Take a tour through the spaces of Zaha Hadid’s Galaxy Soho complex in Beijing, China, in this movie by architectural photographer Dan Chung.
Completed at the end of 2012, the 330,000-square-metre complex accommodates shops, offices and leisure facilities within a cluster of four striated domes. Courtyards and pathways weave between the buildings, while bridges and platforms form connections on the upper levels.
“The design responds to the varied contextual relationships and dynamic conditions of Beijing,” said Zaha Hadid at the opening. “We have created a variety of public spaces that directly engage with the city, reinterpreting the traditional urban fabric and contemporary living patterns into a seamless urban landscape inspired by nature.”
Dutch architects UNStudio have designed a concept for a new business district at Tonghzou in Beijing, consisting of skyscrapers linked by aerial bridges (+ slideshow).
The proposal features six towers atop a large podium that are linked by bridges topped with gardens and swimming pools.
The development, proposed for the Tongzhou district twelve miles east of central Beijing, would create a million square metres of retail, apartments, offices, hotels and transportation infrastructure.
Located at the confluence of two waterways, the Tongzhou Central Business District’s waterfront podium would house shops while the towers would accommodate apartments and offices.
The design of UNStudio’s CBD development is a dynamic composition created by introducing asymmetry in plan, orientation, clustering and façade treatment. This build-up of asymmetries has a far-reaching urban effect whilst simultaneously relating to users on a more personal scale. The six towers form three lively groups which interact according to a layered choreography.
In relation to the ground and subterranean levels the towers are grouped in three pairs, each standing on a joint platform. As defined by the bridging connections between them, the towers are grouped as a couple, a trio and a single volume.
The silhouette of the towers is derived from a combination of substantial differences between the lower and the upper parts of the buildings and the binding together effects of diagonal wrappings. On the lower parts the towers are marked by dense stacking, whilst towards the top they become smooth and reflective. This textural contrast is mediated by the strong diagonals running the entire length of the towers.
The bridges have numerous roles. They help to cluster the towers and to form interconnections between them which can house many different semi-public functions. They also provide an artificial ground for users of the highest floors. In addition to the application of active sustainable measures at different scale levels, passive design tools were incorporated from the initial design of the six towers and the podium clusters. Driving features are the winter gardens and green surfaces.
Client: Perennial Real Estate & Maxon Group Location: Tongzhou, Beijing, China Building surface: 1 million m2 Building site: 108,700 m2 Program: Office tower, Hotel, Service apartment, Residential towers, Retail podium, Waterfront Landscape, Transportation hub Status: Concept
The Chinese propaganda leviathan is still struggling to find a way to make the country look hip and culturally influential worldwide, and in the eyes of a skeptical foreign audience, any effort will be useless until freedom of expression doesn’t become the top…
Architect Frank Gehry has released images of his shortlisted entry for the competition to design National Art Museum of China (NAMOC) in Beijing – a competition thought to have been won by Jean Nouvel.
Gehry’s submission features translucent stone cladding and an interior made up of a series of tall, geometric courtyards reminiscent of pagodas and temples.
“We realized the project from concept through design to a full scale mock-up [of the cladding] that we manufactured in Beijing,” says David Nam, partner at Gehry Partners. “The project was developed in depth over one and a half years through 3 stages of competition.”
Nam added: “To our knowledge the Chinese government has made no official announcement [about the winner of the competition]”.
The National Art Museum of China (NAMOC) will be the showpiece of a new cultural district being built close to Herzog & de Meuron’s National Stadium in Beijing’s Olympic Park. It will attract up to 12 million visitors per year, making it the world’s busiest art museum.
Here’s some text about the project from Gehry Partners:
NATIONAL ART MUSEUM OF CHINA
COMPETITION
Beijing, People’s Republic of China
The globalization of art is connecting the cultures of the world. Art can act as the instrument for breaking down the barriers to understanding between cultures. China is the focus of this global conversation at this moment. The Chinese contemporary art world is exploding at an unprecedented rate proportionate to the size of its population. People all over the world are flocking to experience Chinese art. This form of cultural engagement promotes cross cultural understanding and appreciation. This is the model for the future, and is central to the design of the National Art Museum of China (NAMOC).
