Inside awards: as part of our series of Dezeen Talks filmed at the Inside awards in Barcelona, Dezeen editor-in-chief Marcus Fairs talks to Andy Walker from Nike Football and Sean Pearson from RUFproject about the Football Training Centre in Soweto, which won the culture and civic category. Watch the movie »
Danish architects ADEPT and Luplau & Poulsen have won a competition to design harbour-side housing blocks in their hometown of Aarhus.
The proposed development, collectively titled the City in the Building, will include an assortment of uncomplicated brick buildings that surround a shared courtyard.
Shorter buildings located beside the water will accommodate apartments for families and senior citizens, while taller buildings behind will house students.
All residences are planned to be dual-aspect and every block will contain some sea-facing homes.
Greenhouses will be located on the roofs, beside solar panel arrays and rainwater collection units.
The project is due to complete in December 2013.
Other competition wins from ADEPT include a skyscraper of stacked cubes – see all our stories about the architects here.
Here are some more words from ADEPT:
ADEPT and Luplau & Poulsen win 12,000 m2 residential project at Aarhus Harbour
Common greenhouses on the roof tops, adjacent terraces overlooking the bay of Aarhus, and a sheltered green courtyard – all in close proximity to downtown Aarhus. This is the essence of Brabrand Housing Association’s new residential complex that breaks with both the port’s massive scale, and present iconic building tendencies. The project is expected to be completed for inauguration in December 2013.
Wednesday November 2nd the Deputy Mayor Laura Hay revealed the winners of the competition at a reception at Aarhus City Hall. The winning team consists of the architects ADEPT and LUPLAU & POULSEN, turn-key contractor Dansk Boligbyg and NIRAS Consulting Engineers. The team has designed a project entitled The Port Dwellings – Housing for All at Harbour North, that consists of 238 public dwellings distributed between 83 apartments for families and +55 aged seniors, and 155 student-housing units.
The architects have taken the best aspects of the city’s existing block structure and reinterpreted it, providing a modern and sustainable expression on the waterfront in Aarhus Nordhavn. The simple building arrangement is complemented by shared greenhouses on the roof, varied building heights and sustainable initiatives that make the new dwellings robust and future-proof. The housing structure adapts to its context that, on the one hand, consists of large, industrial scale and on the other, a smaller and intimate scale with a lively maritime atmosphere.
“Placing the building volumes along the edge of the site proved to be highly appropriate for the location. It gathers the dwellings around a large green courtyard sheltered from the wind and creates the best sun and daylighting conditions for the apartments,” says Martin Laursen, partner of ADEPT. The development is being realized predominantly in brick, dropping in building height towards the water and the marina. As a consequence, the apartments furthest from the water, the youth homes share the extensive views. In addition, the building structure is subdivided into smaller buildings, marked by varying heights and subtle changes in façade expression. “The building’s division into smaller buildings relates to the human scale and creates affinities between the residents and the individual ‘town house’,” says Simon Lyager Poulsen, ADEPT’s project architect on the Port Dwellings.
The project differs from the bulk of existing and proposed port projects in that it does not attempt to be a major iconic building – an aspect of the scheme remarked upon positively by the developer and competition jury. Brabrand Housing Association has deliberately chosen to focus on a building that inserts itself in the port in a humble manner, challenging the large scale of the context by addressing the scale of inhabitants’ daily lives.
The family apartments are located in the lowest buildings, in close proximity to the water and the intimate scale of the marina. In this way children and parents have convenient access to activities at the waters edge, the forest and the inner courtyard. In addition, all roof surfaces are designed for shared-use amongst residents. The sunny roof surfaces are activated with greenhouses, common areas and living terraces with excellent views of the city, forest and bay. The remaining roofs are established as green surfaces both for collecting rain water and supporting solar panel arrays.
The settlement is a ‘zero-energy building,’ which, with it’s solar panels and greenhouses, takes more advanced steps toward meeting future energy requirements than those currently formulated by the municipality and the state government. Brabrand Housing Association expects the future settlement to meet the energy requirements of 2025 – an energy class yet to be formulated. At the same time the dwellings can be built within the allocated budget, which allows rents to be competitive.
Each apartment is lit from two sides and has private outdoor spaces overlooking the water and the common courtyard. The units range in size between 78m2 and 115 m2 and consist of 2, 3, 4 and 5 room apartments. Robust and flexible plan layouts ensure live-ability over the years, across generations and changing architectural trends. In these terms, the winning project offers both a robust, simple and coherent project as well as a varied and lively architecture.
