to Connect Water

As one of three shortlisted proposals for the St. Petersburg Pier International Design Competition, the Wave tries to connect the water and the city of Petersburg by emphasizing the possibility of achieving unity through physical contact. Its undulating form creates a narrative that merges the pier structure with the entire bay area. BIG’s project is divided into three parts: Tributary Park, Wave Walk and the Wave. The first phase of construction will include The Wave and Wave Walk. Tributary Park will be realized in the second phase.

The programmatic concept includes a museum, observation deck, playgrounds and green areas. The loop-shaped structure mimics the physiology of the water wave: it goes underwater and rises in order to frame a swimming pool and holding areas for kayaks, canoes and small boats. The gesture further culminates by looping the promenade overhead, sheltering people and providing elevated views from the generated roof terrace. The public spaces terminate with a platform which submerges into the bay creating an additional view towards the city. exhibition spaces, banquet halls and other public spaces. The proposal also offers different rooms including a salt bath, mist room, botanical room, steam room, cloud room, snow room, polar bear club, water slides and swimming pool.
 

Looking for Immortality

Architects at Manuel Ocaña Architecture and Thought Production Office were asked to design a rather unusual spatial concept, one that would ensure the survival of 20 families and thousands of books for three years after the 2012 Apocalypse. The design was commissioned and promoted by a Belgian foundation and would be located at a mountain slope in Sierra Nevada, Spain. It is conceived as a “culture ark”, after a suddenly precipitated climate change with tsunamis, earthquakes, and a global chain of disasters, nuclear or otherwise.

The initial idea for the project was to use a more organic approach of atomization and circulation strategies. Several dome-shaped areas are interconnected and manifest the underground configuration of the system upon the landscape. In the light of ever-rising number of religious beliefs and, as the architects put it, “the “scientificisim” religious looking for immortality”, the project can also function as an Apocalyptic Resort.

The proposed project encountered serious practical obstacles. Large engineering companies, currently selling thousands of bunkers around the world for the impending apocalypse, eliminated the firm from the project. According to the architects, the companies’ argument was:” This project is extremely serious and your proposal is expensive and unviable. Of course, promoters believe in military discipline in case of global apocalypse.” It seems that the weakened nuclear threat has slowed down their businesses, and climate change opens up a whole new market.

al Qahira in Arabic

A Social Construct for Islamic (Historic) Cairo
Modern Cairo (al-Qahira in Arabic which means the “Victorious”) was founded as the imperial city to a conquering army in 969 AD, at the head of location where the Nile splits into its two main branches. It began as a walled royal compound with highly organized palaces, parade grounds, and lush gardens.

However, within 200 years of its founding and given the fall of its conquering dynasty, Cairo rapidly morphed into the medieval social fabric that largely exists today. At its height in power and wealth in the mid 1930’s, Medieval Cairo was the largest cosmopolitan city in the world, boasting a population of over 500,000 people inside its walls and acted as the center for all trade as it moved from the orient to Europe and the West. The fabric of the Islamic metropolis significantly crystallized within a 100 year period into a complex network of social, economic, religious and cultural network. The historic district of Cairo today is a residue of those relationships, most of which still operate much the same as they did 1000 years ago, upon its founding.

Modern metropolitan Cairo´s growth has far exceeded its medieval numbers and is currently the largest city, in both Africa and the Middle East with a population of over 15 million people. Cairo proper has a density of over 90,000 people per square mile and is suffocating from hyper congestion of every type.

Modern Predicament: Horizontal congestion, lack of vertical density, and the social patterns
The current remarkable state of contemporary Cairo is paradoxically defined by hyper horizontal congestion as one of the single densest cities in the world. While there is an almost complete absence of structures less than 3 stories, there also exist a very low percentage of buildings exceeding 10 to 12 stories, city wide, with typically lower structures in the historic district. A rare exception to this is The Cairo Tower, which is a 187 meter infrastructural telecommunication tower built in 1961. At 187 meters, it is the tallest all concrete (i.e. no steel columns or frames) in the world and stands as a modern landmark in a skyline otherwise singly dominated by thousands of minarets built over the previous 1000 years.
While the most obvious device to deal with horizontal congestion is the skyscraper typology, it is almost never implemented by the Cairene population. Its standard spatial organization and normative mode of circulation is at direct odds with the informal interactions that have been concretized over the previous millennium.

