View 2. Image © Hannah Wu / People's Architecture Office

• Architects: People's Architecture Office
• Location: Shenzhen, China
• Principals: He Zhe, James Shen, Zang Feng
• Project Team: Zhang Minghui, Lin Mingkai, Amy Song, Zhang Zhen
• Client: CHINA VANKE CO., LTD. & LDG Narrative Design
• Project Year: 2016
• Photographs: Hannah Wu / People's Architecture Office

Birdview 2. Image © Hannah Wu / People's Architecture Office

The Plugin Tower curtails the investment necessary for building a home since it excludes the risk of losing one’s property: residents can pack up their homes and bring it with them if they are ever forced to relocate. Classified as a temporary structure, the Plugin Tower does not require an underground foundation, thereby circumventing the strict planning approval for permanent structures and easing the requirements for building a private house. 

Future scene 1

Diagram 1

Diagram 2

Diagram 3

View 1. Image © Hannah Wu / People's Architecture Office

A multi-story prefab system that is infinitely expandable, the Metabolist-inspired Plugin Tower is comprised of a steel space frame, a kit of parts that can be assembled in endless variations. Empty bays within the frame are plugged with living units, altered and unplugged when necessary. Units are made with PAO’s proprietary Plugin Panel system, modules that incorporate insulation, wiring, plumbing, interior and exterior finishes into one molded part. Panels are attached with integrated locks, easily installed by a couple of unskilled people with just a hex wrench. Unlike with shipping containers, Plugin Panels allow living spaces to be added without heavy machinery, and does not restrict their layouts to the shape of a box. 

Interior 2. Image © Hannah Wu / People's Architecture Office

3rd floor plan

Birdview 1. Image © Hannah Wu / People's Architecture Office

2nd floor plan

Suggesting the instability of the state of housing in China, the ‘future of housing’ proposed by People’s Architecture Office is a flexible design that adapts to changing needs and fluctuating conditions.

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Courtesy of M CO Design

M CO Design has released its designs for “Dragon’s Link,” a new dragon-inspired, mixed-use infrastructure on the south side of Hong Kong Island “that will serve a large part of the community and will enhance a local historic monument,” the Tai Tam Dam, which will celebrate its 100^th anniversary this coming February. 

Drawing inspiration from local traditions and the natural topography of Hong Kong, the project will create new connections within an existing network of roads and hiking trails in Tai Tam Country Park in “a juxtaposition of old and new,” in order to improve user experience and infrastructure.

Courtesy of M CO Design

Through Dragon’s link, it is hoped that existing transportation issues—namely concerning traffic and safety, such as bottlenecking and flooding due to outdated drainage—will be solved.

Courtesy of M CO Design

Courtesy of M CO Design

Additionally, the project will dedicate space for cyclists, pedestrian paths with scenic lookouts, a hikers’ plaza, a visitor pavilion with special event terraces, and lanes wide enough to accommodate oversized buses and trucks.

Courtesy of Unknown

Courtesy of M CO Design

We have already shown [the project] to the district representative for the area surrounding the site and with his invitation we will be presenting it to the HK Government in the next District Council meeting on transportation issues, said Scott Myklebust, founder and president of M CO Design. The representative noted that the government has been trying to solve this traffic issue for a long time, without success. He felt this was a groundbreaking proposal and unique solution.

Courtesy of M CO Design

Courtesy of M CO Design

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© AL_A

Architectural firm AL_A has unveiled its design for Pitch/Pitch, a series of 5-a-side soccer pitches designed for unused or temporarily vacant lots across London, as well as in other cities internationally. 

Created as a response to shortage of sport space in inner cities, the project is meant to be fast and easy to construct, “meaning it could be set up for a fortnight to coincide with a World Cup tournament, or last for a year, bringing use to vacant sites that might otherwise lie dormant.”

After working with Arup, the practice developed a modular system that utilizes a lightweight carbon-fiber structure, a material generally associated with the aerospace industry, but that is emerging architecturally at larger scales.

© AL_A

This material was also used by AL_A in 2015 at the second annual MPavilion.

© AL_A

We’ve designed this intervention to encourage the theatre of the game, with spectators and would-be players drawn in as Pitch/Pitch animates the cityscape, said AL_A Director, Maximiliano Arrocet. Pitch/Pitch allows the game to retain an urban flavor, adapting to the number of players and awkward shaped sites.

© AL_A

AL_A is currently working with partners in order to finance and implement Pitch/Pitch across London.

