a Parametric Analysis

The Devoid Tower, design by Daniel Caven at the Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, explores the passive systems that can be incorporated into high-rise design. The design is influenced by a set of design rules, and tested using parametric and environmental analysis.

The tower is composed of a central volume that is pierced by a void. The void’s placement and movement is designed around Chicago’s environmental conditions, i.e. wind speeds and sunlight. Energy and wind testing had shown that the void slows down wind speeds, giving the tower the option for natural ventilation through each of the floor-plates. Through the use of the void, the tower also allows for maximum sunlight onto floor plates as well as allowing for even more scenic views to the exterior.

Located in the River North area of Chicago, the tower is graced with a large of amount views (Loop, Lake Michigan, Chicago River), and pedestrian activity. The void extends to the entry way presenting a experiential view up through the tower and framing a view to the sky. On the interior users are greeted with an openness to the space and an open floor plate due to the dia-grid structure suspending the floor-plates. The tower’s form is derived and translated by the movement and form of the void.

The tower’s program includes: Retail space on the bottom three stories looking off towards the river/lake, as well as restaurant space incorporated into the walkway along the river. The larger portion of the tower is programmed for office space. The office floor-plates are arranged for an open plan and operable spaces. The top portion is a five star hotel with a sky lobby disconnecting the office space and hotel, as well as an observation deck near the top of the tower.
 

a Field of a Library

The project is a proposal by Italian architect Tommaso Casucci for the new library of the school of architecture, located at the limit of the old town of Florence. It is part of a renovation plan of a large area used until recent times as convent and later penitentiary. Pre-existing spaces are converted in archive, the new addition provide study areas, meeting spaces, auditorium, exhibition spaces in a continuous varying experience.

The project explore the emergent qualities derived from surfaces modulation in an intensive fields, aiming to equilibrium states of program, structure and function trough morphodynamical processes. Form, structure, function and decoration are emergent qualities of the same coherent system strictly related to his environment.

At a global scale the system explore how the modulation of isosurfaces, based on intensive field from site analysis data, can achieve highly differentiated spaces and performative structures. The research uses a generative methodology to test multiple solutions based on the same process from which was selected the one that represent the best compromise between structural performance, program and connections.

At finer scale, surfaces porosity is based on triply periodic minimal surfaces structures to define a performative interface of bioclimatic regulation where irradiation values on the surface are used to module light perception in the interior spaces of the library.

a Backdrop Of Learning

The School of the Arts in Singapore marries two distinct design tendencies: the existence of a safe and tranquil learning environment and the idea of stimulating communication with the public and wider arts community within the city. Two visually connected spaces encompass a public communication area, achieving a functional porosity that encourages interaction between different types of users. The two parts are called “the Backdrop” and “the Blank Canvas”.

The backdrop is the podium that contains a concert hall, drama theatre, black box theatre and several small informal performing spaces. It is envisioned as a heavy pedestal, a gargantuan mass of stone which has been carved out and chiseled to reveal volumes in various proportions. This exciting multi level space will be open to public as a tropical urban plaza, covered yet breezy.  Stairs and platforms create a diverse set of spaces where spontaneous and planned performances can occur.

The blank canvas, the secure upper stratum is where Making, Interpreting and Communicating happens between individuals and groups within the school. This level is controlled through a single point of access, yet is visually connected to the public areas below. The academic blocks are three long rectangular blocks with class rooms and studios. The rooms are designed in a module with adjustable end walls for flexibility. Other facilities such as gymnasium and resource library are suspended between these blocks. The pockets gardens are provided to link the blocks together and encourage interaction between students.

symbolically Towns

As the first joint project of Rapperswil and Jona in Switzerland, symbolically announcing the merging of the two towns, Janus Project transforms the existing museum premises into a publicly significant stopping point. The project was designed by :mlzd Architects. It won the competition for the renewal and restructuring of the Rapperswil-Jona Municipal Museum, held in 2007.

The project to put up the new building has been sensitively integrated in the historic town. The view from the north, which is important for the overall visual impression of the town, is to remain unchanged. The building fits discreetly into the background of the historic picture presented by the narrow town-centre streets. With the new terrain situation and the tasteful bronze facade, the building imposes a new emphasis on its immediate surroundings and can easily be read as the main entrance to a modern museum complex.

