Hasta La Ideas

News: a skyscraper shaped like a giant doughnut has been completed by Italian architect Joseph di Pasquale in Guangzhou, China (+ slideshow).

Located on the edge of the Pearl River, the 138-metre Guangzhou Circle was designed by Di Pasquale of Milan studio AM Project to provide an iconic headquarters for Chinese companies Guangdong Hongda Xingye Group and GDPE Guangdong Plastic Exchange.

“The architectural concept is for a building that will be immediately perceived as a native Chinese landmark using a closed and central structure instead of the usual western skyscrapers stereotype,”said the architect.

A circle with a 50-metre diameter punctures the heart of the 33-storey structure, turning the building into a hollow circle. When reflected in the river, this shape becomes a figure of eight – a lucky number in Chinese culture.

“[It] is inspired by the strong iconic value of jade discs and numerological tradition of feng shui, in particular, the double disc of jade (bi-disk) is the royal symbol of ancient Chinese dynasty that reigned in this area around 2000 years ago,” said Di Pasquale.

“This figure also corresponds to the number eight and infinity symbol that in Chinese culture have a strong propitiatory value,” he added.

The front and rear walls of the building are clad with copper plates, while the curved side walls are broken down into glazed rectilinear boxes.

Elevated gardens are located within the central void.

Here’s a project description from Joseph di Pasquale:

Guangzhou Circle (Canton), China

On December 16th 2013 the completion ceremony of the Guangzhou Circle Mansion had taken place in Guangzhou, China. It’s the Headquarter of Guangdong Hongda Xingye Group and the venue of GDPE Guangdong Plastic Exchange, the world largest stock exchange for raw plastic material with more then 40 billions euros of annual turn over.

Local and Italian authorities will attend the ceremony including the Italian General Consul in Guangzhou mr Benedetto Latteri and the scientific responsible of the Italian Embassy in Beijing, mr Giuseppe Rao.

The building has been designed by the Italian architect Joseph di Pasquale and his professional practice AM project from Milan that has been the winning proposal of the international architectural competition held in 2009. The total height is 138 mt for 33 floors, 85.000 square meters of floor area and about 50 million euros of global investment. The inner hole is a unique space that has no equal in the world with its almost fifty meters of diameter (48 mt).

The architectural concept intends to design landmark building that will be immediately perceived as a native Chinese Landmark Building using a closed and central structure instead of the usual western skyscrapers stereotype. Therefore the architecture is fully defined, and iconic, very close to the Chinese way of perceiving and understanding. It’s a sort of “urban logo” that works as a landmark in the same way that ideograms are used in the Chinese writing, instead of the alphabet.

The architectural concept is inspired by the strong iconic value of jade discs and numerological tradition of feng shui. In particular, the double disc of jade (bi-disk) is the royal symbol of ancient Chinese dynasty that reigned in this area around 2000 years ago. The building reflected in the water of the river creates exactly the same image: a double jade disc.

This figure also corresponds to the number 8 and infinity symbol that Chinese culture has a strong propitiatory value. Just remember how the date and time of the start of the Beijing Olympics was for the same reason fixed to 8:08 am of the ‘8-8-2008.

But the building is also a clear reference to the theme dear to the Italian Renaissance “quadratura del cerchio” (squaring the circle). The two circular facades in fact contain and support suspended groups of storeys that are actually “squaring” the perfect circumference of the facades in order to make the interior space orthogonal and habitable.

The 33 floors are grouped to create two rows of volumes blocks that appears from the side of the building and are progressively pushed out till an extreme 25 meters cantilever. The main interior space is the exchange hall that is located just lower then the central hole of the building. This is the heart of the entire complex and of the entire company.

The initial structural concept has been developed and tested at the wind gallery of Polytechnic of Milan, and the structural calculations and final test has been developed by the South China University of Technology (SCUT) in Guangzhou.

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This week’s job of the week on Dezeen Jobs is a position for a project leader with Danish firm C. F. Møller Architects, whose domed tropical greenhouse that can be pumped up to alter lighting and temperature inside is pictured. Visit the ad for full details or browse other architecture and design opportunities on Dezeen Jobs.

