Danish architecture studio BIG is designing a “prototype city of the future” with wooden buildings and autonomous vehicles for Japanese car company Toyota near Mount Fuji in Japan.

Named Woven City, the first phase of development on the site of a former car-factory will be home to 2,000 people who will test the vehicles, robotics and smart homes in a “real-world environment”.

The design was revealed at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas with an animation created by London digital studio Squint/Opera.

“Building a complete city from the ground up, even on a small scale like this, is a unique opportunity to develop future technologies, including a digital operating system for the infrastructure,” said Akio Toyoda, president of the Toyota Motor Corporation.

“With people, buildings and vehicles all connected and communicating with each other through data and sensors, we will be able to test connected AI technology, in both the virtual and physical realms, maximising its potential.”

The 70-hectare development in the city of Susono will be designed by Danish architecture studio BIG – it will be the studio’s first project in Japan and is set to start on site in 2021.

The Woven City will be built around a network of streets that will cater for transportation at three different speeds.

Main streets will be used by autonomous vehicles including the Toyota e-Palette, smaller streets will be for other modes of personal transport including bicycles, scooters and Toyota’s i-Walk, and the third type of street will be fully pedestrianised.

“Today the typical is mess – with everything and nothing happening everywhere,” said BIG founder Bjarke Ingels.

“With the Woven City we peel apart and then weave back together the three components of a typical road into a new urban fabric: a street optimised for automated vehicles, a promenade for micro-mobility, and a linear park for pedestrians.”

Buildings throughout the development will be built from timber with solar panels placed on the roofs.

The blocks will be arranged in groups around central courtyards, which will be connected to each other by the streets and pedestrianised linear parks.

“The resulting pattern of porous 3X3 city blocks creates a multitude of different econiches for social life, culture and commerce,” said Ingles.

“In an age when technology – social media and online retail – is replacing and eliminating our traditional physical meeting places, we are increasingly more isolated than ever,” he continued.

“The Woven City is designed to allow technology to strengthen the public realm as a meeting place and to use connectivity to power human connectivity.”

The development will contain research and development spaces for Toyota to develop robotic construction, 3D printing and mobility designs.

Alongside Toyota’s facilities there will be housing for employees, their families, scientists and retirees. The residential buildings will contain in-home robotics to “take care of basic needs and enhance daily life” and sensors connected to AI to check resident’s health.

The community will be powered by a combination of solar energy, geothermal energy and hydrogen fuel-cell technology.

Ingels hopes that the development can be a prototype for how to redevelop existing cities.

“As a replicable framework, the Woven City can serve both as a prototype for future cities and as a retrofit to current cities,” he said.

“By simply ‘reprogramming’ existing streets, we can begin to reset the balance between people, mobility, and nature in cities as diverse as Tokyo or New York, Copenhagen or Barcelona.”

BIG is a Danish architecture studio that was founded by Ingels in 2005 and has offices in Copenhagen and New York. The studio is currently working with Heatherwick Studio to create a headquarters for Google in California and last year unveiled a design for floating villages that can withstand hurricanes.

Animation is by Squint/Opera.

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This year not only marks the end of a crucial decade of design development, 2020 also happens to be the 10th anniversary of the Core77 Design Awards. We’ve spent the last decade celebrating the best innovations to hit the market, and we want to wrap up the best of the ten years in a big way—by celebrating your best work.

Core77 is excited to announce the opening of the 2020 Core77 Design Awards, recognizing excellence in all areas of design expertise for over 10 years. Since the awards’ inception in 2011, the program has welcomed nearly 10,000 entries from professionals and students in over 49 countries around the world. It stands as an annual opportunity to take a look back and celebrate some of the best design of this year. It’s a chance to be a part of a global conversation, get recognized by your peers, and pick up an award or two.

Good design lives in many subsects, and our 18 original categories aim to recognize these many facets of the design world. With distinctions for Professional and Student entries alike, the Core77 Design Awards has awarded over 250 individual design firms including IDEO, frog, Pentagram, and fuseproject, as well as countless students from around the globe.

2019 Home & Living Professional Winner “Wellness Kitchen” by GE Appliances

The judges

Each year, the program hand-picks a jury of international design talent to judge each category. This year’s lineup is no exception, including design all-stars like Pentagram Partner Eddie Opara, Smart Design Director of Design Stephanie Yung, MAST Principal Shady Shahid, and plenty more fantastic folks. These professionals are each asked to build their own judging teams that promise a wide swath of experience and perspective, ensuring a diverse point of view for each category.

