Renderings: SOM

Architizer is hosting the world’s definitive architectural awards program, with 50+ categories and 200+ jurors. As part of an ongoing series, we’re spotlighting projects that fit the “Plus” categories, which tap into topical and culturally relevant themes. Today, in an effort to show you examples of good candidates for the Plus awards, we present five “Architecture + Mobility” projects.  To see a full list of categories and learn more about the awards, visit architizerawards.com.

Cities never stand still, so why should architecture? The future of buildings is adaptability, and mobility can augment the special powers of architecture to encompass greater experiences, while contributing more to the urban whole at large. Still, it’s not enough for buildings to move on their own; it’s the development and infrastructural connective tissues between and beyond city blocks that proves just as important.

The way we get around the city is changing, and so the services that the city has to offer are shifting as well. Fixed institutions like universities and libraries will need to be just as agile as food trucks. Commerce can venture out from their flagship shops on Soho and literally “pop-up” and sprout throughout the city. Similarly, more will be expected from cars and automobile circulation, just as larger urban developments will need to be embedded with urban spaces. Motion is the key to the future of the city, and the A+: Mobility Award will honor the best project that reflects this fundamental shift.

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Beyond the Street, Mengyi Fan and Marc Moukarzel

The GIF wave has hit the architecture community hard. Case in point, Storefront for Art and Architecture‘s GIF-themed halloween party, where architects are being invited to submit their pocket-size animations to be screened at this year’s costume crawl.But the trend has also infiltrated academic channels. As part of Experiments in Motion, architecture students at Columbia University GSAPP worked with Audi of America on a year long collaboration looking at the future of mobility in New York City. What else would an architecture and automotive collaboration produce but GIF visions of a city in motion?

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Audi of America and Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP) have teamed up for an awesome exhibition called “Experiments in Motion.” The show, curated by Christopher Barley and Troy Conrad Therrien, is exhibited next to the Low Line underground park model in an Essex Street warehouse, further exploring the future of mobility, urban space, and transportation within (and below) the city. Read More.

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It’s been a long journey for James Ramsey and Dan Barasch, the creators of the Lowline. Since they first announced their admittedly zany idea over a year ago, they’ve spent that time dutifully shopping the project all over town, so to speak, meeting with investors, sponsors, tech companies, fabricators, and community board members. Read more.

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‘Beyond the Street‘

By 2030, New York City is projected to be home to 9.1 million inhabitants. Given the rigidities of the city’s natural and built topographies, New York will have to undergo a hyper-densification to accommodate its growing populace. But what’s to happen when the existing networks of infrastructure and housing have reached their maximum capacity? “After the Street“, an ‘Experiments in Motion‘ studio sponsored by Columbia University GSAPP and Audi of America, charged eight students to develop an answer to this very problem. Recent grads Mengyi Fan and Marc Moukarzel responded by looking to the street to find the city’s great “unexploited building space”–where they think the next step in New York’s (inward) expansion will unfold. Continue.

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Rendering depicting the “Imaging the Lowline” exhibition; credit: Lowline

One year since the “Lowline” project was first announced, the scheme is moving one step closer to reality. Or rather, a reality. Dan Barasch and James Ramsey, the founders behind what could be the world’s first underground park, have developed their initial idea sufficiently to produce a working prototype of the solar collectors that would illuminate the subterranean park. They will premiere the system–which uses fiber-optic power to filter and distribute light from above down to the underground space–at the “Imagining the Lowline” exhibition that opens September 15. Continue.

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