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A series of steel-braced oak staircases and bridges connect the different levels of this extension to the Manchester School of Art by Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios (+ slideshow).

London architects Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios designed the extension to link the original nineteenth century art school building to a 1960s tower, which was also refurbished as part of the project.

A bank of lifts ascends from next to the entrance to every storey of the tower, with bridges and staircases helping to unite the old and new buildings.

The new building provides additional studio, workshop and exhibition spaces for the school’s 3500 students and features a seven-storey glazed facade, which creates an exhibition and events space that can be seen from the street outside.

Behind the gallery-like facade is a longer, lower building containing studios, workshops and teaching areas, which were designed in an open plan format to encourage interaction between students from the 30 disciplines that share the space.

“Private spaces no longer exist,” described John Brooks, vice chancellor at Manchester Metropolitan University, of which the art school is now a faculty. “What you’ll find are lots of spaces that are intersected by passageways, walkways, stairwells and glass partitions, so whatever you’re doing is almost like a performance.”

Referencing the aesthetic of traditional local warehouses, the architects applied industrial materials including concrete, steel and glass throughout the interior, while the open spaces and comprehensive use of glazing fill the building with natural light.

“This building is all about light,” said architect Keith Bradley. “The way that we’ve created a series of cascading floorplates, almost like a landscape of floors, allows light deep into the space so that we can still get the combination of people working together but also get good natural daylight.”

Concrete is treated with different surface finishes to demarcate the spaces; smooth in most areas, but with a rough texture created by casting it against chunky chipboard on the walls of the staircases.

Four of the double-height columns inside the studio and workshop building feature a decorative pattern that was produced during the concrete casting process. The pattern was designed in the early twentieth century by Lewis F. Day, a former tutor at the school.

Oak was used to line the staircases and linking corridors, and provide a warm and tactile contrast to the raw materials that dominate the interior.

Photography is by Hufton + Crow.

Here’s a project description from the architects:

Manchester School of Art

Context

Celebrating its 175th birthday in 2013, Manchester School of Art is one of the oldest institutions of its kind in the UK. The school was established in the 19th Century to help keep the region competitive in an international market and support regional industry in a wider marketplace.

Now a faculty of Manchester Metropolitan University this remains an important objective for the Art school and a key part of the brief was to help the school bridge the gap between education and professional life.

The new building celebrates the inter relation of the various art & design disciplines and encourages 21st century students to work alongside each other and enjoy the crossover rather than concentrating always on the differences. With a huge front window, it is also a building that is proud of its product and shows the work to everyone who passes by.

Now one of the leading Art & Design courses in the country, the School has around 3500 FTE students across its various disciplines. Housed within a range of late Victorian and post-war buildings, the School forms the southern edge of All Saints’ Park, a green square at the heart of the city centre campus. The Art School Extension consists of an 8600-metre-squared new building of studios, workshops and a gallery; and a 9000m2 refurbishment of a 1960s Arts tower and plinth.

Concept

FCB’s design of the Manchester School of Art has provided an engaging and lively environment in which to work and study and helped re-assert both the art school and the university’s profile on the national stage. The Dean of the School, Professor David Crow, describes the scheme as “a hugely exciting arena where anything is possible and everything is relevant.”

The working heart of the building comprises open studios, workshops and teaching spaces (known as the Design Shed.) A second element is a seven storey Vertical Gallery. This is the linking piece between the existing 1960s arts tower (known as the Chatham Building) and the new studio building. This vertical gallery provides a showcase space for the output of the School and acts as a shop window to the school itself.

Hybrid Studio Space

The open studio space places a great focus on collaborative working in an atmosphere that is inherently creative. Students and MSA staff from a broad spectrum of contemporary design disciplines can work on projects in close communal proximity. This proximity encourages the sharing of ideas, techniques and methodologies in a way that was previously impossible.

The Hybrid Studio is also an environment in which students can proudly display their work in a setting that is light and easy to explore.

