Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) and Hyperloop One have unveiled joint designs for an autonomous transportation system and the world’s first Hyperloop pods and portals in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The designs are being presented as Hyperloop One signs a deal with the Dubai Roads and Transport Authority (RTA), bringing the project one step closer to reality.

© BIG

In May of this year BIG, along with Arup and AECOM, partnered with business magnate and global innovator Elon Musk to design and develop the vehicles and spaces necessary to make the Hyperloop system human-friendly. Initial tests on a system built in the desert outside of Las Vegas saw the model pods reach speeds of 187km/h (116mph) in just 1.1 seconds. Hyperloop One partnered with BIG in order to develop a detailed feasibility study, financed by the RTA. Their joint concept designs for autonomous transportation in the UAE also includes plans for the world’s first Hyperloop One Portals and Hyperloop One Pods that will take passengers from downtown Dubai to downtown Abu Dhabi in twelve minutes, replacing a two-hour drive.

Its happening! with #hyperloopone and #bjarkeingelsgroup

A video posted by Jakob Lange (@jakob_lange) on Nov 8, 2016 at 12:11am PST

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#hyperloopone and #bjarkeingelsgroup in Dubai.

A video posted by Jakob Lange (@jakob_lange) on Nov 8, 2016 at 1:41am PST

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“Together with BIG,” Josh Giegel, President of Engineering, Hyperloop One has said, “we have worked on a seamless experience that starts the moment you think about being somewhere – not going somewhere.” He continued:

We don’t sell cars, boats, trains, or planes. We sell time.

According to BIG, the design of the scheme is based on a study of “how an urban and inter-city transport network should integrate with existing infrastructure.” They describe it as autonomous, point-to-point and able to vastly simplify the experience of “getting from front-door to final destination.” The locations of the initial route in the UAE have been selected by passenger density and proximity to existing or planned transportation hubs. They state that “all of the portals have been designed as individual answers to different contexts, yet appear similar and easily recognizable.”

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How Hyperloop One Will Work

According to the designers, “all elements of the travel experience are designed to increase convenience and reduce interruptions. The main objective of the design is to eliminate waiting from the passenger experience. Hence, the stations are called portals. All departure gates are immediately visible upon entering the portal, and a simple numbering system allows passengers to quickly identify them. Passengers will travel in pods that have room for 6 people. The pods are contained within a transporter, a pressure vessel attached to a chassis for levitation and propulsion that can accelerate the transporter to 1,100km/h.”

“Passengers board the next pod that is available, which moves onto a transporter to their final destination. The relatively small unit-size of the pods paired with a high arrival and departure-rate allows for on-demand travel. Different interior environments and seating arrangements offer passengers a travel experience tailored to their needs, whether travelling solo or in groups, for business meetings or casual trips.”

“The pods operate autonomously from the transporter, which means they are not limited to the portal area and can move on regular roads and pick up passengers at any point. At portals, pods are loaded onto the transporter and hyperjump to another portal, where they merge onto the street and drop passengers off at their final destination.”

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© Miguel de Guzmám

• Architects: NOMOS
• Location: Geneva, Switzerland
• Architect In Charge: Massimo Bianco, Lucas Camponovo, Daniel Schwarz, Ugo Togni, Katrien Vertenten
• Area: 1800.0 sqm
• Project Year: 2015
• Photographs: Miguel de Guzmám

• Client: SCHG

© Miguel de Guzmám

From the architect. The building is located on the higher grounds of Geneva’s Mervelet neighbourhood. At the heart of a rapidly changing residential area, the site has the remains of a garden-city with scattered century-old houses and trees.

© Miguel de Guzmám

Depending on use and context, the outside skin of the building can have several expressive overlays. It reacts like a sensitive interface between inhabitants and their perceived and lived environment. Facing south and west, the alternate assembly of prefabricated concrete modules creates the structure of an inhabited hive.

© Miguel de Guzmám

7th Floor

© Miguel de Guzmám

On the loggias, stainless steel railings lean forward and rotate gradually. The create a curved lining that is perceived differently depending on daylight and location. This arrangement offers both intimacy and transparency.

© Miguel de Guzmám

The rough combination of building materials continues in common areas; a polished concrete slab on the floor, walls covered with cement and iron for the stairs’ railings. The oakwood used for the handrail and entrance doors creates a domestic and nostalgic feeling when entering the apartments.