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© Bartosz Makowski

• Architects: Estudio Lamela
• Location: Warsaw, Polonia
• Area: 27000.0 m2
• Year Project : 2014
• Photography : Bartosz Makowski

© Bartosz Makowski

The outline of the building has been dictated by the road layout on the South and the West side, while both remaining elevations have been located in a way that allowed to simplify the building’s shape.

© Bartosz Makowski

As a result of this combination a building with a rhomboid base has been born. The untypical outline of the building required a provision of  an unusual structural grid, which in that case follows a triangular modulation, with an independent structural grid for the underground part of the building (housing a car park).

© Bartosz Makowski

Whole project follows Breeam recommendations. Advanced technologies have been employed in order to provide a highest level of building’s quality (including structural elements and finishes), a quality of office environment, energy efficiency, sustainable performance,  building’s accessibility, as well as, building’s management and maintenance during the construction stage as well as operation phase. 

© Bartosz Makowski

Courtesy of Estudio Lamela

© Bartosz Makowski

A great effort has been put into designing of all four elevations of Pacific building. In order to prevent accumulation of heat the East, South and West elevations have been designed using a double curtain wall system with openings on the bottom and on the top of the façade – a combination that allows for a natural circulation of the air in summer and limits the heat loss during winter period.  Technical bridges have been located between both curtain walls layers. 

Proposed building’s envelope solution enabled an esthetically coherent image of external all-glazed elevations in symbiosis with building’s physics. Additionally, the possibility to open the windows from inside of the office space allows for a higher level of environmental comfort of the office space, which is extremely transparent but not fully enclosed. The North elevation which is similarly fully glazed, is turned into the proximate greenery and Warsaw’s cityscape. Elevations have been equipped with additional decorative illumination in order to highlight the depth of the façade, which results in a very attractive look, especially just after the sunset. 

© Bartosz Makowski

The extensive view can be enjoyed as well from building’s top terrace, which is accessible from both staircases equipped with glazed canopies at the last level. The accessible, open part of the terrace is intended to be a cozy, relaxing space, for this reason it has been separated from the busy Domaniewska Street and from the technical part of the terrace by horizontal louvers. A smaller landscaped terrace has been located at the first floor level.   

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Courtesy of Utopia Arkitekter

Stockholm’s Southeast Kungsholmen is slowly transforming. Veidekke and Utopia Arkitekter are preparing a redevelopment proposal for the town — and they’re beginning by building an architectural gem. In addition to creating ambitious architecture, Utopia Arkitekter plans to add more housing developments closer to public transport. Their first project? The sector of Kungsholmen, Bolinders Plan, named after Jean Bolinder, who ran a mechanical workshop in the area. 

Courtesy of Utopia Arkitekter

Our aim is to give Stockholm an architectural pearl of price with a contemporary identity of its own. In addition, we want to develop the existing square into an attractive piazza by taking good care of the area and putting non-housing premises into the bottom storey.

Courtesy of Utopia Arkitekter

By improving the ground conditions and giving the bottom story non-housing premises, the architects hope to improve the site. Informed by its surroundings, the building height corresponds with the adjacent Kungsklippan tower blocks. To allow for the turnaround point for traffic, the elevated bottom story will be pulled back slightly. “Playful” yet “elegant” are two words the architects used to describe the building’s composition as it tapers upward. 

Courtesy of Utopia Arkitekter

At 17 stories, the building’s structure both respects and reacts to its site. The street, rocky conditions, and the turnaround influenced the shape of the building. A cycle path will be rerouted to run between the building and street, although the bus stop will remain in its current position. Multiple private terraces will be accessible for top floor residents. 

Courtesy of Utopia Arkitekter

• Architects: Stockholm
• Location: Stockholm, Sweden
• Project Year: 2015
• Photographs: Courtesy of Utopia Arkitekter

News Via: Utopia Arkitekter

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© Chanel Dehond

This article was originally published by Metropolis Magazine as “Seeing the Animal Kingdom in Calatrava’s Oculus.”

Since its opening in March, Santiago Calatrava’s “Oculus” transport hub at the World Trade Center has garnered a lot of criticism for its exorbitant price tag. (The building cost nearly $4 billion to realize.) But look beyond the numbers, and there is something compelling about the physical form of the thing. Like all of Calatrava’s work, the structure invites visual interpretations—spiky fish or a bird, a dinosaur or a hedgehog. Architectural designer and illustrator Chanel Dehond riffs on these and more in the following sketches.