2019 Strategy & Research Runner-Up “GAMMA: Space Exploration Lander” by NASA JPL & Autodesk

The winners

The best part of this process, however, is the announcement. Not just to finally satiate everyone’s anticipation for who the winners are, but to kick off a conversation on the current state and future of design in the years to come. After reviewing, jurors announce their decisions via a video where they describe, in their own words, the process, observations, and discussion that led them to their final choices. It sheds light on a process typically kept behind closed doors, and sparks a meaningful discourse in the weeks that follow.

2019 Visual Communication Student Winner “Flower Power Inc. Rebranding” by Dan Yang

What do you get for all this? Well beyond another line on your LinkedIn profile, you’ll get your work showcased across the Core77 blog and beyond, adoration by your peers, visibility by esteemed designers in your field, as well as a very swanky trophy designed by none other than New York studio Rich Brilliant Willing. Inspired by the kind of group effort that designers and their clients engage in every day, the trophy doubles as a mold, allowing you to, well, make more! As many as you like.

Sound up your alley?

The 2020 Core77 Design Awards are currently open for entry now. Meaning, right now! Early Bird pricing ends on January 31st, Regular Deadline ends March 7th, and the Final Deadline to enter is April 1st. That’s it. Winners will be announced this summer on June 11th.

Designed as a much more modern and minimal take on jigsaw puzzles, the AniBlock Puzzle Challenger helps children learn problem-solving while also teaching them critical thinking as well as abstract visualization. Rather than put together shapes in a predefined pattern to create a picture, the AniBlock Puzzle Challenger uses the same block-shaped pieces to create new puzzles each time. The same blocks form new shapes when arranged differently, allowing kids to use the same tools in different ways. Unlike jigsaw puzzles that have a fixed single way of completing the puzzle, the AniBlocks have multiple solutions to the same problem, allowing children to explore new ways to complete the puzzle each time and approach a solution through multiple directions.

The AniBlock Puzzle Challenger helps capture the joy of Tetris and Minecraft with their abstract blockish architecture and introduces them to children. The block shape helps kids understand volumes better, and encourages them to develop critical thinking skills by looking at complex positive and negative forms using the pixel rather than simply fitting a triangular piece into a triangular hole, as most puzzles for kids do.

The AniBlock Puzzle Challenger comes with a set of twelve boards along with block pieces of different colors. The boards feature pixelated designs while the blocks nest right into the board, using a set of + shaped grooves. The blocks even nest one upon the other, letting you explore the third dimension too, for kids looking to explore more complex visualizations. An activity book helps keep children engaged and entertained by providing clues and allowing the kids to document their process… and while the AniBlock Puzzle Challenger is all about falling in love with blocks and puzzles without a screen, there’s even an iOS and Android app that allows kids to play with virtual Aniblocks on a screen with a variety of new puzzles!

Designer: In-Kyu Lee

Click Here to Buy Now: $19 $29 (34% off)

AniBlock Puzzle Challenger – Develops Creativity in Children

The AniBlock Puzzle Challenger is a new type of puzzle game with maps that features multiple solutions that help to develop critical thinking skills & brings out the creativity that is hidden in every child.

The AniBlock requires kids to figure out how to insert the puzzle piece to get it to fit with the other pieces in the proper pattern. It keeps them calm and focused.

3 Ways to Play with AniBlock

1. Solve the puzzle using various colors.

2. Solve the puzzle using one color.

3. Check the answers on the app and the booklet.

AniBlock Puzzle Challenger is made up of four packages, and each package is made up of two sets of colored blocks, one block board, and twelve patterns.

Each pattern has many different possible solutions, from dozens to hundreds when the colors of the blocks are taken into account. This makes the puzzle a great method to build your children’s creativity.

Features

Encourage curiosity with various patterns. AniBlock offers 48 puzzle patterns in total. Each of the patterns is made up of child-friendly and cute characters, scaled for a difficulty curve.

The scaled difficulty curve makes solving the challenges a good time, and keeps your little ones motivated to keep playing.