The shape of the new building has been developed out of the lateral façades of the old buildings. Its façade and roof have been designed in such a way that the existing windows and doors of the old buildings are not intersected anywhere.

The newly created rooms are extending the museum’s spectrum in terms of space, operations and the possibilities available to the curator. Many different rooms are also available in addition to the main one and are appropriate for a variety of exhibition purposes. The way that different types of natural light are brought into play adds another interesting dimension to the building in the course of the day and the succession of the seasons. Illumination of the building through its roof and the transmission of light from floor to floor deliberately create a stark internal contrast with the legacy buildings. Firstly, that makes it easier for people to find their way around the whole complex and, secondly, the new is clearly offset against the old, heightening awareness for the threshold to the latter. Stepping into the legacy buildings thus becomes an eventful journey in time, back into the past.

an Emerald Flower

With Love to S.M

Matsuo Basho (c. 1680)
Spring:

A hill without a name
Veiled in morning mist.

The beginning of autumn:
Sea and emerald paddy
Both the same green.

The winds of autumn
Blow: yet still green
The chestnut husks.

A flash of lightning:
Into the gloom
Goes the heron’s cry.

a Lava for Coral Caves

Chris Bosse of Laboratory for Visionary Architecture [LAVA] has created a window installation for the famous Italian department store la Rinascente for its Contemporary Christmas Art windows. LAVA’s window installation is an origami coral reef using 1500 recycled and recyclable cardboard molecules that explores the intelligence of natural and architectural systems.

The sculpture plays with space by climbing up walls and arching over to create coral caves. Based on the geometrical structures of sea foam and corals, the colourful reef comes to life through dynamic lighting and sound. Bosse, director of multinational LAVA, is one of seven designers from around the world to be commissioned to create a window – others are Kirsten Hassenfeld, Gyngy Laky, Andrea Mastrovito, Satsuki Oishi, Richard Sweeney, Margherita Marchioni and Tjep.

The store windows are at la Rinascente’s Piazza Duomo store, in the centre of Milan, design capital of the world. This is the first time la Rinascente have commissioned artists to do Christmas windows. The installation shows how a particular module, copied from nature, can generate architectural space, and how the intelligence of the smallest unit dictates the intelligence of the overall system.

Ecosystems such as coral reefs act as a metaphor for an architecture where the individual components interact in symbiosis to create an environment. Bosse says: “In urban terms, the smallest homes, the spaces they create, the energy they use, the heat and moisture they absorb, multiply into a bigger organisational system, whose sustainabilty depends on their intelligence”. Current trends in parametric modeling, digital fabrication and material-science were applied to the space-filling installation.

to Build a Skin, to Harvest Salt

Born from unique environmental conditions, GEOtube is a new kind of urban sculptural tower designed by California-based Faulders Studio. Gravity-sprayed with adjacent Persion Gulf waters, its building skin is entirely grown rather than constructed; is in continual formation rather than fully completed; and is created locally rather than imported. The world’s highest salinity for oceanic water is found in the Persian Gulf (and the Red Sea) – local salt water is supplied to GEOtube via a new 4.62 km buried pipeline and misted onto the tower’s exposed mesh. As the water evaporates and salt deposits aggregate over time, the tower’s appearance transforms from a transparent skin to a highly visible white solid plane. The result is a specialized habitat for wildlife that thrives is this environment, and an accessible surface for the harvesting of crystal salt.

recreating Manhattan

Welcome to Formiscucity, Manhattan’s premier recreational P.A.R.C. tower – where a new way of life is taking shape!

Formiscucity, located just west of Times Square in Manhattan’s new and most contested real estate, occupies a single city block as an uber-special island within the man-made islands of the city’s 200’ x 800’ block grid system. The 50-story tower reaches up 600 feet, with a footprint covering 25% of the site to achieve the super density characteristic of Manhattan. This extreme density promotes diverse interaction as a microcosm of the city itself.

