Dezeen School Shows: a project that presents a future where society has embraced a diet of cultured meat, and a new type of living infrastructure integrating energy, water, housing, agriculture and traffic systems are included in Dezeen’s latest school show by students at UCLA.

Also featured is a planning scheme that responds to the threat of wildfires and a utopian future where mining machinery is turned into a green theme park.

UCLA

Institution: UCLA
School: UCLA Architecture and Urban Design
Courses: Master of Architecture, Master of Science in Architecture and Urban Design, and Bachelor of Arts in Architectural Studies
Tutors: Hitoshi Abe, Cristóbal Amunátegui, Kutan Ayata, Katy Barkan, Matt Conway, Morgane Copp, Dana Cuff, Kevin Daly, Neil Denari, Samaa Elimam, Yara Feghali, Benjamin Freyinger, Sarah Hearne, Georgina Huljich, Mariana Ibañez, Jeffrey Inaba, Julia Koerner, Max Kuo, Ayala Levin, Alan Locke, Todd Lynch, Greg Lynn, Laure Michelon, Narineh Mirzaeian, Michael Osman, Valeria Ospital, Güvenç Özel, Martin Paull, Jason Payne, Garrett Ricciardi, Heather Roberge, Natasha Sandmeier, Mohamed Sharif, Roger Sherman, Nathan Su, Raha Talebi and Enrique Walker

School statement:

“UCLA Architecture and Urban Design’s exceptional faculty teaches students to engage in the world around them, to see ideas as productive forms of response and to leverage design and writing as expressions of newly curated perspectives.

“Through rigorous inquiry, we interrogate contemporary urban issues and propose possible futures with equal measures of expertise, optimism and vision.

“These ideas are grounded in a critical engagement with the history and theory of architecture and the future contingencies of contemporary culture, and an engagement with the geographic, cultural and urban contexts of Los Angeles and Southern California.

“As part of the UCLA School of Arts and Architecture, our department is in close contact with other forms of creative cultural production including the UCLA Departments of Art, Design Media Arts, and World Arts and Cultures/Dance, as well as UCLA’s public arts institutions – UCLA’s Center for the Art of Performance and the Hammer and Fowler Museums.”

Meat Culture: From Lab to Table by Akana Jayewardene and Sunay Rajbhandari

“We imagine a future in which Los Angeles has moved away from its reliance on conventional meat sources and toward a diet of cultured meat and insect-based protein.

“As old habits and desires linger, the graphic and grotesque character of meat culture’s troubled past encounters the clinical sensibilities of scientific research and the culinary arts to establish new aesthetic qualities.

“As a result, common assumptions become unstable and deeply ingrained values are put into question.

“What do we accept as real and what do we reject as artificial? What is natural and what is synthetic?”

Students: Akana Jayewardene and Sunay Rajbhandari
Course: Future (Hi)Stories
Tutor: Kutan Ayata

Flow(t) Motion by Nate Waddell

“A fluid curve, or a line with curvature between two moments can be understood as the mark of transition or gradient between two points of control – otherwise understood as the event between action and reaction.

“In fluid dynamics, these types of curves are used analytically or empirically to determine performance properties of an object met with a force or vice versa.

“Flow(t) Motion is suspended between the domains of a priori and posteriori.

“It takes objective truths and subverts them to create perceived architectural space and experience through a developed toolkit of curves, actions and reactions.”

Student: Nate Waddell
Course: Digging and Flying
Tutor: Neil Denari

Resort Urbanism by Jichu Li, Deshun Liu, Xinyu Tian and Xinhua Wei

“Wildfires in urban areas are occurring with greater frequency and burning more acres of land, as witnessed by year after year reports of ‘The Worst Fire Season Ever.’

“Instead of hoping to naively protect buildings from fires, we’re trying to minimise the cycle of social vulnerability caused by fire disasters with resilient typologies.

“Cloaked as a resort community, this multi-unit prototype aims to counter the perilous expansion of single-family development into the Wildland Urban Interface while giving retirees amenities that double as emergency response infrastructure.”

Students: Jichu Li, Deshun Liu, Xinyu Tian and Xinhua Wei
Course: IDEAS: Urban Strategy Studio
Tutors: Jeffrey Inaba and Shaun McCallum

HousINC: Future Domestic Urban Living Infrastructure by Kaibo Wang, Kaiwen Yang and Ziwei Hou

“HousINC is a new type of domestic urban living infrastructure integrating energy, water, housing, agriculture and traffic systems together.

“It is not a building, it is not a block, it is not a neighbourhood – but something in between.

“HousINC is considered not only a habitat for humans, but also a paradise for nonhumans – asking for resources from the environment, as well as giving them back.