Throughout the competition process, ADEPT and LUPLAU & POULSEN have enjoyed a close collaboration. LUPLAU & POULSEN has in recent years been responsible for several new Brabrand Housing Association projects. “We are delighted to continue the strong cooperation with Brabrand Housing Association,” says Jørn Lyager Poulsen, partner responsible for the housing project at LUPLAU & POULSEN. The three partners in ADEPT, who all come from Aarhus are, like LUPLAU & POULSEN, excited about the opportunity to build in their hometown and to contribute to the development of the waterfront in Aarhus.
If you happened to have been reading this blog two years ago, or really most any design-interested blog, you might recall that a healthy chunk of 2009 was spent talking about Brooklyn’s Atlantic Yards, the massive project in that borough by developer Forest City Ratner, which included a new basketball stadium, housing, shops, etc. And what was not gold to report? To name just a few red letter stories, there was Frank Gehry‘s firing, the NY vs. Kansas City battle, and the constant stream of lawsuits, protests, books and even songs. It was all golden. But since last year, once the project started that slow process of actually being built, the national headlines went a bit quiet. However, as of yesterday, it came back to life, with the unveiling of the plans for the residential portion of the development. Designed by ShoP (which joined then-known-as Ellerbe Beckett in replacing Gehry), and in collaboration with Arup and XSite Modular, the series of towers are set to be built using prefabricated modular construction. The largest tower, coming in at 32 stories, will be the world’s tallest modular structure to date. Not only will that help speed up construction, which is thought to begin early next year, assuming the developers can get through another set of lawsuits, but building modular is believed to help save a considerable amount of money. In certain angles, we think the towers look somewhat attractive, but not everyone shares that opinion. Whatever the case, assuming Forest City manages to get them up, the buildings will at the very least have an interesting story behind their construction.
New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.
Architect Filipe Balestra of Urban Nouveau has sent us his proposal for a series of towers built in the swamps surrounding Mumbai, sketched out on a napkin.
Balestra’s idea is to allow expansion of the city without displacing the rubbish dump, recycling centre and homes at the city’s centre.
Urban Nouveau previously developed a proposal for sensitively revitalising slums, which was featured in the Dezeen Book of Ideas – on sale now for just £12.
Here’s some text about the concept from Urban Nouveau:
Bombay – maximum city, surrounded by water – is just in time to pick up an evolutionary strategy for the benefit of all. Dharavi – in the heart of Bombay – is one of the world’s largest urban villages. It contains the city’s garbage recycling centre and is the home of the cleaners, the taxi drivers and the people without whom the current urban processes are unfeasible.
What if, instead of moving the people of Dharavi to the outskirts of the city and using that land to build new housing, offices and leisure… all the necessary program would be built inside towers which rise from the shallow swamps that surround the city, branding Bombay with a new perspective: from the water. Existing Bombay remains as it is, and is incremented naturally. Pressure withdraws from the city centre. Dharavi stays.
Boats and bridges connect the shore with the new islands. The islands are easy to build because the water level is low. The respect for local flora and fauna is the starting point of this environmental and socially sustainable process.
Urban Nouveau is an interdisciplinary platform which supports an open network of human beings solving problems of everyday life. Urban Nouveau declares itself elastic to bridge formal-informal, legal-illegal, city-countryside in order to achieve appropriate balance in every challenge. Combining improvisation and intuition with research and expertise while performing on local and global issues, Urban Nouveau thrives on collective evolution.
Back in May of this year, the automotive arm of Porsche announced that it was planning to build a sprawling new headquarters for its US division in Atlanta (pdf), complete with a “Customer Experience” test track. Built upon the bones of a long-closed Ford plant, the airport-adjacent new campus project was originally intended to break ground sometime in the fall of this year, with a planned opening of late 2013. That construction effort start date has now been pushed back until early next year, but as consolation, the company has unveiled a few early renders from its selected design firm, HOK (interesting to hear that name connected to something other than stadium building, isn’t it?), as well as some additional details on what they have planned (for one, from the air, the campus will resemble the Porsche logo). At the same time, the company also announced that it plans to open another, and larger, “Customer Experience” center in Carson, California, near the intersection of Los Angeles’ high-traffic 405 and 110 freeways. Designed by Cooper Carry, the 53-acre site will offer up a large test track and handling course (where potential buyers can drive fast without concern of police interaction), as well as a restaurant, gift shop, and meeting facilities. This California location and the one next to their new headquarters in Atlanta will mark the first two of these sorts of complexes in the US, with three already functioning in Germany, the UK, and China.
New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.
