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MVRDV and Zhubo Architecture Design have won a competition to design the Xili Sports and Cultural Centre in Shenzhen, China. The new experience center will consist of four distinct volumes housing a theater, a basketball and badminton arena, a multi-function arena and a swimming pool, as it seeks to “transform the lives of the different generations of people living nearby, through offering a more humanistic model for sports and culture.”
As the fastest developing urban region in China, Shenzhen is currently undergoing a transformation from a production-based to a knowledge-driven economy. The resulting boom has already created high-density usage, and stadium-sized sports facilities for entertainment. But there remains a lack of recreational facilities for typical citizens.
“There is now a need for a more human-centred approach; the challenge was to go from bigness to compression through understanding urbanism,” explain the architects. “MVRDV’s design for the densification and development of a sports and cultural centre responds to the growing demand for fitness sports venues, with the intention of introducing a more fun, human, social and sustainable model that departs from populist Olympic-sized sports arenas.”
The complex will be located in a residential area along Shenzhen’s Dasha Green Corridor, which stretches between the Nanshan and Yangtai mountain parks. Program elements have been arranged to allow for flexible zones, where different sports and social activities can occur, blurring the boundaries between sports and culture to strengthen community interaction.
“We wanted to combine a large-scale sports stadium with a social aspect connecting it with the community. This was achieved by arranging different volumes on the site around a new diagonal (green) bridge linking the Chaguang metro station in the south, with the Tanglan mountains in the north, making this centre a stage for different users – nature, sports and culture”, says MVRDV founding partner, Jacob van Rijs.
The center’s total 105,000 square meters (1,130,000 square feet) includes a 20,000 square meter (215,000 square foot) theatre-amphitheatre, 15,000 square meter (161,000 square foot) Basketball- Badminton arena, 10,000 square meter (108,000 square foot) multifunctional arena and 6,000 square meter (65,000 square foot) swimming pool. The signature element of the complex is a special elevated running track that connects and weaves between the volumes, inviting visitors to “go for an exciting run around the complex, relax and socialise both inside and outside.”
MVRDV designed the project in collaboration with co-architects Zhubo Architecture Design, who are well-revered for their influential works in Shenzhen and throughout China, alongside adopting a humanistic approach to the effect of the design and construction process on health, well-being and fitness.
Xili Sports and Cultural Centre will be MVRDV’s first project under construction in Shenzhen. Construction is slated to begin in 2017.
Location: Xili, Nanshan, Shenzhen, Guangdong, China
Mvrdv Team: Winy Maas, Jacob van Rijs, Nathalie de Vries, Wenchian Shi, Gustavo van Staveren, Tiantian Zhang, Daehee Suk, Duong Vu Hong, Patryk Slusarski, Xiaoting Chen, Mikel Vazquez, Bowen Zhu
Plan, Sections: The Form of Form, Johnston Marklee, Office KGDVS, Nuno Brandão Costa, 2016. Image Courtesy of Lisbon Architecture Triennale
From the architects and curatorial team. One of architecture’s fundamental legacies is its own form. Not only is history built from its visual universe, but form is also a common language that brings together architects from all over the world in a collective conversation. In this exhibition, which proceeds from a potentially infinite repository, three architects—Johnston Marklee, Nuno Brandão Costa, and Office KGDVS—build a dialogue that challenges notions of authorship and the limits of form.
Mariabruna Fabrizi and Fosco Lucarelli were invited to reflect upon a selection of examples from their platform, Socks Studio. They highlight the permanence of form and its capacity to condense a set of values into any visible thing. The Socks format has evolved over the years from an online magazine to become a platform for speculation and discussion that also draws on Microcities’ own architectural projects.
Functioning as a “conversation,” the narrative of the exhibition has been developed around a number of spaces that are inspired by examples of architectural designs by the architects. Each of the spaces is designed to house content selected from the extensive Socks database.
The language of architecture is explored through a sample of construction drawings, landscape interventions, urban plans, artistic investigation, and other elements. Originating from different time periods and regions of the world, the content highlights what remains constant and what changes, as well as identifying analogies and affinities in the creation of the built environment. Organized along twelve interlinked spaces, with each space incorporating images related to a core element, the exhibition defines continuous seam of works that are directly inter-related, be it through affinity or opposition.
Reference: Map of the Neolithic settlement of «atalhˆy¸k (Turkey). Image Courtesy of Lisbon Architecture Triennale
Curated by Diogo Seixas Lopes, The Form of Form exhibition is also a process in itself. The ultimate aim is for it to become a “meeting space” that can demonstrate the meaning of form in architectural design – in the past, present and future.
We’ve reached 500,000 followers on Twitter, which happens to be the first social-media platform we ever joined! To celebrate, London-based designer Jack Bedford has created this illustration for us.
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French photographer Jonk drove over 5,000 kilometers through southeast Europe. His subject matter? Yugoslavian monuments, or “spomenik” in Serbian.