“HousINC is a mechanical model agent evolving from the smart city concept through which we explore further the possibilities of how architecture manages resources and responds to the current urban challenges.”

Students: Morgane Kaibo Wang, Kaiwen Yang and Ziwei Hou
Course: Episode 5: Domestic (R)Evolutions
Tutor: Mariana Ibañez

Open Field by Zirui Wang

“The project is situated in a field setting and requires careful placement to ensure that it takes up a minimally-sized footprint, in the interest of respecting the wetland.

“The design is orientated based on surrounding plants – providing an open space where plants could grow there naturally, offering different viewing experiences for people observing them, and condensing the building unit so it casts minimal shadows on the plants.

“Finally, a column taxonomy that creates a field condition in the site, with plants growing in and filling the central void.”

Student: Zirui Wang
Course: Building Design Studio
Tutor: Yara Feghali

Baggerland: A Greenwashing Experience by Takin Daneshmir, Willie Wu and Luying Xu

“The project centres on a short film imagining a fictional future. Baggers are huge machines built by the German coal industry for surface mining.

“They eat away land and create massive, unnatural landscapes on earth at a rapid speed.

“However, as Germany goes green, all coal-mining activities will stop by the year of 2038 and the sites will be abandoned.

“The owner of the mines has already rebranded themselves as a ‘green company’ producing sustainable energy.

“We are going to capitalise on this greenwashing trend and turn the former coal mining site to a theme park to celebrate everything green.”

Students: Takin Daneshmir, Willie Wu and Luying Xu
Course: IDEAS: Entertainment Studio
Tutors: Natasha Sandmeier and Nathan Su

Nests and Thresholds by Jacob Dunsmore

“By imagining two buildings nested one inside the other, the studio and project interrogate not only the threshold between the building and the world, but within the many thresholds that reside within the architectural object itself.

“The current indeterminacy between living and working, brought about both by crisis and our increasingly ‘seamless’ and ‘interconnected’ work-anywhere and live-everywhere model, has radically altered our understanding of boundaries.

“Binary distinctions between living and working, inside and outside, private and public, individual and collective, have become difficult to pin down.

“Arguably, adjudicating spatial boundaries is architecture’s most fundamental role; how then has this blurring problematised our understanding of space?”

Student: Jacob Dunsmore
Course: House to Housing
Tutor: Katy Barkan

Morphi: Terraforming the Cooper Basin by Danai Sougkara, Sanya Vithalkar and Srujana Bhoopanam

“Morphi has great potential to introduce a new kind of urban zoning where industrial facilities, eco-tourism and wildlife are combined.

“In order to serve the planet’s need for energy but at the same time leaving a positive footprint on it, Cooper Basin acts as a testing ground for new and renewable technologies, like large scale algal biomass and solar power.

“The site functions as an urban machine, operated by artificial intelligence and robots with minimal to no agency of the humans.”

Students: Danai Sougkara, Sanya Vithalkar and Srujana Bhoopanam
Course: IDEAS: Technology Studio, “Maximum City”
Tutors: Güvenç Özel, Laure Michelon and Tucker van Leuwen-Hall

National Park by Morgan Jacobs and Xavier Ramirez

“This project presents a speculative fictional narrative set from 2021 to 2061 that examines the potential outcomes of landscape and architecture through multiple mediums and their consequences.

“Taking on the topic of lithium mining, Nevada and its rich geology become the site while the infrastructure of its landscape and futures of energy production and storage become the architecture.

“With the shift toward green energy, resources don’t stop being consumed – they merely shift from one method of earth extraction to another.

“This future proposes that through the combative relationship of environmentalists and private and federal enterprises a new national park begins forming across Nevada where the production and recreation of landscape begins to coexist as one.”

Students: Morgan Jacobs and Xavier Ramirez
Course: Future (Hi)Stories
Tutor: Kutan Ayata

New Hous(ing) by Zongli Li

“This studio and project asks what it means to live in a ‘house’ and what it means to live in ‘housing’, and foregrounds the development of new sensibilities about what should be preserved or renewed as we move from the one to the many.

“Working at an in between scale of 20 residential units and public programs, the project defines communities that are neither totally intimate nor totally estranged, investigating the way living together can contaminate, disrupt and reinvent ideas for housing.

“As the desire for the single-family house becomes increasingly untenable, the transition from the house to housing is in need of urgent reconsideration.”

Student: Zongli Li
Course: House to Housing
Tutor: Katy Barkan

The Story of the Line by Steven Katz and Hongye Wu

“By 2050, the United States will have a robust industry of rare earth mining and a new domestic supply chain.

“The connective lines needed to support this new territory, from extraction and production to distribution, is the speculation of this project.

“Sites of extraction are points on a line of a supply-chain system that removes material from a distant location and relocates it to an immediate location in the form of architecture.