Medieval Complexity: A study in the historic fabric and religious institutions
At the apex of wealth and power of medieval Cairo’s Mamaluk Sultans, the city fabric went through its most spectacular period of monument building, growth, and crystallization. Careful examination of historic city reveals that there is no absolute way in which the medieval complexity can be directed or given a set of guiding rules. Instead, all growth happens by way of few absolute “Certainties” supplemented in a symbiotic way with a significant number of “Tendencies” which occur as a resultant of forces, many of which are driven by the certainties.

In Islamic cities of historic nature, the construction of mosques acts as a “Certainty” operation in the fabric. All mosques by Islamic law are required to face toward Mecca. When constructing mosques, the fabric is removed, the mosques constructed with its appropriate orientation, and afterwards, over a period of time, the fabric grows back around the newly constructed “certainty”. The type and configuration of fabric is vaguely regulated and responds exclusively to symbiotic forces at the moment. They become a construction of “Tendency”.

When looking at the mosque itself specifically from the Mamaluk medieval period, it is easily identifiable that the constructions themselves were first typologies of complex cross programming of both civil and religious lives governed by a theocracy. The mosque complex of Sultan Hassan completed in 1363 was the most massive structure of its time and housed in addition to the religious activities of the day, 4 schools, a dormitory for 400 people, a hospital, and an orphanage. The massive construction also contained infrastructural works such as a water tower that helped maintain the population. A separate room was also set aside as the mausoleum for the patron of the building.
When analyzing “Certainties” and “Tendencies” of built fabric along with an in-depth programming of the medieval mosque complex, there arises opportunities to respond to Cairo’s hyper congestion via a mechanism of medieval morphology that is responsive to both the informal relationships, complex social patterns, and the trajectory of time.

Proposed Tower
The skyscraper proposition is to develop a programmed infrastructure (not dissimilar to the “Cairo Tower”) that strategically places contemporary “Certainties” such as a mosque, madrassa, secular schools, library, hospital, and crypt throughout the framework. Once the certainties are established, the informal “Tendencies” will take over and infill the infrastructure. The proposed project represents a speculative undermined growth cycle of 100 years, where tendencies will infill the tower and help alleviate the horizontal congestion.

from the Ocean to Tuvalu

Rising high from the ocean below, the elevated “Emergency Land” proposed by South Korean architect Jinman Choi and graduate student Ji Yong Shim is a structure topped by skyscrapers that serves the vital cause of housing the 11,000 residents of the Tuvalu Islands – islands that may soon be swallowed by the sea.

The nine islands of Tuvalu, eight of which have human residents, are located in the Pacific Ocean near the equator. Two of the islands are already experiencing significant flooding, and with elevated sea levels submerging the islands’ lands another 0.5-0.6 cm a year, experts fear the islands could completely disappear within the coming decades.

Choi and Shim are especially concerned with the residents of the islands, as they seem to have few options for escape at this point. The two explain that, currently, nearby Australia has not opened their borders, and New Zealand only permits 75 immigrants from the islands per year, As such, new solutions must be crafted for Tuvalu residents, and quickly. Their solution is to build grand, elevated landmasses anchored by bases on the seafloor and topped by massive skyscrapers to house the 11,000 residents needing new homes. The “arch-designed core” will allow for the balance needed to support the expanded mass of “land” above. The funnel-shaped platforms can be recreated continually to expand the amount of land available. This socially responsible design brings innovation and attention to the needs of a people whose land may, sadly, soon be forever submerged.
 