Materials

As a building for designers, and a place for teaching and learning about Art & Design the clarity and articulation of materials was crucial, as was the tonal and textural quality of the interior. The interiors are a study in concrete, with three distinct grades creating different atmospheres. Rough is used in back stairwells giving a sense of rawness and a factory aesthetic; double height cast concrete columns articulate the central spaces of the design shed, punctuated by four very special decorative concrete columns which were developed from an early 20th century wallpaper design by Lewis F Day, an eminent designer of his period, contemporary of Walter Crane a tutor at Manchester School of Art.

A secondary but important material is the use of oak linings to the stairs and linking corridors which span the vertical gallery. These provide a warmth to soften the hard edges of steel and concrete which form the structure.

Collaboration

Working with clients who are artists and designers on a building for training artists & designers was a wonderfully rich experience for us. The level of collaboration was exceptionally high and we worked with the client by testing processes, recrafting ideas and always seeing the design as an iterative, creative process.

Client: Manchester Metropolitan University
Construction value: £23 million
Commissioned: June 2009
Construction Start Date: April 2011
Completion: April 2013
Project Gross Area: 17320sqm
Cost Consultant: Turner and Townsend
Contractor: Morgan Sindall
Structural engineer: Arup

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Chicago firm Studio Gang Architects has completed a boathouse on the northern bank of the Chicago River with a rhythmic roofline intended to capture the alternating motions of a rower’s arm movements (+ slideshow).

Located beside Clark Park in the north-west of the city, the WMS Boathouse provides a home for the Chicago Rowing Foundation. It is one of four boathouses proposed as part of a city-funded regeneration of the Chicago River, and the first of two designed by Studio Gang.

Structural roof trusses that alternate between M and upside-down V shapes give the building its jagged roof profile, which was conceptualised by tracing the time-lapse movements of rowing.

“The architecture is meant to visually capture the poetic rhythm and motion of rowing,” said Studio Gang principal Jeanne Gang, “but by providing a publicly accessible riverfront, it also reveals the larger movement toward an ecological and recreational revival of the Chicago River.”

The boathouse comprises two buildings positioned alongside one another. The first is a single-storey shed for storing rowing equipment, while the second is a two-storey structure containing offices, community facilities, a fitness suite and a rowing tank where teams can practice indoors.

The exterior of the building is clad with a mixture of slate tiles and zinc panels, which share the same silvery grey colouring.

Interior spaces are lined with timber, which also extends outside the building to wrap the inside of balconies and undersides of overhanging eaves.

South-facing clerestory windows extend up to the edge of the roof, bringing high levels of natural light through the building, but also helping to warm the interior in winter and allow natural ventilation during the summer.

Studio Gang’s second boathouse will be located on the south side of the river and is set to complete in 2015.

Read on for more information from Studio Gang Architects:

Studio Gang Architects completes WMS Boathouse at Clark Park

First of the two new boathouses along Chicago River designed and constructed by SGA state-of-the-art, 22,620-square-foot facility now open to the public

Studio Gang Architects (SGA) is pleased to announce the completion of the WMS Boathouse at Clark Park along the north branch of the Chicago River. Designed and built by SGA, the state-of-the-art facility opened to the public on October 19, 2013. It is located at 3400 North Rockwell Avenue on the northwest side of the City of Chicago.

The Clark Park facility is one of four boathouses proposed by Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel as cornerstones of his riverfront revitalisation plan, anchoring the river’s future development. Emanuel’s initiative was spurred by the provision of nearly $1 million in grant funds by the United States Environmental Protection Agency to help clean up the river and drive job creation. Studio Gang was commissioned to realise two of the four boathouses, with the second facility to be located along the south branch of the Chicago River at 28th and Eleanor Streets. It is scheduled for completion in 2015.

The WMS Boathouse at Clark Park is currently home to the Chicago Rowing Foundation (CRF). In partnership with the Chicago Park District, the CRF offers a wide range of indoor and outdoor activities year-round, including learn-to-row sessions both in tanks and on the river, youth and masters team rowing, ergometer training, rowing-inspired yoga classes, and lessons tailored to individuals with disabilities.

