Prominently located along the Hutchinson River Parkway and Pelham Parkway in the Bronx, this facility will augment existing 911 services in New York, strengthening the city’s ability to maintain communication in the event of a natural disaster or large-scale emergency. The center is designed to operate continually under adverse conditions and provide redundancy to the city’s primary call center.
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The 450,000-square-foot, blast-resistant structure is a perfect cube, with minimal windows due to security concerns. To mitigate the structure’s monolithic appearance, SOM gave it a serrated facade made of recycled aluminum, providing both dynamism and asymmetry. The 9-acre site features a wrap-around sculptural berm of wild grasses. The berm helps protect the building without being oppressively defensive.
Inside, the lobby and cafeteria areas feature a green wall that helps create a soothing environment for stressful call takers. It also acts as a natural air lter, drawing toxins and improving overall indoor air quality. Designed to achieve LEED® Silver certi cation, the project’s other sustainable strategies include recycled building materials and reduced water use for irrigation.
Religious architecture in Russia, arguably, remains backward-looking. With the Soviet Union’s anti-religious stance in the 20th century, religious architecture found little opportunity to grow. Russian architect, Philip Yakubchuk argues that only recently has religious Russian architecture begun “learning to walk again” as it discovers its once-rich history. Quadratura Circuli, a trio of young Russian designers Daniil Makarov, Ivan Zemlyakov, and Yakubchuk, are eager to move beyond the image of St Basil’s Cathedral—seeking to revitalize and create a new image of Russian religious architecture for the 21st century.
The group’s Latin name translates to “Squaring the Circle” which is a metaphor used to describe a task that is believed to be impossible—a striking name for a group dedicated entirely to “designing temples for the people of today.” However, with their proposal for a Russian Orthodox Cultural Center in Reykjavik, Iceland, Cuadratura Circuli demonstrates that it is not impossible to link the art of the past and the culture of the present.
Courtesy of Cuadratura Circuli
While the project is a possible catalyst for contemporary religious Russian architecture, the project’s local context also makes the project a catalyst for civic liveliness in the area. Situated only 700 meters away from Reykjavik’s historic core, the proposed Russian Orthodox Cultural Center includes a church, a baptistery, and a multi-purpose parish house. The site borders a residential zone and an old port territory which is also going through redevelopment. The Cultural Center is imagined to be a social hotspot and thus one of the agents for change and improvement in this area of Reykjavik.
Courtesy of Cuadratura Circuli
The proposed design combines the composition of a traditional Russian church with the minimalist Nordic aesthetic. In this symbiotic union, the architects used regional factors such as climate, sun exposure, and landscape to determine which elements to adopt from both cultures. The Parish House for example, is a nod to tradition. Its lower floor is clad in stone masonry and functions like a traditional Russian podklet—an unoccupied maintenance or storage room with its cooler temperature. The second floor of the Parish House is more insulated with wood construction and thus provides the accommodation for the center.
Courtesy of Cuadratura Circuli
For the Chapel itself, the decorative masonry typical of Russian church architecture has been replaced with Nordic purity and minimalism through the use of plain unadorned white stucco walls and a gray wooden roof. Not only does the aesthetic match the neighboring structures in the area, but the stucco also produces a beautiful effect in the low northern sun and complements the landscape of the cold Nordic country.
Courtesy of Cuadratura Circuli
The designers credit the project’s asymmetrical composition to the ancient churches found in Pskov, a region of northern Russia bordering Estonia, but with its stucco-clad curves the Cultural Center exhibits the same sculptural sweeping effervescence of Le Corbusier’s Notre Dame du Haut. Aside from these formal qualities, the project also emulates the ephemeral interior qualities that are created by the modernist chapel’s irregular fenestration. As Yakubchuk writes: “Small scattered windows… give dimmed light to create an intimate atmosphere suitable for prayer.” But these windows also serve a regional purpose, as they reduce heat loss in the winter and keep in the cool air in the summer.
Courtesy of Cuadratura Circuli
This proposal interprets Russian religious architecture as flexible and innovative. Consequently, the architects revitalize the image of these buildings and emphasize their relevance in varied applications for 21st century life. In fact, this proposal for the Russian Cultural Center is only one of three other formal iterations. For Cuadratura Circuli, it is definitely not impossible to build traditionally within a contemporary language.
The Cerrado House was built at the foothills of the Sierra da Moeda, a mountain range in the state of Minas Gerais. The three-bedroom house has a rooftop pool and a wide staircase that leads to the rooftop terrace. The rooms are right under the swimming pool and have views of the sierra, the Cerrado and its twisted trees. Louvers on the northern and western faces protect against the inclement sun.
