Unveiled> Seoul Cloud by MVRDV
Rendering of the Cloud at night. (Courtesy MVRDV)
Seoul’s Yongsan International Business District, a new district designed to lift the city’s architectural appeal as an international business destination, is filled with wild promises: the world’s second tallest tower (‘Dream Tower’) to be completed by 2016, the Libeskind-designed, 28-trillion-won ($22.6-billion) ’Dreamhub’ project, and now MVRDV’s The Cloud.
Unveiled> David Hovey’s Streeterville Tower in Chicago
(courtesy Optima)
The architect/developer David Hovey has designed buildings in the Chicago suburbs as well as city neighborhoods outside of downtown. With the Optima Center Chicago, he is making a 42 story debut just north of the Loop. The luxury rental tower will have 325 units. Hovey is bullish on the building’s potential. “All our market research shows a lot of demand for rentals in that area,” he said of Streeterville. The units will sit on top of nine floors of parking as well as 20,000 square feet of commercial space. Hovey thinks the building’s location–walkable to the Loop, the Lake, and the Magnificent Mile–will make it appealing to upper-end renters. Amenities will include 10th floor recreation center and a sky deck on the 42nd floor concealed behind an ultra-smooth glass curtain wall.
Unveiled> A BIG Glassy Box for Paris, Sort Of
BIG's design for the University of Jussieu in Paris. (Courtesy BIG)
In Bjarke Ingels‘ traditional style, what started as a standard box of a building for Paris’ Université Pierre et Marie Curie has been lifted, bent, and deformed to maximize light, sight lines, and air flow for a cramped urban site. Ingels’ firm BIG and Paris-based OFF recently won won a competition to design the new multidisciplinary research center called Paris PARC to reunite the university’s campus with the surrounding city including Jean Nouvel’s adjacent Institut du Monde Arabe and the nearby Notre Dame Cathedral.
Unveiled> Angkasa Raya Tower in Kuala Lumpur
The Angkasa Raya tower proposed for Kuala Lumpur. (Courtesy Buro OS)
Ole Scheeren, a former partner at Rem Koolhaas’ OMA who broke away to start his own firm (Buro OS) in March 2010, has unveiled his latest project in Kuala Lumpur: an 880-foot-tall mixed-use tower called the Angkasa Raya. Adjacent to Cesar Pelli’s Petronas Twin Towers, once the world’s tallest, Scheeren’s new 65-story project progresses a skyscraper typology of stacked volumes made popular at OMA.
Unveiled> SO-IL to Transform an Old School into a Winding Community Center
A rendering of the Wulpen Community Center (courtesy So - IL)
Wulpen Community Center
Architect: Solid Objectives – Idenburg Liu
Client: Flemish Government Architect
Location: Wulpen, Belgium
Completion: 2013
The Brooklyn-based firm Solid Objectives – Idenburg Liu (SO–IL) recently won a design competition for a community center located in Wulpen, a small, coastal town in Belgium. Their design transforms an unused schoolhouse into a community center with three distinct parts: a multipurpose room in the former two classrooms, a youth space in a garden, and meeting rooms in the original teachers’ house.
Video> Steve Jobs Reveals Apple Campus
New Apple HQ (Cupertino City Television Screen Capture)
Behold! The unveiling of Apple’s next product… the iBuilding. Okay, so it’s not a product, but it is their highly-anticipated new campus in Cupertino, California. Steve Jobs, wearing his trademark mock turtleneck and jeans, revealed the plans—with fancy, although somewhat grainy renderings—at yesterday’s Cupertino City Council meeting (watch the video after the jump).
According to several reports, the architect of the new complex, whose land Apple bought from Hewlett Packard, will be Norman Foster, but that hasn’t been formally announced.
A few highlights of the new design: Apple’s new HQ is shaped like a doughnut, a spaceship, or an iPod trackwheel. It’s clad in curved glass with a giant courtyard in the middle. While Apple plans to increase it’s employees from 9,500 to 13,000, it will reduce its surface parking by 90% (from 9,800 to 1,200) and most of the parking will be underground. The vast majority of campus is set aside for landscaping (with an estimated 6,000 trees).
According to Jobs, the building will generate its own clean energy using the grid as backup. Given how the council treated Jobs like a visiting god, it looks like the company should get the project passed. If it moves forward, the new campus is expected to be complete by 2015.
Watch Steve Jobs unveil the new HQ and see more renderings after the jump!
Unveiled> BIG Wins Again in Greenland
(Courtesy BIG)
Bjarke Ingels continues his relentless forward march toward world domination, winning yet another project, this time a gallery in Nuuk, Greenland. With so many recent mountains, it appears BIG has moved on to new iconographies inspired by land art, a barnacle perhaps?
Unveiled> BIG News From Hell′s Kitchen
BIG's 57th Street Tower (BIG via New York Magazine)
Surf-and-turf sure is delicious! We’ve been eagerly awaiting news from Bjarke Ingels’ New York debut on 57th Street in Hell’s Kitchen, and today, the Durst Organization, project developer, has released new details of New York’s mountain-to-be. New York magazine got the exclusive, this weekend revealing a new rendering of the 450-foot-tall apartment tower poised to redefine the architecture of the stodgy box.
Unveiled> BIG Designs a Power Plant That Loves You
Waste-to-Energy Plant in Copenhapen (Courtesy BIG)
Where one architect might see an incinerator, Bjarke Ingels, principal at Dutch firm BIG, envisions a ski slope. Ingels has been fond of the mountain typology and he hasn’t been all that subtle about it, giving projects names like Mountain Dwellings and emblazoning Mount Everest on the side.
In his latest competition-winning proposal for Copenhagen, BIG takes the concept one step further, with a mountain you can actually ski down.
Unveiled> Henning Larsen in Nigeria
Rendering of the Calabar International Conference Center in Nigeria (Courtesy Henning Larsen)
Danish architects Henning Larsen have designed a convention center for a major city in Nigeria. Consisting of four volumes resembling sculptural rocks atop a plinth, the Calabar International Conference Center offers flexible space that can accommodate growing conference activity in the city as well as offer the community cultural space for concerts, festivals, and exhibitions. Check out a couple more renderings after the jump.
Advertise on The Architect's Newspaper.
Archives
Categories
Architecture
Design
East Coast
Midwest
National
Planning
Shft+Alt+Del
Sustainability
Transportation
West Coast