a pinPlant WebLayout

Pin-plant is an installation designed by Stewart Hicks and Allison Newmeyer from Design With Company like a series of experiments – an examination and interpretation of humanity through anthropomorphism and color. Finding the fantastic in the systematic. What do our desires to personify computer parts express about us? It all began with an old computer motherboard. At first it was a city scape, then a vast mechanical microcosm, with circuits leading this way and that- a garden of forking paths if you may- immediately immense and endless. Aggregating in intense exchanges of information- where color became landmark and organization revealed a scale of part to whole most basic in its arrangement, yet complex in possibility. It’s efficiency a testament to its time. Technology of foreign pieces. But what did we want to do with it? We wanted to give it life to understand it. Aestheticize it until it could be more than a commentary on the mechanics of things. Through sculpture, the conventional exformative connections are disconnected.
Geometry reminiscent of Buckminster Fuller is structurally efficient until it is not. The 5000 buttons are each an self-sufficient display unit, complete with a devices for hanging and protection; at once a painting, one pixel of digitally sampled color, and an entire portable museum. They are minor figurines, used over and over again to compose the major chimerical figure – an encrusted scape of colorful scales. Each one is hand made and unique yet part of community.

 

to use a Joshua Tree

Using the desert near Joshua Tree as a backdrop Ball-Nogues Studios have installed what they call a synthetic earthwork which hides a swimming pool inside. The project is part of High Desert Test Sites, an art project which “generates physical and conceptual spaces for art exploring the intersections between contemporary art and life at large.” The parametric bowl Yucca Center is 30 feet tall and egressed by ladder. Visitors transverse the swimming hole, which bottoms out 10 feet below grade, by a series of rock climbing hand holds.

The wooden frame was re-claimed from a previous art project’s form work which was originally intended to be supplies for this piece, something the artists termed as “cross-designed”. The plywood is stacked and cut in sections, slotted into the ribs to create a bowl. Plywood strips skin the interior, like a ship hull in reverse.
Inspired by both aesthetic land art and abandoned swimming pools and buildings of the Southwest the piece is also very much about the human experience. Open on October 15th and 16th 2011 the work was a playground for a lucky few who spent an afternoon playing in the temporary oasis. The piece is abandoned to the elements.

 

Academy of Oscar...in Sciences

The Academy of Sciences for the Developing World -Arab Regional Office (TWAS-ARO) holds its 7th Annual Meeting on 28 and 29 December 2011, at the BA. The Meeting will be preceded by a seminar that intends to bring together leading experts to discuss challenges and opportunities of water, nuclear and renewable energy in the Arab region.TWAS-ARO members and young affiliates, along with other eminent speakers, will provide an opportunity for a wide range of fruitful discussions and solution-oriented exchange of ideas regarding the future of water, nuclear and renewable energy in the Arab World. TWAS-ARO Regional Prize winner, in addition to TWAS-ARO Young Affiliates 2011 announcement, will also take place during the Meeting. TWAS-ARO will also sponsor 10 outstanding young researchers, from different Arab countries, to present their project/research on water, nuclear and renewable energy.

to Test the Plants

Nanjing Lab is a vegetation laboratory located in the historical district of Nanjing. Different from the traditional vegetation lab, which focuses on the attributes of the plants themselves, the purpose of the Nanjing lab is to test the plants’ behavior inside Nanjing city, for instance, the plants’ reaction to the the city’s polluted air and dust.

Therefore, the design focuses on being able to control the plant’s interaction with the outside. In order to do this, different plant species are put into separate containers which protrude from the main volume of the building to the outside environment. The containers provide the ability to let sun light come through and control the amount of air that passes through. At the same time, the form of the landscape around the building creates different levels humidity and solar conditions around the building, allowing the containers to interact with a diverse environment.
In the center of the lab, there is a central robot arm that is able to take out the core of the container and place them into storage for further research. The control room of the robot’s arm is located on the south side of the building.  The windows of the control room allow free view of the central robot room and the exterior.

The two big C channel steel beams are the main structure of the Nanjing lab. They lift the main body of the lab off of the ground to provide space for the underside plant containers. In between the C channel steel beams and the body of lab space is the hydraulic mechanical system that absorbs the impact of the structure from movement of the central robot arm.