As the City of Chicago works to transform the long-polluted and neglected Chicago River into its next recreational frontier, Studio Gang’s boathouse at Clark Park helps catalyse necessary momentum. “The architecture is meant to visually capture the poetic rhythm and motion of rowing,” said Jeanne Gang, Founder and Principal of Studio Gang Architects. “But by providing a publicly accessible riverfront, it also reveals the larger movement toward an ecological and recreational revival of the Chicago River.”

The boathouse’s design translates the time-lapse motion of rowing into an architectural roof form, providing visual interest while also offering spatial and environmental advantages that allow the boathouse to adapt to Chicago’s distinctive seasonal changes. With structural truss shapes alternating between an inverted “V” and an “M”, the roof achieves a rhythmic modulation that lets in southern light through the building’s upper clerestory. The clerestory glazing warms the floor slab of the structure in winter and ventilates in summer to minimise energy use throughout the year.

The 22,620-square-foot complex consists of a two-story mechanically heated and cooled training centre, one-story boat storage facility, and a floating launch dock. The main building houses row tanks, ergometer machines, communal space, and an office for the Chicago Park District. Boat storage accommodates kayak and canoe vendors and includes office space, as well as clear span storage for rowing shells and support equipment.

The total building cost is $8.8 million, with $3.2 million in private funding—including $2 million from WMS, $1 million from North Park University, and $200,000 from the Chicago Rowing Foundation—and $1 million matched by Alderman Ameya Pawar (47th ward) with TIF funds.

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Opinion: now we buy everything from Amazon, where does that leave the counterculture? A new attempt to revive the spirit of the Whole Earth Catalog is “about as counter-cultural as a Happy Meal,” argues Justin McGuirk.

In 1973, man’s relationship with his tools was the subject of some anxiety and much hope. In January of that year, the cream of Italy’s Radical Design movement convened in the Milan office of Casabella magazine to launch a manifesto. It was called Global Tools. The objective was “to stimulate the free development of individual creativity”. Renouncing for a moment the industrial rationalism of design, the group – including Ettore Sottsass, Archizoom, Superstudio and Grupo 9999 – embraced primitive tools and traditional craft skills. Flush with confidence, they even published a curriculum for a new type of craft school. But it never materialised. Within a matter of months, the Global Tools project had dissipated.

The same year, the Viennese-born priest turned polymath Ivan Illich published the influential book Tools for Conviviality. For Illich, much as for the Global Tools group, industrialisation was stifling man’s innate creativity. It wasn’t just the fact that mankind had been reduced to mundane labour and consumerism: even social mechanisms such as education and healthcare had assumed a mechanic feed-them-in-spit-them-out quality. “Convivial tools,” Illich wrote, “are those which give each person who uses them the greatest opportunity to enrich the environment with the fruits of his or her vision.” He wanted less technocratic control, and more self-empowerment and participation. In essence, he advocated a creative socialism.

Forty years later, it was with these two antecedents in mind that I opened a copy of Cool Tools by Kevin Kelly. If Illich were alive today, he might find some solace in Kelly’s introduction, in which he writes: “A third industrial revolution is stirring – the Maker era.” The line “these are tools to make us better humans” might jump out as particularly heartening, but by the time he’d flicked through 460-odd pages of sushi knives, lawnmowers and cargo pants, he would no doubt be bemused by the sheer quantity of stuff we can buy to make us better humans.

One of the founders of Wired magazine, and the author of popular technology books such as Out of Control and What Technology Wants, Kelly is both a chronicler and a card-carrying member of the Californian school of techno-utopianism. But this is not a catalogue of apps and digital devices, which become “obsolete within minutes”. These tools are sturdier and earthier. Here are chainsaws and vermicompost kits. Contrary to popular lore, when it comes to getting worms to munch through your rubbish, there is no app for that.