The competition for NAMOC involved three rounds that took place between December 2010–July 2012. Round One was the concept phase. Round two was the primary design phase. Round three addressed client feedback from round two, and advanced the technical development of the project.
NAMOC will form the centerpiece of a new cultural district in Beijing. Located to the north of the city center in the Olympic Park, the district will be comprised of four museums. NAMOC will occupy the most important site facing the central axis of the Olympic Park. The primary goal of the competition brief was to create a design that addresses the concept of a 21st century Chinese architecture. We created a design that is uniquely tailored to China and its rich cultural history, evoking historical models without copying them, to create an innovative building unlike anything else in the world.
Throughout our projects we have been looking for a way to express movement with inert materials like the Greeks did with the horses and soldiers in the Elgin marbles and like the Indian Shiva dancing figures. Our effort to express subtle movement in the façade is what leads us to studying glass.
The façade is clad with a new material developed by Gehry Partners – translucent stone. Evocative of the most precious Chinese materials, it has the qualities of jade. Of all the materials we explored, we found glass to be the most transcendent and symbolic of Chinese landscape paintings, of moving water, of the mountains covered in mist. It has gravitas that creates an emotional impact on visitors. It gives the building a stately and noble appearance, appropriate for a national museum.
We experimented with the translucent stone in many different conditions and configurations, looked at it in various lights, and found that it has the ability to project movement. It changes beautifully with the light, becoming ephemeral, and allowing for different effects with artificial lighting, banners and projection. The glass allows the building to easily transform throughout the day and the seasons, as well as for festivals and for changing exhibitions.
The translucent stone is part of the innovative sustainable façade concept that incorporates a ventilated airspace to reduce the heating and cooling loads of the building. In addition, the airspace is used to display art banners and projections, which provides the ability for the building’s façade to change and remain current far into the future, even becoming a canvas for artist projects.
The building’s entries and interiors have been organized to accommodate an unprecedented number of patrons expected to visit the museum. The building has been designed to efficiently and comfortably accommodate 38,400 visitors per day and approximately 12 million visitors per year, enabling NAMOC to have the highest attendance of any museum in the world. Four distributed entries at each corner of the building facilitate the processing of a large number of visitors, and minimize any queuing of visitors. Each of the four entries is connected to one of four escalators systems that provide fast and efficient distribution of visitors to all parts of the museums. A ceremonial entrance is placed in the center of the west façade, facing the Olympic Park. The articulation of this entrance evokes the silhouette of a Chinese temple.
The building interiors are organized around a series of large public spaces, connected vertically by escalators. These spaces are inspired by pagoda and temple forms- rendered as occupiable voids; the shapes are only legible from the inside. The public spaces provide an orienting device for visitors to easily navigate the large museum, and establish a formal continuity between the shapes of the building façade and the interior of the museum. In addition to providing access to galleries, the public spaces provide opportunities for large scale art exhibit spaces and events.
The organization of the galleries was developed through discussions with NAMOC. Sixty percent of the galleries are dedicated to the permanent collections of 20th century Chinese art, Chinese calligraphy, Chinese folk art, and international art. The permanent collection is housed on the second, third, and fourth floors in gallery types to align with the requirements of the art. The ground floor, fifth floor, and roof top galleries are dedicated to changing contemporary art exhibitions. They are taller in height and have a greater variety of shape and scale.
The museum includes a full complement of supporting functions. An art academy, an art research and conservation institute, five auditoriums, retail stores, restaurants and cafes, and large art storage areas have been incorporated into the design of the museum.
The design for the museum was developed with an integrated sustainability concept. The design is based on a high comfort-low impact strategy that includes concepts for load reduction, system optimization, and renewable resource substitution.
The innovative façade design reduces the heating and cooling loads for the building.
Extensive daylighting of circulation spaces is used to reduce artificial lighting requirements.
Photovoltaic cells are incorporated on the roof, and generate enough electricity to power 100% of the lighting electrical loads for the building.
Geothermal wells incorporated with the building’s foundation system are used to satisfy 100% of the heat rejection requirements of the heating and cooling system, eliminating the need for cooling towers at the roof of the building.