Architect: Yaohua Wang Architecture
Location: Nanjing, China
Structural Engineer: Organization Group
Client: Nanjing Xiaguan district goverment
Program: Vegetation lab
Size: 200 m²
 

Archipelago

Acknowledging that the city is nothing but the product of a myriad network of interactions and emergent flows, re-organized and regulated by a highly evolved system of pattern recognition, the project designed by Gijo Paul George from Studio Toggle aims to find urban solutions for the city of Cagliari in Sardinia, Italy.

Taking fields, nodes and agents as the building blocks of urbanity, the relations and perturbations are mapped, giving rise to generative patterns. Based on this logic, the project strives to find a balance between adaptive non-programmed spaces and typological specificity. The site, SantÉlia has the notoriety for being the badlands of Cagliari. Often this image is exaggerated, contributing to the resident’s hostility to the city and vice versa. This spectacular stretch of waterfront land towards the southern tip of Cagliari happens to be disconnected from the rest of Cagliari due to massive infrastructural figures, which creates canyons in the urban fabric, also due to the negative ramifications arising from a dysfunctional social housing project, from 1970’s.

The project had specific goals including, reconnecting SantÉlia to the rest of Cagliari by colliding the island grids, bringing the city closer to the sea and thus developing the waterfront, revitalizing the social housing and improve conditions and to develop strategic nodes into multimodal urban ecologies. The focus was on de-canyonizing the fabric and overlaying the terrain with a new urban organism, which irrigates the territory and bridges the programmatic archipelago.

Rediscovering the spatial matrix of field conditions as described by Stan Allen, and further elaborated by Keiichi Matsuda in his ‘Cities for Cyborgs’, an emergent matrix of potential (pheromonal) fields acts as the substrate on which an agent-based system is populated. The constant material and information feedback between the to systems gives rise to generative patterns and densities which in turn mutate into inhabitable spaces and nested typologies, there by creating the fabric.

The project in itself becomes a discourse in how the intuitive and emergent processes can work together to produce an urban fabric, and occupy it at the same time, not losing the balance between adaptable emergent spaces, and the specific typologies which seed the territory.

The Beautiful and The Horrific

The Concert hall designed by Isaïe Bloch / Eragatory balances on a fine line between sculptural architectural objects and functional monuments, between meaning and use and between the beautiful and the horrific. While the architectonic aesthetic may seem to revolve around a straightforward gimmick, the work is much richer than that. The more you look, the more you realize how many levels it operates on, from its allusions of architectural ruïnification/collapse as in the romantic era to its connections to our current culture of remixes and mash-ups.

Each successive component of the design layers the pragmatic with an evocative spatial experience obtained by degeneration of architectural primitives in stead of the aggregation of complex freeform geometries, which would lead to very linear repetitive spatial experiences. It reorients the visitor toward a new architectural perspective and circulational/functional logics.

A way of entering into the subject of the exclusive high class Vieanese theatre spectator or his opposite looking for a free platform to spread his word. While this “fictional” concert hall is visually divorced from reality, it gives a sly commentary on the current state of architecture. After leaving this page and stepping back into the build environment, it shocks how much the building across from you, with its cheap-looking touches of faux masonry or abundant technical supplies, starts to evoke similarities with this so called “horrific, dystopian, retro past aesthetic” concert hall.

blue Curacao

Supported by the Curacao authorities nad their entrepreneurs, the project for a major touristic attractor was designed by Rotterdam-based ONL Studio. It is supposed to host the future operator for Galactic Travels and offer a venue for international scientific space ressearch. The landmark building will be built as a spaceship, applying maritime and aviation techniques on the building body.

The shape and material of the building evoke the power of rocket engines, along with lightness of the Spaceship glider swirling down to Earth. The visitor experience is articulated so it resembles the one of astronauts, making the 100 km trip into outer space. The public trajectory leads downwards, swirling down like the Spaceship glider does. The levels grow bigger each step, relating the Experience of space travels to always larger environmental and universal subjects: from the International Space Station to Spaceship II, from the Earth’s atmosphere and global climate change to the expanding Universe, and finally down to themes related to the deep sea space.

