August 23, 2012
Building: Weihai Pavilion
Architect: Make
Location: Weihai, Shandong, China
Why We Like This: The Weihai pavilion is the summa of a generally neglected typology of architecture—the sales office for a subdivision. Not content with the normal trailer or model home, the architects at Make wanted something better. Nestled on an artificial island off the Shandong peninsula, the pavilion features gorgeous space for the display of large models depicting the luxury homes that will soon fill out the site. Views out to the sea and city show prospective residents a future free from the latter, and surrounded by the former. The crescent shape channels the form of the waxing moon over the sea, while the roof is meant to convey the dynamism of the waves below.
Images by Make
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August 19, 2012
Architizer cut out early this week for the team’s annual off-site in upstate New York, where lots of talk, food, swimming, and RISK went down. There was also some work–alas–but that did not dampen our good spirits (that would be achieved by RISK), and we still found some time to throw together our top projects of the week. The buildings are loosely aligned to an admittedly half-baked “private retreat/ideal workspace” theme, where the latter unfolds before the real (or simulated) expanse of the former. Enjoy them! We’ll see you Monday!
House D, Austria
Bridge School, Fujian, China
House on a Pinewood, Castagneto Carducci, Italy
House T, Tokyo, Japan
Embedded House, Heiligengeist, Austria
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August 15, 2012
The Chinese city of Zhuzhou, the second largest in the province of Hunan, is being pressed under the tremendous pressure of growth. Home to many a manufactory and textile mill, residents are seeking new ways to live close to work while preserving the spaciousness of the countryside. Thus, these wonderful photos of McMansion-style housing atop a five-story shopping center in the central district of Zhuzhou.
The four houses are perched above the city, invisible to street-level action. They do not cast a shadow on the ground, and seem to exist solely in the rarefied world of smoggy skies, with scenic views into the apartments surrounding their airy enclave. Though the landscaping around the houses leaves something to be desired, the overall approach is one we’d like to see replicated on blank and bare urban roofscapes everywhere. Now that’s mixed-use development.
Images: China Foto Press/Barcroft Media via The Daily Mail
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July 16, 2012
Located some 18 miles outside the Angolan capital of Luana, Nova Cidade de Kilamba, with its dust-swept avenues and vacant high-rises, has been called Africa’s first “ghost city”. The 750 eight-story apartment blocks, a dozen schools, and 100 retail units that rise from the 5,000 hectare-gridded city plane stand defiantly empty, their vibrant, pastel-colored facades and rooftops ebullient cries amid the sepia-toned bleakness that characterizes the heat-stroked landscape.
Kilamba was conceived and constructed by state-owned China International Trust and Investment Corporation (CITIC) as the largest of several new “satellite cities” being built by the Chinese in Angola. The $3.5 billion “city” was designed for 500,000 occupants, to be housed in the 2800 apartment units that fill out the housing blocks. But these remain empty, as the BBC reports, in large part to the purportedly extravagant costs of the apartments–as high as $80,000–that lay beyond the reach of most Angolan families which subsist on criminally low wages and have little to no access to large loans and mortgages. Chinese officials have refuted these speculations, with the Economic and Commercial Counselor’s Office of the Chinese Embassy in Angola reiterating that the project had yet to be completed, but, even so, that preliminary sales (numbering 220 units) have met expectations.
Much has been made of the promotional material expounding the joys and conveniences, not to mention “bustling” streets and urban connectivity that Kilamba ostensibly offers. The videos, according to Western reports, consists of staged footage with actors animating apartment units or strolling down tree-lined avenues. These photographs are proof that this fictionalized reality couldn’t be further from the truth on the ground, so to speak. Still, the Angolan government stands behind the project, and all other similar Sino-Angolan ventures, as officials are not in the position to offer any admissions of dissent they may harbor.
All photos via ‘Angola’ Facebook
[via Business Insider, BBC ]
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July 13, 2012
Images by Rural Urban Framework
Rural to urban migration has been emptying country-sides the world over for the past half-century. People leave behind their extended families and their homes to try and make it in the big city, striving with millions of others in hemmed-in streets, hurtling toward the future. Social critics harp on the dangerous and difficult conditions facing migrants once they arrive in their chosen metropolis, but generally neglect to examine the conditions they leave behind in their rural communities, where they were deprived of skills, labor, and knowledge.
In the village Shijia, near Xi’an, the migration of skilled community members to larger cities has meant the gradual disremembrance and eventual loss of the region’s building heritage. Now, non-local contractors build concrete-and-tile apartment blocks where in past times, villagers had gathered to assemble mud-brick homes as a community. To combat this impoverishment of rural communities, Rural Urban Framework has built a house in Shijia using vernacular techniques and contemporary spatial methodologies to preserve and continue the rural tradition of self-reliance. Continue.
Traditional courtyards punctuate the house
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July 8, 2012
Houseboat on the Eilbek Canal by Sprenger von der Lippe
July. The heat is stifling, unrelenting, and even oppressive to those of us without a/c or just a reliable fan. What’s the escape? Aside from a nice chilled beverage (I’m nursing an ice-cold Mexican Coke), we present the coolest architecture of the week. Click on through.