© Miguel de Guzmám

Inside the apartments, the large hallway allows views across the day and night areas, and creates a space with multiple uses. In the rooms, alternating high and low windows define the volume. Living rooms with fullwidth glazed windows continue onto loggias. These exterior living quarters project themselves towards the surrounding trees and scenery.

Section

These typologies and arrangements provide the dwellings with the distinctive attributes of a family house surrounded by a garden. In doing so, the 63 public utility housing units are designed as a Building-Villa.

© Miguel de Guzmám

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© Nick Bookelar

The strength of Dutch Design Week (DDW), held annually at the end of October, lies primarily in product design. Although the event has expanded over the past five years to incorporate more fashion, graphics and architecture, small-scale industrial design has retained its preeminence. Many of the designers on show in this year’s edition, however, have embraced the challenges of other design disciplines and allowed them to feed into their work. But where does product design meet architecture? Building materials and, most notably at the 2016 event, some really nice bricks. Rotterdam-based architect Alison Killing guides us through her top installations.

Upcycling

A number of designers across DDW have been working on ways to put industrial waste to constructive use. Often the result of their research is to have the relevant waste product—be it rotten fruit, broken glass, worn out leather or fragments of stone—crushed down and compressed into, you’ve guessed it, bricks. What may at first appear reductive nevertheless involves a complex research and design process in order to ensure that the material binds correctly, is able to bear the loads required for its use in construction, and is also aesthetically attractive.

Of the many projects which have travelled this track, two projects stand out. Thomas Missé’s From Ash at the Design Academy Eindhoven graduation show takes a large number of the by-products from a coal power plant—fly and bottom ash, water vapour, heat, and the portion of electricity which is wasted without making it to the grid—to create a “geopolymer,” a hard, ceramic-like material, as well as a small number of bricks which incorporate a shiny, black, coal-like aggregate.

Courtesy of Dutch Design Week. Image © Nick Bookelar

Tom van Soest is a graduate of the Design Academy and is showing at DDW as part of the Young Designer section of the Dutch Design Awards. His graduation work, from 2012, is also a study of transforming waste products into bricks – this time, waste from the construction industry. It is a strength of the Academy that many of their students go on to develop their thesis work into industrial products for sale and van Soest is far from the only designer at DDW showing professional work that was initially developed during their study days. In the past four years van Soest has worked with the industry in developing the bricks to meet the technical standards for new build construction in The Netherlands, and to create a company—”Stonecycling“—that can produce them at scale. On display is one of the company’s designs, incorporating crushed glass to produce a wall with a shimmering, silvery surface.

Courtesy of Dutch Design Week. Image © Cleo Goossens

Bricks of the Future

Over at the Klokgebouw, students from Amsterdam’s Academie van Bouwkunst have displayed their designs for the bricks of the future. Producing bricks is both energy and material intensive, so the students have spent the past three months working with three brick manufacturers from across The Netherlands, experimenting with substitute materials and shapes that require less energy to make. The resulting forms—zigzags, crosses, and lozenges—also produce interesting textural effects as they are stacked into walls.

© Nick Bookelar

Best in Show

The best brick on show however, goes to Rotterdam-based practice MVRDV, and the solid glass block that they developed for Chanel’s Amsterdam storefront together with the Technical University at Delft, ABT and Poesia. The brick is part of the Product section of the Dutch Design Awards, on show here as an object in its own right rather than simply one element, albeit a notable one, in a wider architecture project. They’re displayed, unglued, in a low wall through which light can refract and where, since they’re unfixed, they can be handled by visitors.

Heavier than they initially appear, smoothly polished, and with rounded corners they come across as an unlikely construction material – they lack the rough edges and appearance of toughness you would typically expect. They look instead like really expensive paperweights, and yet they are also able to meet the stringent demands of being the main structural element in a load bearing facade. MVRDV’s larger claim for them—that creating buildings with transparent glass walls will transform architecture and our cities—didn’t stack up in the early 20th Century, and almost certainly doesn’t stack up now. That said the bricks that they have created are an impressive aesthetic and technical achievement.

Courtesy of Dutch Design Week. Image © Nick Bookelar

The strength of Dutch Design Week lies in the close links between the work of design schools and the younger designers who are driven primarily by the exploration of concepts, alongside wider industry, whose main interest is in presenting goods for sale.

Dutch Design Week 2016 ran from the 22nd to the 30th October.

