News: architecture firm Aedas has won a competition to design a twisting 33-storey skyscraper for Shanghai, China (+ slideshow).
The Xuhui Binjian Media City 188S-G-1 Tower will rise to a height of 155 metres. The rectangular building will gradually twist from its central axis as it rises.
“It begins with an extruded rectangular plan,” Aedas architects said. “Going upward, the west wall is gradually warped to accommodate the subway setback that cuts off the corner of the otherwise square project site; and the north wall is warped to the east.”
The facade will comprise groups of three glass panels, angled in four different directions, to reflect light and mimic a media screen.
“Curtain wall details were then developed to accommodate small differences in glass sizes and the four different aluminium mullion angles to minimise costs and fabrication time,” said Aedas.
A separate podium platform at the base of the tower will be used as a public green space, floating above a number of glass boxes housing retail, restaurant and cafe units. A large warped canopy on the podium will be designed to mimic the skewed shape of the nearby skyscraper and will serve as a cover for outdoor events.
The project will be located within a nine-block development in Shanghai. “The whole development contains nine square blocks and DreamWorks [Animation] will occupy three blocks in the middle,” Aedas told Dezeen.
“The Xuhui Binjian Media City 188S-G-1 Tower and Podium will occupy one block, with a view over the DreamWorks blocks. The developer will take up 20% of the tower space and lease out the rest (80%) to media industry tenants.”
This apartment block in Seoul by South Korean designers OBBA has a semi-outdoor stairwell screened behind a section of open brickwork in the centre.
The Beyond the Screen project by OBBA (Office for Beyond Boundaries Architecture) is located on a corner plot in the Naebalsan-dong neighbourhood of Seoul.
The five-storey building comprises two volumes bridged by the stairwell, and its volume is sliced externally by regulations such as setback lines and natural light requirements.
“The outer appearance is a single mass, however, it is actually two masses bridged by a semi-exterior central stairwell with a unique brick screen to the front and back, forming an H-shaped plan,” said the architects.
The upper four floors are divided into 14 residential units in four types, arranged on split levels so that each apartment is accessed directly from a stair landing.
The brick screen allows each apartment to have natural ventilation on three sides.
The pattern continues over the roof and covers selected apartment windows that would otherwise be severely overlooked by adjacent buildings.
“This screen filters the view into the building from the front, while allowing for the right amount of natural light and ventilation, creating a far more pleasant atmosphere in and around a stairwell,” the architects added.
A roof garden at the top provides communal outdoor space tucked behind a parapet wall, while the ground floor comprises a parking place on one side and a cafe on the other.
Seoul studio OBBA was founded in 2012 by Sojung Lee and Sangjoon Kwak, who previously worked at Dutch firm OMA and Korean firm Mass Studies.
Beyond the Screen is a new type of residential complex, located in Naebalsan-dong, Seoul. The existing condition of this residential neighbourhood is no different from most other neighbourhoods, with multiplex housing having held the majority.
The aim of this project was to offer a compact spatial richness for living, while finding new architectural solutions in satisfying the specific needs of the user, client, as well as contributing to the improvement of the typically generic townscape so familiar in Korea.
The building sits at a corner condition and is formed by a cutting and shaping of the volume by influences of the site regulations such as setback lines and natural light requirements.
The outer appearance is a single mass, however, it is actually two masses bridged by a semi-exterior central stairwell with a unique brick screen to the front and back, forming an H-shaped plan, with a skipped floor structure from the east to west.
This five-story building incorporates both residential and commercial functions – the first floor with a café and a piloti parking space, and from the second to fifth floors, four different unit types making up 14 different units in total.
From a user’s perspective, the design took into consideration the following four points:
Courtyard
Upon entering the building, one encounters the courtyard with a semi-exterior stairwell that provides access to each of the 14 units, with a unique brick screen to the front and back. This screen filters the view into the building from the front, while allowing for the right amount of natural light and ventilation, creating a far more pleasant atmosphere in and around a stairwell.
The sunlight that filters through the bricks makes for a lovely courtyard, allowing for an atmospheric transformation throughout the day, every day.