“Our proposal speculates on the reclaiming of these points of extraction by inhabiting these sites into a new territory of domestic space.”

Students: Steven Katz and Hongye Wu
Course: Episode 5: Domestic (R)Evolutions
Tutor: Mariana Ibañez

Future Histories: LA’s Film Industry by Morgane Copp and Wei Qiu

“We speculate on the future of abandoned sound stage typologies of movie studios in Los Angeles due to the emerging technologies for digital scene-making, which will eventually render the currently required physical spaces obsolete.

“Instead of imagining a clean slate to exercise yet another version of tabula rasa towards a generic urban patterning, the project speculates on an alternative form of urbanism that challenges present norms and assumptions.

“By flipping the figure ground, in essence removing the roof of the obsolete sound stages, and building program in between these containers, we imagine a new urban fabric.”

Students: Morgane Copp and Wei Qiu
Course: Future (Hi)Stories
Tutor: Kutan Ayata

Partnership content

This school show is a partnership between Dezeen and UCLA. Find out more about Dezeen partnership content here.

The post UCLA presents 12 student architecture projects appeared first on Dezeen.

Here’s a fantastic example of “less is more.” By removing a very specific chunk of material, French industrial design firm Contexte turns a piece of wood into a function-increased cutting board and serving board.

“Mudra is a simple, practical and minimalist cutting board. Thanks to the cut in the board, you can cut your vegetables and pour them out without them falling out. But there is a second function that allows you to use it as a tasting tray by turning it over. It has been designed to be used for both purposes depending on your needs and everyday situations.”

Contexte writes that the made-in-France boards are available in Oak or Beech, but I was unable to find a retailer online for a price.

Although it was terribly late to the wireless charging party, Apple managed to one-up everyone else by adding something that it already had a lot of experience with. Adding magnets to the equation sounds almost trivial, but it’s a small change that made the technology not only more convenient but also more flexible. Now there are dozens of magnetic wireless charging accessories, including those certified for Apple’s MagSafe branding, that take advantage of this development. Unsurprisingly, some are better designed than others, especially when it comes to both appearance and usability. This power bank concept, for example, is designed not only to keep your phone alive before you reach home but also to keep it standing so you can watch your favorite videos in comfort.

Designer: Eli Lan

Power banks are old news, of course, but they have always carried with them some level of inconvenience in exchange for their portable batteries. Most require you to wrestle with cables to charge your phone, making it difficult to use the phone at the same time. Others do come in cases that enclose the device, but it’s an all-or-nothing situation with these. Magnetic wireless charging thankfully mitigates some of those problems, leaving enough room for innovation and creativity in design.

This STRICKERS concept, for example, utilizes an ultra-thin power bank that magnetically attaches to the back of a phone, most likely an iPhone. Current technologies do allow such a small pack to have a 10,000mAh battery capacity so that it won’t add too much bulk to your phone’s back. It could actually be thicker in reality, but at least you don’t have to stick it to the phone if you’re not using it, unlike bulky battery cases.

What makes STRICKERS really special, however, is the sheet of bendable silicone material that turns the power bank into a smartphone stand. Most accessories of this kind utilize awkward rings or kickstands, but this design allows the stand to stay flat and stay out of the way when you don’t need it. And since the power bank uses magnets, it is possible to use the stand in both vertical and horizontal positions, breaking the mold of limited phone stands.

Despite this mix of convenient features, the power bank remains visually simple. The power bank’s form itself is almost like a mirror of the iPhone’s current design, while the silicone stand brings not only a contrasting material but also a better grip compared to slippery glass or metal. The design also leaves plenty of room for different colorways to match available iPhone options. This sadly remains in the realm of ideas, though, but it’s a shining example of the kind of designs that are now possible, all thanks to the addition of a few small magnets.

The post This super-thin MagSafe power bank has a trick to keep your iPhone standing first appeared on Yanko Design.

A thatched roof and large cardboard tubes form part of the structure of the Farmer’s Restaurant on Awaji Island, designed by Pritzker Architecture Prize-winning architect Shigeru Ban‘s studio.

The restaurant sits in the middle of a field on the Japanese island, which is the same location as Shigeru Ban Architects‘ wooden Zenbo Seinei meditation retreat, completed earlier this year.

Farmer‘s Restaurant was commissioned by agricultural company Pasona Agri-Partners Inc to serve food made from fresh vegetables from the field. It is also used as a music hall.

Its architectural design pays homage to traditional Japanese farmhouses, most visibly in its large thatched roof.

According to Ban’s studio, its chunky structural beams and columns also pay homage to the large trees that are used to create old farmhouses in Japan.

These structural elements are made from two pieces of Japanese cypress wood, wrapped in cardboard tubes.

