March 28, 2013
Easter is just around the corner, and you don’t need to celebrate the holiday to enjoy all the Cadbury Creme Eggs, marshmallow Peeps, and chocolate bunnies currently in season. But there’s one guilt-free Easter tradition that we (gasp!) love even more than candy: That’s the good ole-fashioned Easter Egg Hunt. We’ve gone all over the world and back to find the best, most labyrinthian, and prettiest public parks to hide—or search for—those colorful little treasures. From ancient ruins to futuristic gardens, here are our nine favorite places for an Easter Egg Hunt. Click through to see them all!
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March 14, 2013
Project: Cairns Botanic Gardens Visitors Centre
Architect: Charles Wright Architects
Location: Cairns, Australia
Charles Wright Architects recently completed this new gateway to the botanic gardens of Cairns, a city with a mission to be seen as progressive and sustainable both nationally and globally. Moving away from the traditional, vernacular architecture of the city, this striking mirrored building reflects the surrounding vegetation and blends seamlessly into the landscape and gardens. The visitor center is a model for green building, featuring solar panels for feedback into the energy grid, stormwater harvesting tanks, mixed-mode air-conditioning systems, long lifecycle-efficiency materials and construction, and naturally ventilated circulation corridors.
Read more about this project in the Architizer database.
Photos: Patrick Bingham Hall
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March 6, 2013
Landscaping is the butt of many an undergraduate architecture student joke. But what do undergrads know about anything, right? At its best, landscaping melds structure and context, ensuring that the best attributes of the site — or the sense of “place,” if you prefer — are preserved while still accommodating the new building. This relationship can be very literal (i.e. a “green-lawned” building) or more general, functioning in more subtle ways (i,e, a park). In both senses, landscaping — in which we include gardens and parks — is an essential component to the making of architecture.
The finalists for the Architizer A+ “Landscaping” and “Parks/Pavilions” awards make a great case for the indispensability of landscape design. Click through to see them all!
(Psst. You’ve got just 2 days left to vote for your favorites! Head over to the Awards site to vote now.)
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February 14, 2013
It’s official. After being shelved last fall for its £140 million price tag, Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s ambitious plan to transform a city garden in Aberdeen, Scotland, into an aerial web of granite-paved greenways is being scrapped. Aberdeen’s city council has announced its redevelopment plans for the city center, which include only a £20 million allowance for pedestrian amenities. As city councillor Fraser Forsyth told the Evening Express, the Granite Web—as the project is known—has entered the realm of a “totally imaginary situation” alongside “unicorns and tooth fairies.” Read more.
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January 31, 2013
Phil the Groundhog at the Garden Shed; All Photoshop work: Peter Levins
The frost of winter is on the thaw, and spring will come early this year! At least, that’s our take on the results from this year’s Groundhog Day. No, the furry little prognosticator—that would be Phil—will not see his shadow this coming Saturday (Feb. 2), and that’s that.
So what better way to welcome the new season than with the best of “spring architecture”? It’s something we just made up, but by which we mean houses that photograph real well in the springtime, when flowers are coming into bloom, the sky is blue, and the sun hasn’t reached its greatest intensity yet. We’ve gone ahead and added Phil in there just to be festive, so see if you can spot him in the following 10 projects. Click through for the slideshow.
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January 28, 2013
Project: Garden and House
Architect: Ryue Nishizawa
Location: Tokyo, Japan
Function: Confronted with a 4-meter-wide site in a dense commercial district of Tokyo, the architect used all glass walls in order to maximize the interior space. This combined home-and-work place uses roof gardens to bring nature into the urban environment — and add another level of privacy. Read more about this project in the Architizer database.
Photos: Iwan Baan
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November 7, 2012
Building: Malopolska Garden of Arts
Architect: Ingarden & Ewy Architekci
Location: Krakow, Poland
Why We Liked This:
Designed to be a new cultural center for Krakow, this project transforms what was once a 19th-century horse shed into a contemporary arts hall. The scale of the building is in line with the historic fabric in which it’s enmeshed, while its form is respective of its surroundings without pandering to them. Thin wood slats line the facade of the structure as it cascades up and down the block, giving the center a razor-like profile, To one end, the building opens up to the street, presenting an “urban garden” to the neighborhood beyond that includes plant life, seating, and programmable space for a host of activities. See more of this project in the Architizer database here.
You think you’ve got a better project? Submit it for an Architizer A+ Award!
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October 11, 2012
LA-based firm Jerde is known for working with the best of the best in local and organic design to create public spaces that become popular destinations around the world. (We smell an Architecture+Collaboration A+ contender here.) Its latest project, Mecenatpolis, in Seoul, Korea, is no exception, with the enormous multi-use space sure to put the up-and-coming neighborhood of Hapjeong on the map. Read more!
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September 5, 2012
THUPDI and Tsinghua University recently won the American Society of Landscape Architecture 2012 Honor Award for transforming an abandoned rock quarry in Shanghai into a garden oasis, complete with floating water walkway. After hearing the site had been closed to the public for over a decade, the team spent more than 6 years cleaning, planting, and restructuring the massive space. The final design is a unique multi-layered park that works closely with its quarry roots. Read more
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June 25, 2012
Last month, we wrote about the soaring steel “supertrees” that have cropped up on the shore of Singapore Bay. Those spindly structures, whose moss-covered trunks rise some 25-50 meters skyward before fanning out into flower-bearing branches, are just part of Gardens by the Bay, a sweeping greenscape that foregrounds Moshe Safdie’s Marina Bay Sands complex.
Designed by Grant Associates in collaboration with Wilkinson Eyre Architects, the just-completed park consists of several pavilions and zones, including a pair of swelling steel-and-glass conservatories–so-called ‘biodomes’–housing horticulture sourced from both mild and tropical climates and, among other things, an all-weather “edutainment” space. There are also several collections of themed gardens, such as the ‘Heritage Gardens’–four in total, each of which have been named and planned according to the floral catalog they contain–and the ‘World of Plants’, which consists of six gardens that collectively aim to showcase the planet’s “biodiversity of plant life.” Don’t miss the Marina promenade a kilometer-long boardwalk that snakes along the marina’s edge and connects the gardens to the city center or forget to charter a boat taxi down ‘Dragonfly Lake’, an equally large water feature that creates a dramatic setting from which to view the complex as a whole. Click through for more.
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