The remainder of the site begins as a horizontal green space on 11th Avenue, continuing up vertically through the tower’s 50 stories. Four core biozones (jungle, arctic, mountain, and desert – each with their characteristic fauna/climate) are utilized as a vertical recreational park space, density generator, and internal climate moderator for energy conservation. For adventurous climbers, the mountain service and structural core additionally provide vertical climbing access to the top.
Surrounding the biozones are 600 privately occupied generic lofts. Lofts may be flexibly inhabited by market-rate and 30% below market-rate housing, commercial/retail, and/or office space as driven by economic demands, such that Formiscucity never ends up as a vacant office tower during an extreme economic downturn.

Whereas typical skyscrapers intensely consume, Formiscucity uses no more energy than the neighboring 6-story brownstones. This is achieved through a double-skin structural façade with solar and waste water collection, a grey water system, geothermal pumps, and organic light emitting diodes that actively re-dress the tower in response to Times Square and Manhattan’s ever-changing imagery.
Formiscucity spatially embodies and psychologically projects the extreme “uber-specialness” of Manhattan’s island density, diversity, and variability to residents, workers, recreation seekers, locals, and tourists. Additionally, effort to formally and programmatically re-conceive Manhattan’s skyscraper typology in response to current city conditions sponsors a tower ecology of community, ecosystems, populations, and behaviors.

Ultimately, Formiscucity aims to simultaneously address Manhattan’s extreme social and political climate of divergent community, developer, resident, and architectural desires through form, program provision, energy consumption, economic sustainability, and quality of life.
Formiscucity… Inhabit Variety!

ethnography in Bangladesh

Bangladesh National Museum, formally inaugurated on 17 November 1983, is one of the largest museums in South Asia. Dhaka Museum, formally inaugurated on 7 August 1913, was its forerunner. Bangladesh National Museum is devoted to archaeology, classical, decorative and contemporary art, history, natural history, ethnography and world civilization. Bangladesh National Museum has splendid collections which range in date from prehistory to the present time. Both in number and uniqueness, the Museum is extremely rich in stone, metal and wooden sculptures, in gold, silver and copper coins, in stone inscriptions and copperplates and in terracottas and other artifacts of archaeological interest. The Museum has one of the largest collections of arms and armour in the Indian subcontinent.

Quite fascinating are its collections of decorative art, especially of woodwork, metalwork and embroidered quilts. It has items of natural history and ethnographic interest. The Museum is noted for its collection of Shilpacharya Zainul Abedin and works of other contemporary artists. The Museum also illustrates the freedom struggle culminating in the liberation of Bangladesh.
 

the Heart of a City

The designer of the “Monument to Civilization” asks you to reconsider what constitutes ‘spectacular.’

Skyscrapers are meant to wow, to impress. But other things within cities are also impressive, the designer says: “New York, for instance: If we put its annual garbage on a area of a typical tower footprint, we’ll get a 1,300 meter high landfill tower, which is about as three times tall as the Empire State Building (450 meters). Isn’t that spectacular?”

As landfill possibilities surrounding growing metropolises disappear and cities fight waste management issues, the power of trash needs to be reconsidered. The accumulation of waste, for example, actually creates potential energy-recycle opportunities, such as when gas is emitted during decomposition. The Monument of Civilization proposal suggests locating trash vertically in a tower and using the energy generated from its decomposition to help power the surrounding city. By locating the tower in the heart of the city, energy is provided in immediate proximity, and money is also saved in transportation costs when garbage no longer needs to be shipped out of town.

It also able to serve there as a loud reminder of society’s wasteful ways: “The ever-growing Monument may evoke the citizens’ introspection and somewhat leads to the entire city’s waste-decreasing and better recycling,” the designer says. Seeing the tower as an “Earth-Friendliness Meter,” the designer says, means the shorter the tower, the friendlier the city, as that means less waste is made and more is recycled. “Perhaps all metropolitan cities would inverse the worldwide competition from being the tallest to the shortest.”

Underneath the structure lie recycling and wastewater processing facilities, gas and power stations, a temporary dump and wasted water tank. The tower consists of a garbage brick wall, gas transmission pipelines, and a solid-waste tank in the center.