Designing an Urban Village / Brenac+Gonzalez

The building is composed of several layers assembled on the vertical axis, over a base that provides properly anchored natural and use-related services. It is designed ​​according to the needs of each housing site, thereby defining the overlay districts. As a village, the high-rise is organized and structured around common areas such as meeting places and places of exchange. It includes characteristics of individual housing, offering to its inhabitants large living areas with more than 3 meters high ceilings and customizable spaces through use of mobile partitions.

New LACMA Campus Explores Designing a Surfaceless Structure

Surface has a long standing relationship with architecture and has been the primary component through which we communicate architectural composition. However the less obvious contributor that has had its hand in the making of architecture is the line. The line has typically been the ghostwriter for compositions that have been manifested through surface. However surface has the potential to become a canvas for other rhetoric outside those of the lines’ and can dilute the lines’ original aesthetic intention. The ambition of this project is to remove the surface avatar and reveal the line as the protagonist of this project.

A figural arrangement or movement is often illustrated with a line. Contextual forces are used to agitate the surfaces of the building where intense moments unrest yield an unraveling of the lines within. The relationship of line to line and surface to line presents opportunities for different types of spacial configurations for the program. The lines bundle and splay for varying degrees of saturation to fulfill a variety of spacial and programatic requirements.

Responsive Infrastructure for a Sinking Manhattan

Responsive Infrastructure by Natalie Chelliah combats the paradoxical problem of lower Manhattan’s future; a city with a footprint slowly sinking into the ocean while its population consistently expands. Less Space : more people. An new city infrastructure is created that not only elevates the previously 2D sidewalks into a 3D matrix of interconnected bridges, but also provides endless possibilities of inhabitation and use.

Sensory City: Buildings Dynamic Morphologies

Xiaofeng Mei, project is located on a coastal area of Japan which is a site susceptible to environmental influences. The project is about the Dynamic Morphologies of a building’s envelope, and how architecture can move away from being fix to one that is in contrast shape. That shape is a response to the immediate environment. By applying flexible material and intelligent surfaces to new volumes affecting form and color of buildings,  to activate the building’s envelope.

Icon Square Houses: Peace Center, Community Center, and Eco Hotel

The Icon Square houses a Peace Center, Community Center, and Eco Hotel designed by Kyle Duvernay and Mike Knowlton in located in Bunker Hill, Los Angeles. A 150,000 sq/ft lot invites the public in by creating a corridor across the site, and by uplifting the ground floors for minimal building footprint. A systematic power generator consisting of over 200 vertical wind turbines was created for the public to view and interact with. The expression of the Eco Hotel is complimented by the purity of the Peace Center by allowing them to share a common goal of sustainability in the community.

City-like Supertall Skyscraper in Beijing, China

The most innovative architectural idea of this project is based on the possibility of a constantly changing skyscraper. It is all about developing a mutant vertical city building possibility, which answers to its time, place and inhabitants requirements. NODO project becomes much more than a skyscraper, it is a collective creation, a gauge, an urban infrastructure which evolves during its existence and adapts itself to its environment, receiving many functions and needs such as housing, offices, commercial and public spaces.

The project has two different parts: the permanent one and the mutable one. The vertical communications and facilities core (1), and standardized and mobile parts (2) on the other hand. An elevator inside (3) is in charge of transporting these prefabricated modules into their places inside the building, which are trucked from the factory. We can say that is the first proposal in the world of a “supertall” built with prefabricated modules, making it a flexible and versatile building. Betting into the future field of industrial architecture. This idea was the winner of the construction category of the competition.

National Art Museum of China Proposal / MAD Architects

The building was designed by MAD Architects, as proposal for the international competition for the future National Art Museum of China in Bejing. Their concept is based on an elevated public square which is protected by a floating mega volume above.