© Chanel Dehond

© Chanel Dehond

© Chanel Dehond

© Chanel Dehond

© Chanel Dehond

© Chanel Dehond

© Chanel Dehond

© Chanel Dehond

© Chanel Dehond

© Chanel Dehond

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Courtesy of Factoría

• Architects: Susana Herrera, FACTORIA
• Location: Lago Lanalhue, Talcahuano, Región del Bío Bío, Chile
• Project Year: 2016
• Photographs: Cortesía de Factoría

• Team: Rodrigo Troncoso, Diego Triviño
• Graphic Design And Astronomical Management: Marcelo Cifuentes
• Structure: José Nicolás Duran
• Client: Quelen Centro Turístico / Yepun
• Construction: Quelén Construcciones

Courtesy of Factoría

The Architecture as a transforming agent

The reconciliation between tourism and communities has transformed Lake Lanalhue into a natural, economic and political resource. We are aware of being part of  our own time and place, in the Arauco province  where tense ancestral and  historical demands are taking place,  a complex period in many aspects, and instead of avoiding the implications that this entails, we decided to face this period by contributing from what we know best, and this is to act from within the territory with the architecture that makes us the most sense, that is the architecture whose action transforms and summons the encounter of worlds that at times seem so distant, but that share a specific place of the planet, a common place in the Cosmos.

Site plan

Yepún is one of the last works developed by Susana Herrera & Factoría in Lake Lanalhue. And like others, it is part of the continuity of a series of architectural and tourist projects that have been developed in the province of Arauco for more than a decade. And as such, it is an articulating architectural piece that becomes a landmark along with others, with a very specific tourist programme, become an Astronomical Observatory Tourist Ethnic.

Courtesy of Factoría

Yepun Observatory was partially co-financed by a Corfo, a governmental innovation contest won by its director Marcelo Cifuentes, who partered with Pedro Durán, owner of Quelén to decided to install here the southernmost observatory in Chile. Architecturally, it is a recycled object. Its structure is mainly in wood, and was entirely constructed by local master artisans. For us, is a project that transcends the architectural object itself and contextualizes it with several interventions around it and designed by Susana Herrera & her team Factoria.

Section

Locating this project in Quelén meant the opportunity to establish relationships between science and the cultural context, between astronomy and the Mapuche Cosmovision, between the certainties of man, and what is rather immeasurable. It was a question of redesigning a physical and virtual space, capable of integrating knowledge, experiences beyond the possibilities of hard science, to place all this in a simple, almost domestic scale intervention. It was to re-think a space of educational exchange in a rather warm and pleasant space that would be able to embrace an experiential program in a rather local architecture, where the wood and the craftsmanship were the hallmark that differentiated it from other observatories, those of metallic domes very common for this type of observatories. Here the local identity was already printed in the constructions of Quelén, and this new piece remodeled, should be part of that context and this way of doing.

Courtesy of Factoría

This new architectural project is also the opportunity to deepen and above all, to experience from the turistification the exchange between visitors, local communities and anyone who wants to get closer to observe and share new areas of knowledge and cultural exchange. To imagine that this was possible, beyond the architectural dimension seemed exciting to us. The specificity of this place in Chile made it possible to ask new questions and stand in a different perspective, with a new paradigm at this time, and indeed, recognizing that the ancestral cultures would surely have already done it before us.

Courtesy of Factoría

The Architectural object

The 2010 earthquake had made available the small Kurem Cylindrical Building, which used to be the reception of the demolished old hotel, which was now being built on the shores of the Lake. We worked with scarce resources, so it was natural to choose to recondition the old Kurem Building to transform it into the Observatory.

Courtesy of Factoría

We kept the original Oregon pine wood structure of the building and its elliptical shape. We use wood because it is the material of the existing structure and because there is good availability of it on site. Steel pleats were added to extend the column structure. Regarding the lining of the building, the need to avoid light pollution forced us to close the entire building, which was previously much glazed.
Wood boards on the outside were placed in an upright vertical and tertiary planks in the interior, completely covering the 11 Oregon pine pillars, 200x155mm which transmit the entire load to the foundation without joists.

In the two spans with lower radius of curvature, we placed vertical diagonals of Oregon pine in the shape of a cross to avoid very large drifts in the upper level. On the top floor; where the telescope is located, a rigid plane was designed in which steel beams formed by two connected channels forming an “I” beam were placed. These beams provide stability to the top floor. Among them is an Oregon pine latticework formed of beams and chains. This, structured a resistant floor that avoids the vibrations that are critical and that can disturb the operation of the telescope.

Courtesy of Factoría

The scales of the project

This architectural piece has four scales:

The landscape scale:
The previews remodeled and transparent building that was mimicked with the kiln of the hill, was completely closed, becoming almost a trunk / or great * Rewe. Placed in the upper part of the hill, on an elevated plane and of strong pendant to the lake, it becomes an architectural landmark. The southeast façade embodies the landscape dimension that integrates the lake, the Nahuelbuta Range and finally with the black eye, that dark lake sky surrounded by the mountain.