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© Nuno Almendra

• Architects: José Adrião Arquitectos
• Location: Praia do Estoril, Ilha da Boavista, Cape Verde
• Area: 3918.0 sqm
• Project Year: 2012
• Photographs: Nuno Almendra

• Principal: José Adrião
• Project Manager : Carla Gonçalves
• Equipe: João Albuquerque Matos, Margarida Lameiro, Ricardo Aboim Inglez, Sara Jardim
• Structure : MB – Engenharia
• Mep : MB – Engenharia
• Contractor: CFS

From the architect. The detached houses at Praia do Estoril are located in a privileged area in Sal-Rei, Boavista Island, Cape Verde. The location is excellent due to the great proximity to the city centre – within a few minutes walking distance –and the direct access to the magnificent beach and the dunes of Praia do Estoril.

Model

The residential project consists of 18 detached houses, creating a small residential area located in the middle of an alley connecting the houses directly to the seafront promenade of Sal Rei and to the beach.

© Nuno Almendra

The units have two or three bedrooms and a courtyard. The walls surrounding the courtyards provide a private and intimate atmosphere, as well as a protection from the wind and the sand from the beach.

© Nuno Almendra

Each unit has two floors. The common areas are located on the ground floor, with a spacious kitchen and living room area. The living rooms, depending on the type of house, open directly to one or two porches that create a relation between the interior of the house and the outside area. The window’s framework and its deep opening allow an almost complete connection with the exterior, reinforcing this relation. The porch along the house is an exterior lounge area with shade, protecting the interior of the house from the direct sunlight and the occasional rain.

© Nuno Almendra

In the upper floor, is the private area of the house, with the bedrooms and the two bathrooms. The bedrooms and the bathrooms open to a balcony, protected from direct sunlight, creating a relation with the surroundings and the sea.

© Nuno Almendra

The house’s main yard has a garden area with local plants, that are easy to maintain, and a swimming pool.

Section

The finishing of the houses is simple and informal. The paving is made of weak concrete, the walls and the ceilings are plastered and painted in white and the aluminium frameworks are lacquered in matt white. The concept of the house was designed to reflect the casual and relaxed living of a beach house.

© Nuno Almendra

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© Ilya Ivanov

• Architects: Nefa Architects
• Location: Moscow, Russia
• Architects In Charge: Maria Nasonova, Margarita Kornienko
• Authors Team: Dmitry Ovcharov, Elena Potemkina
• Chief Architect : Dmitry Ovcharov
• Area: 600.0 sqm
• Project Year: 2016
• Photographs: Ilya Ivanov

• Project Management: Daria Turkina, Maria Boyko
• Visualization: Dmitry Tridenov, Rustam Yusupov
• Lighting Designer: Varvara Shchetinina
• General Contractor: Shafran

© Ilya Ivanov

From the architect. Gazeta.ru is one of the oldest news agencies in Russia. Owned by a large media holding Rambler&Co, the editorial office of Gazeta.ru was relocated to Danilovskaya Manufactura, a 19th century former manufacture building, to join other subdivisions of the media group.

© Ilya Ivanov

Business goal. The challenge was to create a comfortable and multifunctional work space for a journalists’ team that included areas for different activities – zones for concentrated work along with various meeting and social spaces.

Floor Plan

Floor Plan

The editorial office of Gazeta.ru occupies the third and the fourth floors of a 4-storey building. Office accommodation comprises workspace areas for individuals and teams, meeting rooms, lounge-zones, mini coffee points as well as a kitchen-dining-room located on the 4th mansard floor.

© Ilya Ivanov

Besides, employees can use a multifunctional hall equipped with most modern audio-visual equipment for conferences, lectures, meetings and presentations. Formally, the hall belongs to Chempionat.com – another subdivision of the media holding Rambler&Co – but both teams have it at their disposal.

© Ilya Ivanov

The whole publication process is very fast so the speed of communications between different departments is extremely important. That`s why working desks are placed in an open space. The chief editor`s and his assistants` cabinets are located right in the middle of the editorial office for the convenience of communications and information transfer with all the departments of the news agency.

© Ilya Ivanov

The portal`s reports cover a wide range of news: politics, style, auto news. Architects decided to show the scope of information the agency reported using only one color- White. Graphic black accents on the floors and windows create an image of a newspaper page or an information web-site.

© Ilya Ivanov

The interior is made up mostly with custom furniture produced in local workshops according to the architects` sketches.

© Ilya Ivanov

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