Hasta La Ideas

Inflatable flexible video folly for indoor media presentations in exhibitions or public spaces. The construction is made of tight airbags with a cover..

by Jose R. Mejia

What happens when you task four leading architects with redeveloping a historic Milanese neighborhood? Multiply that by €523 million and you get an equally historic seven-year endeavor, breaking records and creating an entirely new blueprint for cities of the future.

CityLife, the catch-all name for the project, will end up being Milan’s first zero-emissions neighborhood. Comprised of residences, offices and retail space, the new architectural phenomenon will include three bold skyscrapers designed by Zaha Hadid, Daniel Libeskind, and Arata Isozaki.

At the core of the development, a centralized park—designed to operate both as a pretty public attraction and an eco-engineering feat—will purify air and normalize temperatures.

Slated to become Italy’s tallest building, Isozaki’s Il Dritto, will tower at 715 feet. His love for spartan design makes a strong statement through the simple, elegant structure.

Hadid’s tower, Lo Storto, will connect to the tube station (along with Il Dritto), housing retailers and apartments. The slick design highlights her mastery of form and curvature, seen recently in the MAXXI Art Museum. Hadid explains her process, “The dynamism of the surrounding urban fabric was the subject of our formal investigations and inspired the geometry of the project.”

Libeskind deconstructed the classic shape into Il Curvo, a strange pairing of curved, half-moon glass and sharp concrete. Both dreamy and urban, the edifice represents the metropolitan idealism of CityLife.

Intended to work as a fully-formed neighborhood from its opening in 2014, the mix of offices and residences will be complemented by several new cultural buildings, including a new Museum of Contemporary Art, tying together the starchitect-studded vision of utopian living.

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We’re no longer bitter about Chicago not getting the 2016 Olympics and seeing it go to Rio de Janeiro (stupid #@&* Rio). Nope, we’re perfectly fine to see that Rafael Schmidt is the first architect to turn in an entry for the city’s architecture competition for incredible things to build and be marveled at. Who cares if it’s an amazing thing called the Solar City Tower and it looks like a floating waterfall and doubles as a solar power plant? Why would you want some sort of awesome, beautiful structure that would greet arriving tourists by both air and sea? Personally, we’re more than happy to just keep to our familiar architecture and Calatrava holes in the ground. Yep. Have fun with your feats of modern engineering and design, Rio. Here’s a bit of the amazingness we’re glad the Windy City won’t have:

The project consists of a solar power plant that by day produces energy for the city respectively the Olympic village. Excessive energy will be pumped as seawater into a tower. By night, the water can be released again; with the help of turbines, it generates electricity for the night. The electricity produced can be used for the lighting of the tower or for the city. On special occasions, this “machine building” turns into an impressive wonder of nature: an urban waterfall, a symbol for the forces of nature. At the same time, it will be the representation of a collective awareness of the city towards its great surrounding landscape. Via an urban plaza located 60 meters over sea level you gain access to the building. Through the amphitheatre, you reach the entrance situated on the ground floor.

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Spanish architects MID Estudio have converted a grain store in Palencia, Spain, into a museum by blocking up windows and door with metallic and wood boxes. (more…)

Back in October, starchitect Jean Nouvel finally won his battle over protesters and leery city officials when he got the go ahead for his MoMA tower plans. But that doesn’t seem to have been enough for him, given that he still seems pretty miffed that, in order to get the structure all the necessary thumbs up, he was going to have to shave off 200 feet from its top (and installing some shiny new fins to the side). He recently spoke to New York, offering up some fairly damning statements, wherein he just can’t understand why people dislike the building and “Why Manhattan, of all places, is afraid of heights?” According to the piece, there’s still a lot of revising to do in order to get the building’s plans to reflect the approved changes and it sounds like Nouvel’s not even certain he wants to go ahead with it anymore. Here’s a bit:

In Nouvel’s view, Tower Verre is not just another commercial high-rise but an emblem of its moment, a testament to the city’s self-renewing vitality, and a crown on its mutable skyline. “We’re in midtown,” he says. “A place where we have to make a real skyscraper. It emerges from the skyline and you say: Okay! That’s where MoMA is! It testifies to what the skyscraper is at the beginning of this century. It’s not a copy of what the twentieth century did. It brings new forms of expression. The corsetlike structure on the perimeter of the building, the way it follows setback rules with a dynamic form of ascent that’s not the habitual stepwise manner, a structure that erases the distinction between outdoors and in — these things tie this building to the culture of these last few years.”

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