The intermediate dimension is embodied by the west side of the building. The slenderness and closed skin of the Yepún is a perfect backdrop for the lateral amphitheater formed by the stairs of the Metawe Building and the square that separates them. This vitalizes the public space ideal for concerts, marriages and backdrop for movies and shows.

Courtesy of Factoría

The Northwest façade responds to a more pedestrian scale, which is reached from a zigzag wood platform. An extruded volume of smaller height softens the main volume and articulates the ascent of the different levels, as if it were a great Rewe that connects the earth with the infinite sky.

Finally, the last and most ambiguous and difficult to understand, is the scale of the universe. We know that if we look at a star that is a million light years away, we are looking at what the universe was like a million years ago. It means that the light that comes from it has taken a million years to reach us. This is basics in astronomy, and it is obvious that space is extended indefinitely, and that thanks to the telescope we can probe the depths of space. And although the universe seems to have the same aspect always, in fact it changes decisively with the time like when the stars began to shine or the fact that in century XX we understood that the galaxies are moving away and therefore the universe is expanding, in other words, the universe continues without end in space. Placing ourselves in that place helps us to get out of our own convictions, and this is mind-boggling.

Courtesy of Factoría

The Structure

From the old structure, we remove the staircase and the attic. In order to keep the center of this space clear, we built a ramp around the interior contour formed by cantilevered beams that are attached to the pillars by means of steel profiles, which allows us to create an ascending museological route without being interrupted by pillars in the interior. In addition, to increase the height of the building and to accommodate the telescope here, we had to surpass the heights of the existing buildings. For this, it was necessary to design steel rings, of the barrel type with tweezers between them, to avoid buckling. We worked with the calculator José Nicolás Durán, who designed this system with the 11 wooden pillars. The last level houses the rotating cover that opens in its center to clear the view of the telescope adapting to amateur and professional astronomers.

Detail

The Inner Experience

Three ascending levels make up the Yepún. The smallest configures the access, with a height not exceeding 2.5mt. When your pupils become accustomed to the darkness, you are pulled into the central elliptical and cylindrical space whose wood makes it close and intimate. A somewhat small space, with no possibility of exterior view that keeps you focused on the route and the total darkness, almost uterine that takes you out of the context of which you come from. The invitation, is to climb an elliptical perimeter ramp and transit in another dimension, another time.

Courtesy of Factoría

You walk up, and as you become aware of human smallness, you may remember that we are all so tiny without exception, and that we all fit into the same galaxy, whose size is hard to understand, and reminds us that we are really nothing. This feeling does not discriminate and the invitation is kept open throughout the visit to perceive the smallness of the time in which we inhabit this tiny planet that we call Earth, a sensation that we all warn without exception.

Section

You continue to rise, and the museological experience begins with the subtle archigraphy of laser engraving on lightly lit acrylics and oblique geometries inserted into the rhythmic wooden supports. Almost at the top, a small staircase takes you to the end of the route, to a circular space formed by a perimeter bench and a central pedestal where you meet the telescope. Once here, the ceiling is opened as necessary, so that the telescope’s lens allows you to observe the cosmos.
This small building makes us perhaps aware of where we are. It situates every visitor equally in this specific point of the universe, on the edge of the world, between Lake Lanalhue (place of lost souls), and the Nahuelbuta, mountain range of the Paleozoic, initiated some 570 million years ago, much earlier To the formation of the Andes Mountains, but not old enough in relation to the formation of planet Earth as part of the supercluster of galaxies more than 4.6 billion years ago.


For us, this experience is almost surreal; and is that, finally, such a simple architectural space located on the edge of Lake Lanalhue, allows us to situate ourselves in this new stellar dimension, with an architecture of uterus whose experience of space makes you abandon all the certainties relativizing them to allow a new logic of relationships. Relationships between humans, between civilizations, between beings that inhabit the same point on the planet.

Susana Herrera

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This past September, the Museum of Art, Architecture, and Technology (MAAT) opened in Lisbon. Funded by the Fundação EDP, the museum was designed by Amanda Levete and sits on the banks of the Tejo river. 

Portuguese photographer Francisco Nogueira captured the building’s spaces in this comprehensive gallery of images. The MAAT proposes a new relationship between the river and the visitor through a building whose simultaneous power and sensitivity explores the convergence of contemporary art, architecture, and technology. As a structure in the landscape, the building becomes landscape by allowing visitors to walk over and on the museum itself. See here 70 stunning photos of MAAT’s interiors and exteriors.

Learn more about the project after the break:

MAAT / AL_A
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