When architect Santiago Calatrava announced that he was walking away from the project to massively redevelop Denver’s airport, and after information was slowly let out about how the collaboration fell apart, we were expecting the fight to get a bit ugly (and therefore, fun to write about) over who exactly owned the rights to Calatrava’s original plans, which the city intended to move forward on, with or without him. Instead, the whole issue has been solved fairly cleanly and quietly. The Denver Post reports that the city will pay Calatrava’s final invoices (coming in at over half a million dollars) and pay a $250,000 licensing fee to keep using his plans. Not a bad payout at all for the architect, whose firm, the paper approximates, has earned just shy of $14 million from working on the project over the past two years. However, as seemingly amicable as this official split is, the city isn’t going to walk away with everything the famous architect had originally envisioned:
Designs that the agreement deems as proprietary to Calatrava and off-limits to DIA include some white architectural elements on the upper exterior of the hotel and some Calatrava-designed columns,” [DIA manager Kim Day] said.
New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.
Above: photograph is by Wei-Ming Yuan
New York architect Stan Allen constructed this pavilion of bamboo scaffolding at a former airport in Taichung, Taiwan.
Above: photograph is by Wei-Ming Yuan
The temporary Infobox structure displays masterplan proposals by the architect to redevelop the 240-hectare site.
Above: photograph is by Wei-Ming Yuan
Drawings, models and projected animations are displayed on the ground floor of the pavilion, while a first-floor balcony offers a view of the progressing construction.
The gridded scaffolding is composed entirely of bamboo sticks, which are tied together with metal wire.
The bamboo structure will be completely recycled when the pavilion is eventually dismantled.
Another former airport recently hosted an international design fair – you can watch a movie about that event here.
Other bamboo structures featured on Dezeen include a nest-like den and a woven lattice restaurant ceiling, both in China.
Photography is by Iwan Baan, apart where otherwise stated.
Above: photograph is by Wei-Ming Yuan
Here’s some further explanation from Stan Allen Architects:
Taichung Infobox
In 2009, Stan Allen Architect completed the master-plan for Taichung Gateway Park, a 240 hectare mixed use quarter to be built on the site of the former Municipal Airport in Taichung, Taiwan.
The urban design proposal includes a long-term strategy to “grow” the site over time, with civic buildings, infrastructure and residential neighborhoods to be built around a large central park space.
In order to raise awareness of the Taichung Gateway project, and to bring the public onto this spectacular site, SAA proposed the immediate construction of the InfoBox, a temporary exhibition pavilion to display the site and the project. Throughout the life of the structure, drawings, models and computer animations will be displayed within, while an elevated overlook terrace gives the public a ringside seat to observe the process of construction.
Click above for larger image
Responding to the need for fast implementation and making the most of a limited budget, the InfoBox re-purposes the ubiquitous bamboo scaffolding technology seen all over Asia. The bamboo structure is not only quick and inexpensive, it is a locally available green technology: all materials will be recycled at the end of the pavilion’s lifespan.
Click above for larger image
The dense weave of the bamboo creates optical effects which will contribute to the iconic presence of the InfoBox. The systems are flexible and adaptive, both during construction and over the life of the project.
Click above for larger image
Client: City of Taichung
Design architect: Stan Allen
Executive architect: W.B. Huang Architects & Planners
Project coordinator: Feng-Chia Design Center
Proposal by Deborah Gans for additions on preexistng homes
The New York Times has a great piece in yesterday’s Critics Notebook that examines some recent proposals by city architects to rethink housing in a city that is no longer defined by the traditional nuclear family model.
Most new homes in the city today are still designed for nuclear families. According to the nonprofit Citizens Housing & Planning Council, two parents raising young children occupy only 17 percent of New York dwellings; another 9 percent house single parents with children under 25. The city meanwhile has a growing population of singles—students, young professionals, immigrants, empty-nesters and the elderly—who can’t afford market-rate rentals.
Peter Gluck/Terri Chiao’s Microloft proposal
The Citizens Housing & Planning Council in collaboration with the Architectural League gathered New York City governmental officials and planners in a conversation around the mismatch between New York’s population and its available housing stock. The Making Room project is documented through video and creative assets on a dedicated website, and projects proposed by architects and public thinkers including Graham Hill (Treehugger), Jonathan Kirschenfeld, Deborah Gans, Peter Gluck/Terri Chiao and more. Watch a selection of the presentations at Making Room after the jump or read the full piece from The New York Times here.
Architects Foster + Partners have completed a production centre for British sports car brand McLaren.
The facility has wide spans offering maximum assembly space while the basement is used for storage and machinery and a mezzanine offers a view of the production line.
High-performance sports cars are manufactured, painted and tested on a linear production line that dictated the building’s rectilinear form.
The McLaren Technology Centre’s curved surfaces and horizontal aluminium cladding reference the existing buildings on the site in Woking near London.
An underground tunnel will link the production centre to the McLaren Technology Centre, which was also designed by Foster + Partners.
Trees screen the building from the nearby road and the whole structure is sunk into the incline of the site, reducing its visual impact on the landscape.
Foster + Partners recently completed another transport facility – the world’s first commercial spaceport – and also unveiled a proposal for a massive transport hub in the Thames. See all of our previous stories on Foster + Partners.