The calculated impact of the integrated sustainability concept is a 57% reduction in energy use and carbon emissions over a standard museum, the equivalent of 275 Beijing households.
Gehry Partners developed a larger landscape and master plan design for the museum’s surrounding areas to link with master plan for the cultural district. A revitalized waterfront park to the west provides new public open spaces and ground level retail areas, and a visual foreground to the museum as viewed from the main axis of the Olympic Park. A connection to the subway is provided at the first level below grade that links directly to the museum. A new park to the east of the museum offers additional public open space and sculpture gardens as an extension of the museum. The roof of the museum has a public garden that allows visitors views to the Olympic Park beyond, and provides a key fifth elevation to the museum when viewed from above.
This micro house in Beijing by Chinese architect Liu Lubin comprises three cross-shaped modules that can be flipped around to turn a living room into an office or bathroom (+ slideshow).
Designed as both architecture and furniture, the modules are constructed to a minimum size with just enough room for sitting, sleeping or preparing food.
The cross-shaped profile creates worktops along two edges of the space, while square windows hinge open at either end and double up as entrances.
Studio Liu Lubin used a fibre-reinforced foam composite for the structure of the modules, making them light enough to lift. This allows residents to rotate the rooms if they need to swap simple shelves for a desk or sink.
The three modules of this house contain a bedroom, a bathroom and a small office. Lubin explains that more could be grouped together to make larger dwellings, or even neighbourhoods.
The modules are designed to fit neatly into shipping containers and can transported to different locations. Their minute size also allows them to bypass current restrictions governing private homes in China.
Lubin developed the concept as part of a research project at Tsinghua University in Beijing.
The Micro House is based on the minimum space people need for basic indoor movement, such as sitting, laying and standing. The form of the Micro House is designed to act as a combination of furniture and architecture elements.
Different uses for the modules
When being rotated, the unit of the Micro House will shift its space which contains all kinds of housing activities, such as resting, working, washing and cooking, etc.
The main material of the Micro House is the fibre-reinforced foam composite structure, which is light but strong. In this case, the Micro House unit can be easily lift and assembled by hand. For the convenience of transportation and replacement, the size of the unit is designed as the size of containers.
The Micro House makes it possible for people to have private housing product under current Chinese land policy.
A village built up from hundreds of modules
Project: Micro House in Tsinghua Location: Beijing Designer: Studio Liu Lubin Project Team: Liu Lubin, Wang Lin, Weng Jia, Wang Xiaofeng, Wan Li, Liang YIfan, Zhao Ye Constructor: Architectural Design & Research Institute of Tsinghua University CO.LTD, Nanjing University Of Technology Advanced Engineering Composites Research Centre Structure Type: fibre-reinforced foam composite structure
News:the organisers of Beijing Design Week plan to emphasise problems with copyright in China by exhibiting an original version of Dutch artist Florentijn Hofman’s giant Rubber Duck, which was duplicated around the country when it recently appeared in Hong Kong’s Victoria Harbour.
At a press conference announcing that Florentijn Hofman‘s ten-metre-high inflatable duck will appear at Beijing Design Week 2013, the event’s organising committee highlighted the proliferation of unsolicited copies that emerged in several Chinese cities including Tianjin and Wuhan last month, as well as unauthorised T-shirts and merchandise.
“We want to use the Rubber Duck case to drive an awareness programme raising the sensibility towards intellectual property rights around China,” said Wang Jun, a senior consultant to Beijing Design Week’s IP Protection Office.
Beijing Design Week will instead work with Hofman to produce and license official associated products and promises to take legal action against lookalikes.
“The Rubber Duck knows no frontiers, it doesn’t discriminate people and doesn’t have a political connotation,” says a statement on Hofman’s website.
A 16.5 metre tall version of the sculpture was shown in Hong Kong from 2 May until 9 June, attracting a reported 8,000,000 people to the area.
Hofman’s duck has appeared in over a dozen cities since it was first exhibited in 2007, including Sao Paulo, Sydney and Amsterdam. Its installation at Beijing Design Week, which takes place from 26 September to 3 October, will be its second in China.