The Spaceport is designed to attract both the scientific community and tourists. The design and the styling of the SXC spaceship is intentionally related to state-of-the-art developments in automotive, naval, aerospace and environmental design.

a Silk Network

Italian architectural studio OFL architecture received the first prize in the international competition “New Silk Road Map” that aims for the recovery, reinterpretation, and reconfiguration of the Silk Road – a network of commercial, cultural, and religious paths that connected the Eastern and Western civilizations for more than 2000 years.

OFL’s project description:

Silk Road Map Evolution (SRME) is a project born out of the will to revive and regenerate the current layout of the silk road. This is to be accomplished by means of a social, economic, political and architectonic redevelopment of the historic stretch of the road that once belonged to Marco Polo.

The project deeply integrates infrastructure with architecture and by means of a new railway system functioning on gravitational platforms follows the trail from Venice to Xian, Shanghai and Tokyo, extending its “arms” to create new infrastructures, commercial services and residences. A wiry MOTOR CITY extends itself to help out urban realities and struggling economies. The (linearly) diffused city runs into other micro-cities in such a way that the greater entity hooks onto the smaller ones to help them survive and, like an economic pump, extends life from the greater nodes to the smaller and poorer extremities. The 15,000 km of the silk road shall be broken up by bionic towers which will represent the centers of new urban sprawls. The new silk road line will also serve as the GENERATOR of other paths that will branch off of the main course of the road to develop a larger economic armature.

a Fantasy Mermaid

A young girl learns she’s half mermaid and plunges into a scheme to reunite with her father in this entrancing, satisfying tale that beckons readers far below the waves.

For as long as she can remember, twelve-year-old Emily Windsnap has lived on a boat. And, oddly enough, for just as long, her mother has seemed anxious to keep Emily away from the water. But when Mom finally agrees to let her take swimming lessons, Emily makes a startling discovery — about her own identity, the mysterious father she’s never met, and the thrilling possibilities and perils shimmering deep below the water’s surface. With a sure sense of suspense and richly imaginative details, first-time author Liz Kessler lures us into a glorious undersea world where mermaids study shipwrecks at school and Neptune rules with an iron trident — an enchanting fantasy about family secrets, loyal friendship, and the convention-defying power of love.

Annotation
After finally convincing her mother that she should take swimming lessons, twelve-year-old Emily discovers a terrible and wonderful secret about herself that opens up a whole new world. .

the MIT is the Passageway

VoltaDom is an installation created for MIT’s 150th Anniversary Celebration and FAST Arts Festival. It populates the passageway between Buildings 56 and 66 on MIT’s campus. Designed by a multidisciplinary research based practice SJET, founded by Skylar Tibbits in 2007, the project is one of the firm’s recent experiments in computational design. The project revisits a historically paramount structural element-the vault, attempting to find its contemporary equivalent through various assembly and fabrication techniques. This reference allows one to appreciate the installation both as a sculpture and a research in materiality and digital fabrication.

The installation lines the concrete and glass hallway with hundreds of vaults, reminiscent of the great vaulted ceilings of historical cathedrals.It can be seen from inside and outside, creating spectacular views. The vaults provide a thickened surface articulation and a spectrum of oculi that penetrate the hallway and surrounding area with views and light. VoltaDom attempts to expand the notion of the architectural “surface panel,” by intensifying the depth of a doubly-curved vaulted surface, while maintaining relative ease in assembly and fabrication.  This is made possible by transforming complex curved vaults to developable strips, one that likens the assembly to that of simply rolling a strip of material.

 

memorabilia Generation

Designed by Fletcher Priest Architects, the tower is intended to celebrate the cosmopolitan, urban and global character of New York City. It is a high-rise monument located at the tip of Manhattan on a pier projecting from Battery Park. While revitalizing the immediate surrounding and integrating it with the existing urban tissue, the Tower Museum also functions as an architectural landmark, terminating the north-south axis that extends to uptown Manhattan. The building would facilitate various exhibitions, with the emphasis on the 1970’s memorabilia: personal effects, souvenirs and photos of a new generation of immigrants who arrived after 1960.

