Hasta La Ideas

Architecture firm Snøhetta has designed a pair of ring-shaped platforms linked by a cable car, which will offer expansive views of the Alps to residents and visitors in Bolzano, Italy.

The cable car will scale the Virgolo cliff in the foothills of the Alps, reestablishing a link that was broken when the town’s previous cable car line closed in 1976.

Bolzano, which has approximately 100,000 residents and has been ranked as one of the best Italian cities for quality of life, is the provincial capital of the South Tyrol region in the north of the country.

Snøhetta bested Zaha Hadid Architects and Coop Himmelb(l)au in an invited competition conducted by SIGNA Group, an Austria real estate interest that is developing the project in partnership with the town. The project is expected to be a major draw to bring tourists to the small city.

The base ring, which cantilevers over a hill, will be entered via a large escalator. Visitors will be able to look back down over Bolzano as they ascend. From there they will board one of 16 cars, the cabins of which will each hold eight passengers, and be transported up the mountain in just over a minute.

“The base station is only four minutes from the city centre, so you can go from the centre of town to the top of a mountain in about five minutes – a really quick trip,” Patrick Lüth, a partner at Snøhetta, told Dezeen. “We don’t want people to linger at the base. It’s really just for take-off.”

The upper ring will include a 120-seat restaurant, a bar, and an exhibition and event space all topped by a “mountain plaza,” a large open-air viewing platform that could also host concerts or markets. “The scale feels right for the city,” Lüth said. The upper platform is about 180 metres (about 590 feet) above the centre of town.

Both rings will be clad in local marble, which will help tie the futuristic-looking forms to their site. The ring-shaped forms underscore the panoramic, 360 degree views.

Related stories: see more viewpoints

The cable car will use existing Italian technology, though the Snøhetta team is hoping to customise the cars, possibly by working with local artists. “We would love to have a look at those cabins. It would be great to create something unique to the place,” said Lüth.

A possible second leg could take visitors much higher. An additional cable line could be added to bring visitors more than 500 metres (1640 feet) above town to the top of Kohlern mountain.

Based in Oslo, New York, and San Francisco, Snøhetta are also currently working on the new headquarters for the Parisian daily Le Monde, a new waterfront development in Oregon, and a library in Calgary.

Swiss firm Herzog & de Meuron has recently completed another Alpine lookout point, building a wooden restaurant around an existing cable-car station on the top of Switzerland’s Chäserrugg mountain.

The post Snøhetta wins competition for cable car and Alpine viewing platform in Italy appeared first on Dezeen.

If a continent’s infrastructure is its’ bones, then Africa is growing up quickly. From 2000 to 2010, six of the ten fastest growing economies were in sub-Saharan Africa, and the region had to accrue new housing, highways, skyscrapers, factories—much of it financed or constructed by China. Who better to build Africa’s new economy? Continent-sized China just had its own growth spurt, one that began thirty five years ago in a few special economic zones (SEZs) and now promises to make Beijing a new megacity five times the size of New York City— a home to 130 million people boasting industries from technology to textiles. China’s economy-building industries—construction, real estate financing, urban planning—have found a new home in the African continent. But is Africa filling a Chinese mold? Or is it growing into something entirely different?

Portrait of Chinese construction site manager for a new light-rail line system in Addis Ababa. [Photo courtesy of Michiel Hulshof and Daan Roggeveen]

[Photo courtesy of Michiel Hulshof and Daan Roggeveen]

That question sits at the core of Facing East: Chinese Urbanism in Africa, an exhibition currently on display at New York City’s Storefront for Art and Architecture. The exhibit was curated by journalist Michiel Hulshof and architect Daan Roggeveen, both Dutch, who have extensively explored Chinese urbanism in their ongoing Go West Project. For Facing East, the pair travelled to six major African cities—Nairobi, Kigali, Lagos, Addis Ababa, Accra, Dar Es Salaam—over the past three years to photograph, interview and investigate. The exhibition’s walls of photographs, along with captions and a short essay, provide a condensed portrait of their experiences. So, what’s the verdict? Is Africa, in the words of one Kenyan small-business owner, truly “facing East to our new friends, the Chinese?”

Installation view. [Facing East: Chinese Urbanism in Africa, 2015. Curated by Michiel Hulshof and Daan Roggevan. Storefront for Art and Architecture. Photo by Qi Lin.]

Africans now have a choice between Western and Eastern-driven development and aid. [Facing East: Chinese Urbanism in Africa, 2015. Curated by Michiel Hulshof and Daan Roggevan. Storefront for Art and Architecture. Photo by Qi Lin.]

The show catalogs the broad conditions and consequences of Africa’s developing cities. [Facing East: Chinese Urbanism in Africa, 2015. Curated by Michiel Hulshof and Daan Roggevan. Storefront for Art and Architecture. Photo by Qi Lin.]

Facing East does not explore any projects in detail but articulates the broad tensions that are shaping the design and construction of Africa’s new infrastructure and cities. While development aid from the West aimed to reduce poverty and improve quality-of-life, China’s efforts are purely for-profit ventures. There’s no guarantee that rising waters of growth will lift all boats equally. This may be best exemplified by the massive slums that grow around Africa’s cities, a product of economic growth—jobs are the in cities—combined with a lack of government planning or services. Hulshof and Roggeveen cite a figure that three quarters of urban Africans live in such slums. This points to the second tension underscored by Facing East: unlike China, Africa is a diverse collection of cultures, governments, religions, and economies.

Aerial view of Kilamba New City. [Photo courtesy of Michiel Hulshof and Daan Roggeveen]

Kilamba New City, a housing development for 500,000 located outside the Angolan capital of Luanda, could have easily been lifted straight from Shanghai or Chongqing. [Photo courtesy of Michiel Hulshof and Daan Roggeveen]

View of the Kenya Commercial Bank Headquarters construction site in Nairobi. [Photo courtesy of Michiel Hulshof and Daan Roggeveen]

View of Thika Superhighway, built by Chinese contractors in Nairobi. [Photo courtesy of Michiel Hulshof and Daan Roggeveen]

Chinese managers oversee Ethiopian workers in this shoe factory in the Eastern Industry Zone—a a Special Economic Zone modeled after Shenzhen. [Photo courtesy of Michiel Hulshof and Daan Roggeveen]

For example, Kilamba New City, a housing development for 500,000 located outside the Angolan capital of Luanda, could’ve been lifted from Shanghai or Chongqing. But will its inhabitants finds the same industrial jobs that drive China’s growth? Will global economics and a host of supporting infrastructure—governmental, physical, and human—make it prosperous? These are difficult questions that only time will answer. Nevertheless, Facing East presents two very different portraits that help give visual substance to that question. The first is physical: sprawling grids of roads, fields of cruciform housing towers, sinuous curves of highways and hardtop, and thick webs of scaffolding. These scenes could’ve been captured anywhere in China, today or ten years ago, but the second portrait records Africans caught in that growth. It’s a Chinese stage but the actors are all-new.

Facing East: Chinese Urbanism in Africa is on view at Storefront for Art and Architecture through August 1st.

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