Ma Yansong of Chinese studio MAD is exhibiting architectural models and sculptures in a Beijing courtyard to illustrate his vision for a future city inspired by nature and shaped by human emotion (+ slideshow).
The exhibition centres around an architectural model of Shanshui City, a new urban development proposed by MAD for Guiyang, China. Inspired by a concept first developed in the 1980s by Chinese scientists, the city is named after the Chinese words for mountains and water and is intended as a model of how cities and their inhabitants can reconnect with the natural world.
In an accompanying book, Ma Yansong explains: “The city of the future development will be shifted from the pursuit of material civilisation to the pursuit of nature. This is what happens after human beings experience industrial civilisation at the expense of the natural environment.”
Ma Yansong’s “Shanshui City” Book Launch and Exhibition Held in Beijing
On June 6, 2013, Ma Yansong’s “Shanshui City” exhibition officially opened; the exhibition is displayed in a Qing Dynasty courtyard garden at Wu Hao in Beijing. More than twenty architectural models and works of art are scattered around the ancient courtyard. Among rocks, screen walls, bamboo groves, pools of water and beneath the sky, the scale of each piece varies and collectively they form a futuristic utopian urban landscape.
The pieces on display range from a fish tank to the conceptual model of the “Shanshui City” which represents a proposal of hundreds of thousands of square metres in size. All the pieces exhibited express the sentiment of humans towards nature and depict the “Shanshui City” as the social ideal of the future. The newly issued book “Shanshui City” – released simultaneously with the exhibition – is an important turning point for Ma Yansong’s ten years of architectural practice and theory.
In the book, he says: “The city of the future development will be shifted from the pursuit of material civilisation to the pursuit of nature. This is what happens after human beings experience industrial civilisation at the expense of the natural environment. The emotional harmonious relationship between nature and man will be rebuilt upon the ‘Shanshui City.'” This small brochure illustrates the young Chinese architect’s ideals concerning futuristic habitation. “It would be a great pity if the vigorous urbanisation could not breed new urban civilisation and ideal.”
Fake Hills
The famous Chinese scientist Qian Xuesen proposed the concept of “Shanshui City” in the 1980s. In view of the emerging large-scale cement construction, he put forward a new model of urban development based on Chinese Shanshui spirit, which was meant to allow people to “stay out of nature and return to nature.”
However, this idealistic urban concept was not put into practice. As the world’s largest manufacturing base, a large number of soulless “shelf cities” appeared in contemporary China due to the lack of cultural spirit.
Qian Xuesen pointed out that modern cities’ worship of power and capital leads to maximisation and utilitarianism. “Buildings in cities should not become living machines. Even the most powerful technology and tools can never endow the city with a soul.”
To Ma Yansong, Shanshui does not just refer to nature; it is also the individual’s emotional response to the surrounding world. “Shanshui City” is a combination of city density, functionality and the artistic conception of natural landscape. It aims at composing a future city that takes human spirit and emotion at their cores.
In the opening forum of “Shanshui City,” a round-table dialogue was held with the participation of Liu Xiaochun, Li Xianting, Bao Pao, Wang Mingxian, Jin Qiuye and Ma Yansong, leading to be, undoubtedly, a historic moment. Perhaps the “Shanshui City” ideology is the very progress that China’s urbanisation can contribute to the world.
We’ve been following the all-new Bentley Flying Spur from its sneak peek in London to its debut at Geneva’s International Auto Show and to the factory in Crewe, where we saw the first production car roll down the assembly line (you’ll see…
The adornments lining YVMIN’s Beijing studio tell a lot about their work. An iridescent heart hangs on the wall alongside a set of plastic heads of Greek statues, and…
Seen from one angle, the scaffolding on the upper levels gives the tower an obviously phallic appearance, as internet commenters pointed out this week.
The 150-metre-high building, which will become the new headquarters for the Chinese state newspaper People’s Daily, in fact has a wedge-shaped silhouette.
Visualisation of completed building
The Chinese government has attempted to block internet users in the country from searching for images of the building, but carefully worded messages have spread the word across Weibo, China’s biggest social networking service.
“It seems the People’s Daily is going to rise up, there’s hope for the Chinese dream,” said one message.
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