Offices for Junta Castilla y Leon / Alberto Campo Baeza

The sandsone walls of Junta Castilla y León offices are completely enveloped in glass. Using the same stone as the Zamora Catherdral, which is located in the west of the historic walled city, Spanish architect Alberto Campo Baeza has created a box-like building with two irregularly shaped courtyards. The building houses the advisory board for the autonomous region of Castilla y León.

Arteixo Tourist Office / Alejandro Garcia y Arquitectos

Arteixo Tourist Office was designed by the Spanish firm Alejandro Garcia y Arquitectos and is located on a site previously used as a bus top. The ambition was to create an urban attraction of the Arteixo municipality in Galicia, Spain.

Note that other cities such as Santiago de Compostela and are themselves an attraction, not necessary that the Tourist Office be, however in Arteixo Tourism is little known (beaches, trails landscapes, architecture , trade is not known) is why from the beginning we wanted a solution that was the center of attraction of tourism, the tourist that goes to the coast of Finisterre or death did stop along the way through a unique building after giving staff would be responsible for information that will remain on Arteixo tourists to consume and learn from another point of view the area.

Buddhism Temple Based on a Mobius Strip / Miliy Design

The Buddhist temple soon to be built in Taichang, China, takes shape of a Mobius ring, reflecting the basic principles of Buddhism and the idea of reincarnation. With the aid of digital design and fabrication techniques, the spatial logic of the building is rooted in the idea of “formlessness”. The architecture is interpreted as a path, connecting the beginning with the end, ultimately representing the principle of reincarnation.

KMUTT Learning Center is a Study on Biomimicry

According to the KMUTT Roadmap 2020, the university is aspiring to be one of the world class universities in the area of science and technology. For the Learning Innovation, the design by MAB Studio (Achawin Laohavichairat) used biomimicry as a natural inspiration to make the building harmony with the context. The building became a new transition of the university to transfer people to go to each building and to create the structure that can show the potential of the engineering because that is an image of the university, the biomimetic strategies that integrate form, material, and structure into a single process.

Asemic Forest: Spontaneous Order and Architecture

This project by Shahira Hammad envisions a new train station for Vienna, one that would either modify or replace the existing Westbahnhof train station.

The project keeps the existing building, but contaminated with structures that would express a complexity of programs now missing. The project was inspired both from Nature and Culture, and beyond its polemical characteristics it does intend to bring back what in science is called: Spontaneous Order.

It is, evidently, a reaction against excessive rationalism and rationalizations. Yes, it is excessive, but essentially it tries nothing else but to bring the complexities present in Nature into the urban fabric.

Anisotropic Sheet Morphologies – Pavilion at Beijing’s Design Week

Ban is the latest pavilion by architects Orproject which has been constructed for the Beijing Design Week 2012. The Chinese title refers to floral petals, and similar to the way that the shape of a flower is created by its bent petals, Ban is constructed from bent polymer sheets which form a self-supporting structure and create shapes and volume from a multitude of leaves.

Phyllon Lamp Mimics Leaf Structure

The Phýllon lamp designed by Nikolay Hristov Ivanov was inspired by the complexity of a leaf’s veins system. A novel process that employs computer simulation is used to generate a design that operates close to a micro-scale. It started as a research design-investigation based on the distribution of the veins of a single leaf blade. The goal was not to mimic the leaf’s pattern of veins, but rather to have a new reading towards using a speculative data set and reconnecting it within certain logic – establish direct connections – more like covered with a spider net, creating complexity via the quantity of the elements, rather than the elements themselves. Via exploring a numerous configurations of points and diverse connection logics of growth, it crystallized as extremely fragile, elegant or even precious single object design.

Kiriake Miniature Water Park / Takao Shiotsuka

The three “Kikuchi” public parks are carefully weaved into the neighborhood of Kikuchi, a city in Kumamoto, Japan. Designed by Japanese architect Takao Shiotsuka, they are a good example of an alternative approach to pocket parks. According to Shiotsuka, the goal of these three parks is not to add greenery, but to revitalize an old area of the city with “a new stream of people.”

League of Shadows Pavilion / PATTERNS

Designed by Marcelo Spina and Georgina Huljich of P-A-T-T-E-R-N-S, the League of Shadows Pavilion has been declared winner of an architectural design competition for a 1,200-seat outdoor pavilion at SCI-Arc. The pavilion would accommodate graduation ceremonies, lectures, symposia and other cultural events. The pavilion will be located in the school’s parking lot in downtown Los Angeles. It is set to be completed spring 2013.

Studio Fuksas Completes The Tbilisi Public Service Hall

Studio Fuksas have completed the Tbilisi Public Service Hall in Tbilisi, Georgia. Conceived as the largest social service center in the world, the landmark, which is located on Tbilisi’s waterfront, pairs an innovative program with flamboyant architecture. A giant corolla of eleven white petals covers the building, adorning the banks of the Kura River with a symbolic bloom.

Description from the designers:

The Tbilisi Public Service Hall is situated in the central area of the city and it overlooks the Kura River.

The building is 28.000 mq. It is made up of 7 volumes that contain offices (each volume is made up of 4 floors located on different levels). These volumes are placed around a ”central public square”, which is the core of the project,  where there is the front office services. Offices are connected to each other by internal footbridges that stretch on different levels.

Snøhetta Wins Busan Opera House Competition

Inspired by the dramatic coastal landscape of Busan, the Norwegian design firm Snøhetta has won the competition to realize the city’s opera house. The new Busan Opera House will be located by the port, and, as with the Opera House in Oslo, it will allow the public to walk on the roof. The house will have about the same size at its counterpart in Oslo, only exceeding it by a slightly bigger main hall with the planned capacity of receiving an audience of 1800 people.  According to the architects, the main guideline in the design process was the creation of an accessible and democratic space, turning the static into dynamic. The Opera is an interactive open stage that transforms the contemporary cultural spaces from elitist monuments into democratic arenas.