All photography is from McLaren. The drawings below are from Foster + Partners.
Here’s some more information from Foster + Partners:
The McLaren Production Centre is the second building designed by Foster + Partners at McLaren’s rural site on the outskirts of London. The 34,500-square-metre facility is intended for the manufacture of a range of high-performance road cars and is located to the south-west of the existing McLaren Technology Centre. The two buildings will be connected by a subterranean walkway, lined with interactive exhibition spaces. Sharing a common language of details and materials, the new building is clad in aluminium tubes, the rounded corners of its rectilinear plan reference the curves of the Technology Centre and the entrance, echoing the existing building, is a circular glass drum beneath the overhang of the roof canopy.
The state-of-the-art McLaren Production Centre is located to the south-west of the existing McLaren Technology Centre. The two buildings are connected by a subterranean walkway and share a common language of details and materials. The entrance, echoing the existing building, is a circular glass drum beneath the overhang of the roof canopy.
As a manufacturing facility, the building is inherently flexible, with a wide span between columns and fully integrated services. The linear arrangement of the two-storey structure mirrors the flow of the production line: components are delivered; the cars are assembled, painted and tested, and then pass through a rolling road and car wash, before leaving the building. Beneath this floor there is a full basement level for storage and plant and above is a mezzanine floor with views over the production line. Every stage of production takes place under the same roof. Initially it will take 10 days for an MP4-12C to be assembled; at peak production it will be possible to build one in five days, with a new car joining the line every 45 minutes.
Although the McLaren Production Centre represents a major increase in McLaren’s capabilities at its Woking campus, the building is dug into in the gentle incline of the site, to give it a discreet presence in the landscape. The lower floor is sunk completely below ground and the superstructure is almost invisible from the nearby road, with further screening provided by extensive tree planting.
The new McLaren Production Centre is designed to be environmentally efficient. The roof collects rainwater and has been designed to integrate photovoltaic panels in future; and the building incorporates a low-energy system of displacement ventilation. No soil was removed from the site, and all excavated material has been used to conceal the building within the green-belt landscape.
Lord Foster, Founder and Chairman, Foster + Partners: “The McLaren Production Centre is a further leap forward in the evolution of industrial buildings, both socially and in terms of working conditions and technologically in its flexibility and the sophistication of its services integration. The scale and grandeur of the main hall is a fitting complement to the purity of the McLaren cars, which will emerge from its production line. This project has been a wonderful opportunity to work once again with Ron Dennis, who is a great patron and friend. It is a testament to a fantastic team effort that this production centre was achieved in just twelve months.”
David Nelson, Head of Design at Foster + Partners, said: “It has been great to have the opportunity to build on the success of the Technology Centre by continuing our collaboration with McLaren, particularly our close working relationship with Ron Dennis. The project presented a unique set of challenges, from the constraints of the site to the operational demands of the different processes. McLaren’s work is incredibly precise – in many ways, the production line is like an operating theatre – the architecture reflects this with an industrial building of the highest quality in every detail. As well as drawing on the understanding we gained with the Technology Centre, the Production Centre echoes its minimal aesthetic – visually, they can be seen as a family of buildings, unified by a common language of finishes and a consistent materials palette.”
Nigel Dancey, a design director at Foster + Partners, said: “It is a privilege to design two companion buildings for the same client and it has been a great experience. While the McLaren Technology Centre took six years to design and build, the fast- track programme meant that the McLaren Production Centre was completed in a third of the time. The same team has worked on both buildings and this continuity has helped to make this ambitious timescale possible. We were also able to draw on the wider capabilities of our studio: the McLaren Production Centre is a great example of integrated design, with services built into the structure to create a highly flexible space.”
Click above for larger image
Iwan Jones, a partner at Foster + Partners, said: “Our intention was to design a new kind of industrial building, which would be an elegant addition to the McLaren Technology Centre. The two buildings are physically connected by a 100-metre- long tunnel and unified by a common architectural language – we established a ‘kit-of-parts’ system for the project, a family of finishes and details. By optimising structural spans to allow a largely clear floor space, we have essentially created a big empty box, with services integrated within the structural zones, wall and floor voids.
Click above for larger image
This flexible form ensures that the building is also highly cost efficient – it will support McLaren’s production needs today and in the future. And the experience of the finished McLaren Production Centre is equally impressive. You don’t realise its scale until you are actually inside the assembly hall, where visitors will have a fantastic view of the different processes from the viewing gallery.”
Découverte de ces excellentes mise en scènes par l’artiste allemand Frank Kunert, avec ces travaux autour de l’architecture. Des oeuvres surréalistes et décalés sur ces objets et situations en 3D. Les scènes et les constructions sont à découvrir sur son portfolio et dans la suite.
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