With its feet firmly planted on the ground, Cool Tools has a slightly different lineage than Kelly’s other books. He is candid about intending this to be the reincarnation of, or at least a homage to, that bible of 1960s counterculture the Whole Earth Catalog. Indeed, in the 1980s Kelly worked as an editor of the Catalog and its various supplements. The question is, does Cool Tools retain that counterculture spirit?

When the impresario Stewart Brand published the first Whole Earth Catalog in 1968, it became an instant hit with the hippies. Drawing heavily on the ideas of Buckminster Fuller, it featured anything you might need for a sustainable, self-sufficient lifestyle, from geodesic domes to LL Bean hunting boots, electronic calculators and kibbutz manuals. Its subtitle was “access to tools”.

In a sense, Brand’s offering was itself a reincarnation of the mail-order catalogue published by Sears, Roebuck & Co in the late 19th century. The Sears catalogue was instrumental in the settling of the American West, so much so that the British critic Reyner Banham called it “one of the great and basic documents of US civilisation”. But the Whole Earth Catalogue was a more political document if only because instead of spreading the American way of life it essentially rejected it – in the 1960s, one way to be political was to drop out.

Of course, in the internet age “access to tools” is no longer provided through printed catalogues. Indeed, for the last ten years Cool Tools has existed as a website where potentially anyone can review a tool they think is “cool”. So why make a book? After all, this one really does look like a blog printed out. Virtually no image is of print quality, resulting in a great sea of pixellated gizmos, their edges dissolving into digital noise. I know all of this is self-conscious – this is Kelly evoking the scrapbook ethos of the Catalog but in the digital age (it’s even self-published). Yet it’s a move that contradicts itself. If Kelly made this volume to revive the spirit of its predecessor – because, let’s face it, we still venerate books as cultural milestones – then why not treat it accordingly?

Where some see the Whole Earth Catalog as having prefigured the web, Cool Tools takes the behaviour and form of the web and returns them to paper. An impressive compendium it is, but that does not make it the inheritor of the Catalog’s mantle. Brand’s bible spawned various successors, including the “solutions” website/book Worldchanging, but arguably his true inheritors are the Maker movement itself. This is where Brand’s self-sufficiency overlaps with Silicon Valley hacker culture. It is where craft nostalgia meets digital optimism. Surprisingly, there is very little of that in Cool Tools. There is no mention of “hacking” (although, frankly, I’m inclined to find that refreshing). I couldn’t even find a 3D printer.

Cool Tools is clearly aimed at the Maker movement, or at least the renewed DIY zeitgeist in general, but it is ideologically adrift. The clue is in that word “cool”. This is the language of blog comments and Facebook “likes”. It bespeaks a breezy Californian positivity. As Kelly makes clear, this is a book made up entirely of positive reviews – of tools that are “ingenious”, “nifty” and of course “awesome”. But without an ideological backbone, what we have here is a Sears catalogue for the twenty-first century with no Wild West left to tame.

Brand at least had Buckminster Fuller, the I Ching and drugs – not exactly an ideology but a constructive meeting of science and New Age escapism. Kelly just has Amazon. Every product comes with a QR code, most of which link to an Amazon page. On one level, this is just practical – I mean, Amazon does sell literally everything – but it’s about as counter-cultural as a Happy Meal. As if to stick it to The Man, first you have to let him trouser your money. Perhaps this is simply an irony that someone immersed in dot-com entrepreneurialism can’t appreciate. Or perhaps the Maker revolution really is chained to the corporate hegemony.

Either way, it seems that when industrial capitalism is in crisis we fall back in love with our tools. There is something steadying about the feel of the screwdriver in our hand. It makes us feel in control again. The difference between the 1970s and today is that an alternative, creative lifestyle is both easier and more illusory. “Access to tools” is no longer the issue. We have infinite access, because Amazon and Google have made us an offer we can’t refuse.

Justin McGuirk is a writer, critic and curator based in London. He is the director of Strelka Press, the publishing arm of the Strelka Institute in Moscow. He has been the design columnist for The Guardian, the editor ofIcon magazine and the design consultant to Domus. In 2012 he wasawarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale of Architecture for an exhibition he curated with Urban Think Tank.

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