Farmer’s Restaurant is one of the largest-scale examples of Ban’s Paper Tube Structures system – his pioneering use of tubes made from cardboard as architectural and structural components.

Famously used across his works since 1990, the system can also be seen on projects including the Cardboard Cathedral in Christchurch, the Nomadic Museum in New York and the Paper House in Yamanakako Village.

Externally, the chunky columns sit between decorative wooden panels, doors and openings that lead out onto a decked area.

Inside, Farmer’s Restaurant’s exposed structure is complemented by wooden flooring, banquet tables, and stools.

As some of the cardboard tubes are exposed to the outside, Ban’s studio has coated them in waterproof paint and designed them to be replaced over time.

Ban also famously uses cardboard as part of his modular Paper Partition System (PPS), which was developed to ensure the privacy of people seeking refuge in refugee centres.

The PPS makes use of thin cardboard tubes as structure and textiles as partitions, with one unit taking just three people to build in five minutes.

Ban’s non-governmental organisation, the Voluntary Architects’ Network, recently used the system across Europe to help house Ukrainians fleeing the Russian invasion.

The photography is by Hiroyuki Hirai.

Project credits:

Architects: Shigeru Ban Architects
Client: Pasona Agri-partners Inc
Structural engineer: Hirokazu Toki, Shunya Takahashi
MEP engineer: Hokuryo Denko, Kukan Koubou, Fujii Scene2
General contractor: Kukunoya, Kusakanmuri

The post Shigeru Ban marries thatch and cardboard tubes at Farmer’s Restaurant in Japan appeared first on Dezeen.

Swiss architecture studio Herzog & de Meuron has revealed its plan to overhaul London’s Liverpool Street station, which includes the addition of two towers above the railway terminus.

Herzog & de Meuron‘s proposal also includes improvements to the station and railway infrastructure, such as the addition of 60 per cent more ticket barriers, 1.5 acres of public and green space, and increased circulation, platform and concourse areas.

A large upper concourse will be added, extending the current mezzanine level that surrounds the main concourse, bringing its total concourse area to 9,137 square metres. The addition of six escalators will lead visitors to the existing platform-level concourse.

Alongside improvements to the station, two towers will be introduced alongside it to house approximately 78,038 square metres of office space and a 17,651-square-metre hotel.

Visuals of the plans suggest that part of the station’s glass and iron roof will be replaced with a curving white canopy, which extends to the southwestern corner of the site to make way for the double-level concourse.

Above the canopy, renders show one of the two towers in place of one of its existing 1980s entrances, which Architects’ Journal reported could be demolished to make way for the project.

The historic components and facade of the Grade II-listed Andaz hotel, which sits beside the station, will be restored. The hotel will also be fitted with routes to the station concourse, creating new public spaces and allowing the public to access its historic rooms, ballroom and masonic temple.

Renders of the second taller tower, which will be used to house the hotel space, show it emerging from behind and above the existing 19th century-hotel facade.

After initial plans for the project were released earlier in October, Historic England voiced its concerns surrounding the proposal, saying that the plans to redevelop the railway terminus would have a “severe impact” on the Bishopsgate Conservation Area.

“The proposed redevelopment of the station would have a severe impact on the Bishopsgate Conservation Area, and more widely on the extraordinary historic character of the City of London,” said Historic England.

The public body added that the scheme would “trample on the listed station and hotel rather than showcase their heritage”.

“The 16-storey tower and bulk of development proposed above the station is so large that it is likely to encroach on views of some of London’s great landmarks, including those of St Paul’s Cathedral protected under the London Views Management Framework,” it continued.

Historic England’s chief executive Duncan Wilson also commented on the plans, describing them as “oversized and insensitive”.

“Liverpool Street Station is one of London’s great Victorian stations, with a distinctive and special character,” Wilson said.

“While we recognise the need for upgrades to the site so that it can better serve the millions of people that pass through its doors, this oversized and insensitive development is surely not the answer.”

In a press release released by developer Sellar and transport operators Network Rail and MTR, it explained that views of St Paul’s Cathedral will be protected, ensuring “no or low impact on views” of the historic structure.

“We have also prioritised protecting and enhancing the heritage elements of both the Andaz Hotel and of the station itself,” added Sellar chief executive James Sellar.

“The original Victorian railway sheds at Liverpool Street station will not be touched but will be celebrated by opening up new views to them.”

Earlier in 2022, architecture studio DSDHA created the Exchange Square park, which is located between Liverpool Street station’s Grade II-listed train shed and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill’s Exchange House, while Hopkins Architects reused elements of a 1980s office block to create 100 Liverpool Street.

The renders are courtesy of Herzog & de Meuron.

The post Herzog & de Meuron unveils plans to add two towers to Liverpool Street station appeared first on Dezeen.