Kramer, Johannes Pilz, Mateusz Wojcieszek, Thomas Grievink, Eleonora Lattanzi, Dex Weel, Manuel Magnaguagno, Mikel Vazquez, Magdalena Gorecka
The design for K31 Courtyard marries together two typical residential building typologies; a stepped podium which surrounds a private courtyard, and two towers that face each other diagonally in such a way as to provide the best possible view corridors for all the residents and enable increased daylight for the apartments.
The podium design, with its stepped terraces, is designed to provide sufficient sunlight for the apartments that face the inner courtyard. These stepped terraces also create a unique feature for this residential project, as they can be used for additional amenities for the adjoining apartments.