“The Tower rises at an incline towards the Statue of Liberty, the symbolic gateway to New York, gesturing as an outstretched arm and welcoming hand about one hundred meter high. The external structure reads as a complex layering of muscle with a layered sinuous form. Internally, a central spine rises as a vast spiral stair through a void and is approached through a fluid entry sequence to a glazed wall facing the water. Lifts and stairs climb through this vertical void to the museum, library and rooftop restaurant that has a panoramic view over the city and the outlying boroughs.”

emergent Porosity

This project by Joseph A. Sarafian from the University of Southern California imagines a future in which billions of genetic algorithms act not only as the mediator between man and reality, but shape his existence through their very interactions. It explores a functionality beyond the carrying out of human desires, but of the prediction of human behavior. These ideas manifest in the design of the Bach Multidisciplinary Research Institute. Derived from notions of how Johann Sebastian Bach wove together voices in his fugues, this design is a synthesis of various flows of information, creating an effect larger than the sum of its parts. To achieve this goal, the building acts as an organism, reacting to its environment in such a way that it automatically controls its porosity through a network of advanced algorithms. Thus the facade is a continually fluctuating network of openings.

Instead of merely controlling the light conditions of the interiors, the aperture system is designed to close off and filter pollution from the adjacent freeway as part of the research of the facility. Thus by engaging with its environment the building acts as a testing instrument as much as an enclosure. Acoustical considerations are addressed on a local level as spaces that require varying levels of insulation are opened or closed automatically and in relation to human occupancy.

The research institute is designed to engage various fields of study, from music and the visual arts to biology and mathematics. This diversity promotes a common wealth of knowledge and facilitates interdisciplinary learning. Advancements in one field will have ripple effects in others and this synergy will promote a culture of recombinatory knowledge.
Flanked by Grand Avenue and an off-ramp of the 101 Freeway in Downtown Los Angeles, this site poses a unique set of challenges. Noise and car pollution are controlled through the pyramidal apertures that can close off sound, light, air, or all three depending on which layer of the double skin system is closed. This building envelope is comprised of carbon-fiber panels that enclose a shell of glass apertures. The glass is actually an assembly of two thin glass sheets with a membrane of translucent Aerogel insulation that adds to its acoustical and thermal insulation abilities. This enclosure system functions as the mediator between interior and exterior, and is controlled by an individual, agent based system. Each occupant has his own algorithm of light preferences and thus controls the system locally, contributing to the movement of the array as a whole when the needs of many are seen acting as an amalgamation.

The building form and structure is generated by an agent-based flocking algorithm in which agents from various locations on the site create paths following those of structural loads, determining the location of primary and secondary structural members. Special thanks to my instructor, Roland Wahlroos-Ritter and friends Erick Prins and Michael Sun for their help.

a Complex Landscape

The project is located in Xiaguan District, Nanjing, China. The site is on the south side of Jianning Road, in this urban area which is traditional and historical. The architects are required to design a big complexity including entertaining, sport, commercial and administration offices. Hence the major concern of the design is how to merge this “huge complex” into the existing beautiful nature landscape scenery and get a brilliantly transitional connection with the landscape there.

The distribution of architectural volumes in this design follows the idea of traditional Chinese Gardens, which transforming the elements of water, stones, hills, bridges and flowers into significant urban shapes animating and vitalizing the daily life of the entire district. As the site is in the traditional area, which is very sensitive to avant-garde architecture, this drives us to control the upground mass of the highrise. The proposal therefore lifts up the ground surface and transforms it into a flexible and lively vertical highrise with landscape integrating all the service and leisure facilities to provide an attractive and continuously active support for this traditional and cultural site.