Built in the 1960s and 70s under former president Josep Broz Tito, these monuments commemorate the communist resistance during the German occupation. While their sculptors and architects vary (Vojin Bakic, Jordan and Iskra Grabul among others), all of the monuments memorialize WWII battle sites or former concentration camps. Although the monuments attracted a high rate of visitors in the 1980s, many of them have been abandoned or poorly preserved after Yugoslavia’s split. Jonk’s photographs illuminate both the decay and beauty of these sculptures.
Estonian interior architecture students designed this floating timber pavilion to provide a shelter, sauna and campfire for visitors to the Soomaa National Park wetlands during flooding (+ slideshow). (more…)
Well-known architects are easy to admire or dismiss from afar, but up close, oddly humanizing habits often come to light. However, while we all have our quirks, most people’s humanizing habits don’t give an insight into how they became one of the most notable figures in their field of work. The following habits of several top architects reveal parts of their creative process, how they relax, or simply parts of their identity. Some are inspiring and some are surprising, but all give a small insight into the mental qualities that are required to be reach the peak of the architectural profession—from an exceptional work drive to an embrace of eccentricity (and a few more interesting qualities besides).
1. Playing With the Same Toy All Day (The Eameses)
Charles and Ray Eames were prolific in their work, producing over 900 multidisciplinary designs. The Musical Tower was one of these, a 5-meter high rearrangeable xylophone tower. For new staff members, the entire first day would be spent playing with this one toy. This creative initiation was important for the Eameses, who believed that spending a day listening to and observing someone’s musical experiments provided valuable insight to their personality.
“Architectural art cannot be created in an office-like environment”, Alvar Aalto once said. Taking this to extremes, Aalto was known to have “drank like a fish,” and boozing in the office was common—aiming, of course, for an artistic bohemian air rather than unproductive drunkenness. [1]
Climbing a Norwegian mountain may be considered an odd team building exercise for architectural firms, unless your firm is Snøhetta. For Snøhetta, whose founding inspiration and namesake is a mountain said to house Norse gods, an annual trip to climb that very mountain makes a lot more sense. The purpose of the trip has changed as the firm has grown: “We use the time to talk about what we’re doing and where we want to go,” says co-founder Craig Dykers. “We used to go just for the sake of climbing but now it’s got to have more meaning.”
There are many stories of Zaha Hadid that suggest the most important person in her life was herself. Examples include being several hours late for a Vogue photoshoot in her own home or only furnishing her apartment with objects she designed herself. While many of those in her inner circle have attested to her kind heart, this attitude of self-love was also also the heart of her headstrong philosophy; in her own words, “I never took no for an answer. I never sat back and said ‘walk all over me, it’s OK.’”
The inspirations behind Eileen Gray’s designs were often people she loved. The hallmark of this was perhaps the ill-fated E.1027, built originally for her then-lover Jean Badovici. Even the name itself was “code for an affair of the heart.” E stood for Eileen, while the numbers corresponded to letters in the alphabet for J, B and G, signifying Jean, Badovici and Gray—her name “holding his.”
7. Having Sex Several Times a Day, Even if You’re Eighty (Frank Lloyd Wright)
Image <a href='http://ift.tt/2dJpIXc Wikimedia</a> (public domain, photographer Al Ravenna)
Frank Lloyd Wright was said to have an “inexhaustible supply of creative energy” that allowed him to maintain a habit of only beginning drawings for clients a few hours before they were due to present. His wife also reported a similar inexhaustible supply, but one of sexual energy. She claimed that even at eighty-five, he could go at it twice or thrice a day. She even sought medical advice and was offered potassium nitrate, thought to decrease a man’s sex drive, but decided against it in the end. [2]
8. Creeping on Your Building Users (Denise Scott Brown)
When asked what part of her work brought her joy, Denise Scott Brown admitted to essentially creeping on people using her building. Visiting the Perelman Quadrangle at the University of Pennsylvania, she observed thirty or so students sitting on the rising steps “like bees in a hive,” just as she had envisioned. Taking her to be some “old lady in a skirt” who they did not know, they simply looked puzzled and could not understand why she was grinning broadly at them. [3]
9. Lying Quietly in the Dark, Deep in Thought (I.M. Pei)
I.M. Peihas noted how over his long career he has come to rely less on drawing on paper, and more on drawing in his mind. For Pei, much of his best thinking is done in bed at night with the lights out, sometimes with a trip to the bathroom to scribble ideas down. If it didn’t look as good on paper as in his mind, it would be back to bed to think some more. This nocturnal process meant that even for him it was hard to distinguish the sources of his ideas, which came to be increasingly dream-like.
You are what you eat, or so they say. So for an architect who championed color, it’s perhaps not surprising that Luis Barragánwas known to order entirely pink-colored meals, such as sherry-drizzled melon halves.
11. Taking Your Porsche out for a Spin (Ricardo Scofidio)