The play between function and form here is spontaneous and undogmatic: the ramps and stairs of the swimming pool are stamped irrepressibly onto the façades and shape the internal space. The employment of the programmatic source is made directly manifest: it is a generative strategy that explores the programme/form relationship as an absolute and inevitable correspondence.
Seeking the plasticity of basic architectural elements, the project also exalts this underestimated and threatened biome: the Cerrado. There is no landscape design: the house sits on natural terrain, whose immensity and vistas are best seen from the pool terrace.
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The Cerrado is one of the country’s seven biomes and covers an area of 1.5 million km². It holds about a third of all Brazilian biodiversity, 5% of the world’s flora and fauna, and is home to the headwaters of the three largest hydrographic basins in the country (Amazon, São Francisco, and Paraná/ Paraguay). It has a unique flora and stands out for its generously-spaced trees and low-slung brushwood, blending into a South-American variation on the African savannah and the European steppe. Given its ecological, geopolitical and cultural specificities, the Cerrado is considered the biome of national integration.
The soils of the Cerrado were once regarded as too acidic to farm. But since agronomists began applying industrial quantities of lime in the 1980s, these soils have been transformed. The Cerrado now produces 70% of Brazil’s agricultural output.
In recent years, the rate of ecological destruction of the Cerrado has been twice that of the Amazon, and while the majority of the Amazon rainforest survives, more than 60% of the Cerrado’s former 200 million hectares has disappeared under the plough, and most of that within the last two decades alone. It has been a black hole for conservation: only 2% of the ecosystem is protected. However, Brazilian agriculturalists and ministers still talk as if it had no conservation value at all.
Leading UK architects and designers will vote overwhelmingly to remain in tomorrow’s EU referendum. Dezeen invited figures including David Chipperfield and Ron Arad to explain their reasons for staying. (more…)
Perkins+Will designed a sports therapy and research centre for a new collaboration between the Dallas Cowboys and healthcare provider Baylor Scott & White. To sit within the Cowboy’s new 91-acre campus, the mixed-use medical facility will provide necessary care and training facilities to athletes of all levels, including the Dallas Cowboys themselves.
View of South East Corner. Image Courtesy of Perkins+Will
Located in the Texan city of Frisco, the campus will host the new headquarters of the Dallas Cowboys, alongside sports fields, a multi-use event center and a new stadium, designed by Gensler. With an estimated 50,000 visitors annually, Perkins+Will’s new medical center aims to provide the Cowboys’ campus with a holistic approach to sports and wellbeing. The center incorporates indoor training fields, continuing the patchwork of playing greens across the site, and has pedestrian and cycle links to the larger network of publicly accessible trails.
View of Tower Lobby. Image Courtesy of Perkins+Will
The 300,000-square-foot, nine-story building is broken in two distinct volumes, visually sliced by a soaring plane that cantilevers out to the south. The design emphasizes connectivity to the masterplan, and largely glazed facades allow pedestrians visibility into the building, as well as views outward to the surroundings. It will host not only medical facilities such as surgery, emergency care, a pharmacy and medical offices, but also a Sports Performance Center where research, training and rehabilitation will take place.
View from South West Corner. Image Courtesy of Perkins+Will
The project is under construction and slated for completion in early 2018.
Architect and designer Eero Saarinen was involved in the development of “new weapons and devices” for the US government, according to newly obtained documents. (more…)
A Globe-inspired theatre in northern France has been vandalised a week before its opening, an act the architect believes was “politically motivated desecration” by members of the far right. (more…)
Lantern House is a private home located in Kerhonkson, New York, USA. It was designed by Studio MM Architect. Lantern House by Studio MM Architect: “Perched at the top of a wooded knoll in the Hudson Valley, the Lantern Ridge House accentuates mountain views while camouflaging itself in the densely forested environment. At night, the typically obscured house becomes a beacon for passing cars and a guiding light for our..
From the architect. After one decade of vacancy, the building from 1715 was in poor structural condition and has been completely redesigned. The majority of the population wanted to demolish it. Depending on years of efforts at persuasion, the community decided to preserve and reconstruct the building.
The newer components were again dismantled to obtain the original, spacious structure. The extant historical components were protected and preserved during the 2-year renovation period. Necessary new components are clearly visible, but in harmony with the historic ambience. In a simple, solid design and consisted equitable selection of materials value was placed. The façade is reconstructed with the ancient plastering and ornaments.