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July 6, 2012
The traditional form of a Buddhist temple consists of a stupa or a pagoda, a central spire around which worshippers are supposed to circumambulate, and cloisters to house the monks and their offices. The Buddhist temple soon to be built in Taichang, China, a town between Shanghai and Suzhou, revisits these classic elements with an eye to reinterpreting them to match China’s modern energy and spirit of innovation.
The architect, Miliy Design, generated the form from studies of Mobius strips in varying configurations, altering the traditional path of circumambulation into one that is dynamic and unstable, perhaps reflecting new quantum physics-based visions of the universe’s structure, in opposition to older, more Platonic, cosmologies. The Mobius strip also serves as a metaphor for reincarnation, with the beginning and ending of the worshipper’s path occurring at the same point.
[Miliy Design via +MOOD]
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July 3, 2012
The BIG-designed tower rises above the urban haze; All images: BIG via A/N Blog
BIG has unveiled renderings for a new tower in the Chinese city of Tianjin which is to be among the tallest in the world. The first renderings of the conceptual tower, officially named the Rose Rock International Financial Center, depict a wedge-like monolith rising above a cloud of fog (or pollutants?) into the stratosphere. The skyscraper is part of a new business district that will replace some of Tianjin’s maritime industrial areas, and is conceived of as the central hub for the new district’s blend of mixed-use, commercial, and historic development. Bjarke Ingels has said that the tower is inspired in part by Rockefeller Center, as it also uses “an architectural landscape of urban plazas and roof gardens designed to stimulate and cultivate the life between the buildings”–an unsurprising admission given the project’s sponsorship by the Rockefeller-run Rose Rock Group.
Climbing more than 500 meters into the air, the skyscraper is deserving of the designation ‘supertall,’ though this height is achieved in a most basic way: by mimicking the form of a mountain. Pixelated tiers rise one above the other to create a sort of elongated mound, all of which makes BIG’s physical model of the building look as though it is built out of LEGOs (which, like BIG, hail from Denmark).
Like much of BIG’s work, the design inspires a quiet joy, despite its apparent simplicity. Hopefully, it will not suffer the same fate as its supertall cousin in Dubai: emptiness.
Public space was a big focus of the project
[via A/N Blog]
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June 18, 2012
Skyscaper chart via CNNGO
In December of last year, Chinese developer Broad Sustainable Building (BSB) constructed a 30-story hotel prototype in 15 days. 360 hours. Seems they were just getting started. The construction company has announced plans to build an 838 meter (2750 feet) tall skyscraper in Changsha, Hunan PR, and they say they’ll do it in just 90 days. 2160 hours!
As CNNGO reports, ‘Sky City’ would become the world’s tallest tower, eclipsing Dubai’s Burj Khalifa by just 10 meters. While that building took some 5 years to complete, the new superstructure, estimated at RMB 4 million ($628 million), would not only be far cheaper than rival skyscrapers (compared to Burj’s $1.5billion price tag and the $2.2 billion Shanghai Tower), but will also employ sustainable building techniques and systems unheard of at such scales. BSB says the 220-story tower, which will offer 1 million square meters of occupiable space linked by 104 elevators, will consist almost entirely of prefabricated modules that will be stacked on site–the key to the neck-breaking construction times that the company is promising. The building will also feature innovations such as quadruple glazing and thick (quake-resistant) exterior walls that will significantly cut down its energy consumption. The company hopes that Sky City will receive the necessary approval to break ground by November of this year, with the project’s completion following in January 2013.
A possible rendering of ‘Sky City’, via Inhabitat
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June 7, 2012
All images: AP
Just one year after announcing ambitious plans to build a copy of a small idyllic Austrian mountain village, Chinese developers have unveiled their clone hamlet. Located just outside the southeastern city of Huizhou, the new village is a close approximation of Hallstatt, Vienna, complete with rows of pastel-colored chalets, architectural finials, and even an exact replica of the town clock tower that characterize the 900-year old original. Overseen and operated by Minmetals Land Inc., the $940 million project was recently completed, with Halstatt mayor Alexander Scheutz on hand to open the complex to tourists this past Saturday.
When news of the project spread last summer, Hallstatt residents expressed outrage at the idea of the Chinese fake, threatening to make an appeal to UNESCO to potentially halt the building. The town soon came around, however, after realizing the great promotional opportunity the Chinese development presented. When Scheutz opened the site over the weekend, he did so after signing a cultural exchange agreement with local authorities, expressing pride at the accomplishment and pledging mutual support for the endeavor.
As Reuters reports, the Chinese Hallstatt is comprised of expensive housing units for the city’s nouveau riche, with other shops and sites for tourists. The main square, modeled on the Austrian town’s marketplace, is strewn with photographs of the local replica landmarks, while staff constantly water and maintain the extensive gardens that line and surround the village. The scheme is working, claimed the Chinese developers and the visiting Austrian delegation. The number of visitors from China to Hallstatt was near negligent half a decade ago, but the project has seems to have set off a significant boost in Chinese tourists to the village, with thousands now flocking to the alpine retreat. We’ll see if the new Hallstatt enjoys the same success.
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