Diverse solutions boost creativity. Let’s take this Tulip pattern for example. There are nearly 1,000 possible solutions to this pattern. Explore the possibilities: your kids will have to exercise their creativity to the fullest to find the answers. They can even solve the puzzle without using all the blocks. The key is in the experimenting.

Kids won’t get bored. By combining an analog puzzle with a digital app, AniBlock Puzzle Challenger creates a continuous source of curiosity for children. The children will harness their curiosity as a drive to solve the puzzles.

AniBlock Puzzle Challenger represents the characters in the patterns as pixels. The children will be encouraged to imagine the final completed forms as they solve the puzzle.

Once the puzzle is completed, the kids will confirm the character, and challenge the puzzle once more in search of a different solution.

Click Here to Buy Now: $19 $29 (34% off)

Announced at CES 2020, Toyota has an ambitious plan for a newly redeveloped 175-acre site at the foot of Japan’s Mount Fuji. Ground will officially break next year on Woven City, a Bjarke Ingels Group-designed prototype town meant for piloting mobility services, in-home and public technologies, and connected innovations. Autonomous vehicles will be the only cars allowed in this pedestrian-centric city. Green space will takes on greater importance. And, walking will be encouraged through intuitive city planning. Buildings will be made from wood to reduce the project’s footprint, and energy will be sourced from solar panels and hydrogen fuel cells. The city, however, will be populated exclusively by Toyota employees. Read more at Forbes.

Brazilian architect Isay Weinfeld has completed his first US project – an upscale residential building in Manhattan’s West Chelsea neighbourhood that features verdant courtyards and “a paparazzi-proof porte-cochère”.

Named after the Portuguese word for garden, the Jardim development occupies a block-through parcel between 27th and 28th streets, and is just steps away from the High Line park.

The luxury housing project was designed by Isay Weinfeld, a leading contemporary architect in Brazil who started his practice in 1973. While Weinfeld has an extensive portfolio of residential and commercial projects in his native country, Jardim marks his first completed building in the United States.

Encompassing 150,000 square feet (13,935 square metres), the complex consists of two, 11-storey towers that are arranged around a multi-level garden. Facades are composed of concrete, brick and a patchwork of glass.

One of the building’s distinctive elements is a street-level tunnel that runs along the east side of the property, providing access from both 27th and 28th streets. The private tunnel – which acts as the “paparazzi-proof porte-cochère” –connects to the building’s lobby.

As residents approach the lobby, a latticed wall offers a glimpse of a lush, interior garden.

“Weinfeld has carefully choreographed movement and circulation throughout Jardim, creating a sense of mystery and drama along the way,” the team said.

A granite spiral staircase in the lobby leads up to the second level, where the architect incorporated additional greenery and intimate terraces. The gardens are adorned with trees, shrubs, ferns and grasses that provide “an ever-changing sequence of colour and fragrance”.

The complex contains a total of 36 apartments, along with two duplex penthouses. Amenities include a fitness centre, a massage room, a children’s playroom, and an indoor swimming pool illuminated by skylights.

The apartments feature fluid layouts and a “luxurious palette of noble materials” such as wood and stone. A dressed-up model unit is infused with earth tones and soft textures, helping reinforce the architect’s intent to provide a tranquil setting for urban dwellers.

In the kitchens, Weinfeld incorporated terrazzo flooring, pale-oak cabinetry and stainless steel countertops. Bathrooms are adorned with limestone tilework and oak vanities with brass fixtures.

Floor-to-ceiling glass ushers in daylight and provides generous views, along with facilitating a connection to the verdant gardens.

“Visually and experientially, the residences and gardens are one with each other, forging a uniquely intimate connection between architecture and the natural world,” the team said.

Jardim joins a number of new residential buildings in the Chelsea neighbourhood, which has experienced a construction boom since the High Line opened in 2009. Other projects there include 520 West 28th Street by Zaha Hadid Architects, which opened in 2018, and The Eleventh, a pair of twisted towers by BIG that is expected to be completed this year.

Photography is by Evan Joseph.

Project credits:

Architecture: Isay Weinfeld LLC
Landscape architecture: Future Green
Developers: Centaur Properties LLC, Greyscale Development LLC
Construction management: Pizzarotti IBC LLC
Marketing and sales: Douglas Elliman Development Marketing
Branding and marketing design: Pandiscio CO

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