To the open space, the idea is through “bottom elevated” to broaden the horizons, enhance ventilation, expand public space, and promote community interaction. Meanwhile by setting up “roof garden” to increase the accessibility and integration between the inner and outer space. Thus, an outstanding public space which allows citizens to have an unique and great spatial experience can be realized.

Besides, considering the different climate in Nanjing, this requires to pay a special attention on the facade during design period. In the podium part, the façade is in form of compound “green skin“. The continuity of the urban environment is a necessary urban ecological factor.

Team Members: Xinyu Wan, Dingliang Yang, Keming Wang, Jialong Lai, Jie Li

minority Women

Over the past two years, Lili Almog has photographed minority women in the countryside, small cities, and villages of China. In her second powerHouse monograph, The Other Half of the Sky, Almog examines these women at a time when the demands of rapid growth and a sweeping desire for modernity is encroaching upon the traditions and values that have sustained their cultures as intact microcosms in the larger picture of China for centuries. Almog focuses on minority women, with an emphasis on the extraordinary situation of Muslim women in China, as well as the Mosuo women, a unique ethnic minority living within the boundaries of western China and one of the last matriarchal societies existing in the world.

The images in The Other Half of the Sky reflect how the communist revolution, with its vision of the nobility of physical labor and emphasis on gender equality, left its mark on women's and personal identity in a changing China. The book tells the story of the women of today’s China, of their individualism in their domestic and work environments, and of minority women that have only recently been exposed to modernity. Given the nature of today's Chinese society and the conflict between the private self and society, The Other Half of the Sky presents a portrait of the public female representation as a challenge to express the dignity and heroism of the private, intimate female self.

at Bosphorus Valley

An interesting Studio Project program was introduced for the spring semester 2011 at University of Applied Arts Vienna, titled-Vertical Mass, Neither One nor Many. The idea was to propose large scale urban developments as an alternative to a collection of towers resting on a retail and public plinth.  The designs would have to reinterpret notions of skyline voids and spaces within masses, putting the emphasis on the urban void instead of a tower of any kind.

Designed by Joseph Hofmarcher, Rangel Karaivanov, Jürgen Strohmayer and Siim Tuksam, the Levent Vertical Mass sits at a high point of the Bosphorus Valley, integrating the high velocity axes of the highways and contextualizing views of the old city towards the southwest. The building is a commercial high-rise facilitating hotels, offices, condominiums and public plazas and gardens. The vertical garden occupies one of the landed masses and spills into the plaza meeting semi-programmed surfaces (open air theatres, parks) triggered by the civic program in the two other masses that touch the ground. The structure is made of a torus-shaped voids and supple forms, with the adjacent program and circulation pulled around the torus into the central mixed space. Multiplicity is created by organizing program and surfaces into irreducible forms negotiating organic internal logics with the urban concept of the project.

Natural Habitats

Pupa is a habitat by Liam Hopkins of Lazerian within Bloomberg’s London headquarters made from reclaimed cardboard and pallets.

The form and aesthetics are inspired by natural habitats – cocoons, bee hives, spiders nests and weaver birds nests. The ceiling assumes the appearance of a shelter; snug and cave like, but also references the vaulted ceilings of church naves.

The numbers which can be extrapolated from Pupa reflect the almost Sisyphean task faced, whether by human, bird or insect, to create these sort of  structures:


•3,972 triangular cardboard borders make up frame
•3,972 triangle inners fill the exoskeleton providing the cover
•180 wooden pallets taken apart for chair frame and legs
•11,000 nails removed from wooden pallets
•252 leather offcuts from make up the chair seats

Constructed in triangular sections Pupa utilises the structural and acoustic properties of cardboard. Computer design techniques were used to generate the form and the individual components were then extracted from the virtual model to create flat layouts that are glued together by hand.The original Bloomberg cardboard arrived in damp bales so was pulped and re-constituted at a John Hargreaves factory in Stalybridge using machinery originally installed in 1910.

“Commissioned for Bloomberg Philanthropy by art and design agency Arts Co, ‘Waste Not, Want It’ is a series of specially commissioned art and design projects made almost entirely out of Bloomberg’s waste.”