Natural ventilation
By splitting the building into two volumes, it allows all of the units to have three open sides, maximising the natural cross-ventilation throughout.
Roof garden
The roof garden is open to the sky, with a parapet wall at full-floor height, creating a private communal space for the residents.
Privacy
The brick screen walls, in their orderly staggered stacking construction, allows for privacy from the exterior gaze of the adjacent buildings into the semi-exterior, semi-public core of the building. This filter is applied, not only in the central core zone, but at specific moments where the building closely faces adjacent buildings. This adds to the privacy of each unit, while allowing for the residents of each unit the flexibility in ventilation, allowing each unit to breathe naturally.
The design also takes into consideration the client’s point of view, with an attempt to satisfy cost efficiency and profitability through quality design:
Area
The skipped floor structure allows residents to enter their units directly from the stair landings, eliminating unnecessary, dead public hallway space, and maximizing the area for exclusive use.
Cost Efficiency
With a limited construction budget, but aiming to satisfy all of the essentials for living, the design of the building and the units focused on only the absolute necessities, without being superfluous with custom materials and built-in furniture, but with quality materials and fixtures that were economical.
In order to provide the client with something new and different from the monotonous characteristics of the area, their needs were met through a quality of design that allows the building to stand apart within the existing streetscape of multi-family housing, both formally and in function, resulting in a new type of residential experience and use.
As designers, there was a need to find a new architectural solution for the unexpected and unplanned, such as the following:
Equipment
It is quite common for residential buildings to attach and expose air conditioning equipment on the exterior of the building. In order to keep to the intended design of all four elevations of the building, spaces were allotted for such equipment into the overall plan of the building, as well as an application of the brick screen system for ventilation and air circulation for HVAC.
To avoid illegal additions and extensions to the original design of the building in the future, which is a common practice in Korea, especially to buildings lacking a specific logic, there was a great focus in efficient spatial planning and design to allow for longevity in the initial design intentions and the spatial organization of the building.
A unique design calls attention from its surrounding neighbours and residents in sparking an interest in a new design sensibility, and to form and awareness and appreciation for beautiful buildings and well designed spaces for living. Due to the changes of living patterns in the city, the number of single to double occupancy living units has grown. Rather than contribute to the increase of thoughtless and monotonous residential typology, the focus of Beyond the Screen was to provide new architectural design solutions to improve the quality of compact living through and enrichment of spatial qualities and functions.
Competition: Dezeen has teamed up with designers Another Studio to give readers the chance to win one of five MONUmini kits for building a tiny Centre Pompidou or Villa Savoye.
Also in France, the second new model is Le Corbusier’s iconic modern Villa Savoye house located just outside Paris.
Etched stainless steel and paper sections are folded and locked together by following the simple step-by-step assembly instructions provided. Parts come in A5-sized envelopes with a short history of the building and can be purchased from Another Studio’s website for £15.50.
To enter this competition email your name, age, gender, occupation, and delivery address and telephone number to competitions@dezeen.com with “MONUmini” in the subject line, stating which kit you would like to win. We won’t pass your information on to anyone else; we just want to know a little about our readers. Read our privacy policy here.
You need to subscribe to our newsletter to have a chance of winning.Sign up here.
Competition closes 26 August 2013. Five winners will be selected at random and notified by email. Winners’ names will be published in a future edition of our Dezeen Mail newsletter and at the top of this page. Dezeen competitions are international and entries are accepted from readers in any country.
Following the success of our digital map-based guides to London Design Festival 2012 and Milan Design Week 2013, we’re creating an even better version for this year’s LDF – so if you’re exhibiting or organising an event and want to be included FREE, drop us a line!
The map will be published on Dezeen just before the festival, which takes place across London from 14 to 22 September. This year we’re integrating it with our World Design Guide – the world’s first and only guide to all the best architecture and design events around the world.
Last year’s map of London Design Festival was an astonishing success. It has been viewed over 800,000 times, making it by far the most popular guide to festival events.
To be considered for FREE inclusion in our guide, please submit details of your event to hello@worlddesignguide.com with “London Design Festival 2013” in the subject line. Please include the event name, venue, address, dates, opening times and website, plus a description and images.
London firm Paul Crofts Studio has completed a bakery on a high street in Suffolk, UK, with a motif based on a magpie’s nest set into the douglas fir serving counter.
The Two Magpies Bakery in Southwold produces fresh bread and patisserie at the back of the shop every day and the kitchen can be seen through a window onto the seating area.
“The space is made up of a series of bespoke elements made from douglas fir finished in white lye, creating clean lines with a contemporary feel and a pared-back canvas on which to display the highly crafted products on sale,” said Paul Crofts Studio.
The birds-nest motif was created by illustrator Katharine Gorham and picked out in white resin. It’s repeated on the opposite side of the shop with criss-crossing white dowels supporting long shelves above the seating area, where a silver ring entangled in the sticks references the collecting habits of magpies.
White timber dowels also protrude from the wall behind the counter to accommodate a series of bespoke wooden serving boards, as well as alongside the window where they provide perches for displaying loaves to passersby.
“Warm wood, clean white detailing and a high level of craftsmanship combine to create an intimate and relaxed setting in which to enjoy the exceptional food on offer,” the studio added.
The rear wall of the shop is clad in overlapping wooden shingles in shades of grey and tables in the seating area have their legs dipped in black.
Cardboard luggage labels tied with string present information and pricing on the produce and the seasonal menu can be written on a brown paper roll hanging next to a blackboard behind the serving counter.
Architect Alison Brooks talks about how residents come together in the streets of her firm’s Be housing project in Essex, UK, in this movie produced by Living Projects.
Alison Brooks Architects designed 85 homes in a variety of typologies as part of Newhall masterplan on the eastern edge of the Essex town of Harlow.
Nominated for the 2013 RIBA Stirling Prize and announced overall winner at this year’s Housing Design Awards, the houses at the development, formerly named South Chase, reference the traditional local architecture.
“We were able to achieve narrower urban blocks, because they’re back to back and they’re terraced, and a denser overall masterplan,” Brooks says.
Keeping to the original masterplan, terraces create east-west streets and detached dwellings line north-south avenues, with apartment blocks at the corners of the site.
For the terraced houses, the firm cut courtyards and front gardens into each square plan. “We were able to develop a T-shaped plan, which means you enter the house at the centre and that central hole is the hub of the house,” says Brooks.
She also explains that the apartment blocks connect the scheme together: “They help the masterplan turn the corners in a slightly softer, more organic manner.”
Finally, she comments on how residents use the outdoor spaces to socialise. “They use the streets for street parties in the summer,” Brooks says. “Everybody opens up their kitchens on to their front courtyard… the street itself becomes a big party room, and that I think is a big achievement.” Read more about the project in our earlier post.
Product news: this pencil cup and stationery holder that appears to be sinking into the desk has been designed by Luka Or for Israel design brand Monkey Business.
The Titanic pen caddy sits slanted on a flat surface. Tel Aviv-based designer Luka Or designed it to store pencils, paper clips and other stationery items.
The pencil holder measures 12 x 8 x 8.5 centimetres and is sold with paper clips. It is available in a range of three colours: red, charcoal and white.
Competition: Dezeen has teamed up with Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners to give away five pairs of tickets to a retrospective exhibition of work by architect Richard Rogers at the Royal Academy of Arts.
To enter this competition email your name, age, gender, occupation, and delivery address and telephone number to competitions@dezeen.com with “Richard Rogers exhibition” in the subject line. We won’t pass your information on to anyone else; we just want to know a little about our readers. Read our privacy policy here.
You need to subscribe to our newsletter to have a chance of winning.Sign up here.
Competition closes 23 August 2013. Five winners will be selected at random and notified by email. Winners’ names will be published in a future edition of our Dezeen Mail newsletter and at the top of this page. Dezeen competitions are international and entries are accepted from readers in any country.
Dezeen archive: here’s a roundup of some of the most beautiful Barcelona apartments we’ve featured with decorative geometric floor tiles (+ slideshow).
The most recent story from the Catalan capital to include ornate tile work is an apartment laid with triangular floor tiles that gradually change colour from green to red.
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