S9 Architecture’s Dock 72, a 17-storey commercial office project expected to bring 4,000 workers to the Brooklyn Navy Yard area, has been topped out this month marking the completion of the building’s steel superstructure.
Over 350 construction workers, local business leaders, community representatives and public officials attended the ceremony, which ended with the raising of the final beam signed by all the members of the Dock 72 team.
J. MAYER H., in partnership with Architekten, celebrated the groundbreaking ceremony for their competition-winning Pavillon am Ring Project in Freiburg, Germany. Located at the edge of Freiburg’s historic district, this new tram stop will feature a café and dynamic roof structure.
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In the Colombian city of Medellin, a new headquarters is being constructed for the Empresa de Desarrollo Urbano (Urban Development Company), combining optimal thermal performance with local urban regeneration. The new EDU headquarters is the result of a three-part collaboration between the public company, the private sector, and Professor Salmaan Craig from the Harvard Graduate School of Design who has family roots in the Colombian capital.
Constructed on the site of the former EDU headquarters on San Antonio Park, the scheme aims to act as a benchmark for sustainable public buildings in Medellin, embracing the mantra of “building that breath."
As a specialist in materials, thermal design, and building physics, Professor Craig (EngD) voluntarily offered his service to the scheme’s realization. Below, he explains the thermodynamic challenges behind the building’s conception.
Construction is now underway on Columbia University’s new University Forum and Academic Conference Center, designed by Renzo Piano Building Workshop and Dattner Architects. Located at the school’s new Manhattanville campus at the corner of West 125th Street and Broadway, the 55,980 square foot building will serve as a new home for academic conferences and a meeting place where scholars from many fields can gather to share ideas.
Vincent Callebaut Architectures has released in-progress images of their Tao Zhu Yin Yuan sustainable tower, under construction in the Xinjin District of Taipei City, Taiwan. The tower’s rotating form draws inspiration from the double helix structure of DNA and will be covered in 23,000 trees in its aim to become a pioneering sustainable residential eco-construction that finds “the right symbiosis between the human being and the Nature.”
Foster + Partners' Apple 2 Campus is racing towards its December 2016 completion date. As seen in this drone video captured by aerial videographer Matthew Roberts, the exterior of the spaceship-like main building is nearly finished, with many of the campus' other buildings, such as the auditorium, the research & development center and the 100,000 square foot corporate fitness center, also approaching full realization.
Henning Larsen has been selected to design a pavilion for Denmark for the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. Opening on Ipanema Beach from August 4-21, 2016, the pavilion – named “The Heart of Denmark” – will feature a tent structure that utilizes building techniques appropriated from sailboat construction. Inspired by Denmark’s maritime history, Danish architecture, the landscape of Rio de Janeiro and the buildings of Oscar Niemeyer, the pavilion will marry aesthetic iconography of both Denmark and Brazil.
Santiago Calatrava's long-awaited World Trade Center Oculus has officially opened. Thanks to EarthCam and the project's contractor Skanska USA, you can watch the $4 billion transportation hub take shape over the course of 42 months in just 65 seconds, from June 2011 to December 2014. For more, see what the critics have to say about the newly opened building here.
After the Bolsheviks secured power in Russia in the late 1910s and eventually created the Soviet Union in 1922, one of the first orders of business was a new campaign, Novyi bit (new everyday life), which sought to advance many of the most hallowed causes of their newly minted socialism. The initiative’s great success came from the bold designs of Constructivist artists such as Alexander Rodchenko, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and Lyubov Popova. Using a high-contrast visual language and a combination of words and symbols, the graphics were arresting and comprehensible in a post-tsarist country that was largely illiterate, and became some of the most recognizable examples of twentieth century graphics and political propaganda.
It's hard not to see the connection between the styles of the Constructivists and the unusual graphics created by NL Architects in association with BeL (Bernhardt und Leeser) Sozietät für Architektur BDA for their competition-winning proposal for Hamburg’s St. Pauli neighborhood, consisting of an urban plan of housing and other amenities at the former site of Esso Häuser on the Spielbudenplatz. And, while this stylistic connection may not have been intentionally drawn by the architects - the inspiration for the graphics is not mentioned in the four-page project description - it is oddly appropriate for this particular development.
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Selected as the winner of an international competition, Penda’s landscape pavilion for the 10th international Garden Expo in Wuhan, China seeks to highlight the importance of clean water and protecting the environment. Dubbed “Where the River Runs,” the pavilion takes visitors through a landscape of hills and valleys on a pathway resembling a river. Each visitor is given seeds to plant, taking over “the function of a river as they bring life to the pavilion.”
The 1,500-square-meter-pavilion is currently under construction and is set to be completed this year. Learn more about the design after the break.
Five years after Studio Architektoniczne Kwadrat's design was selected as the winner, the Museum of the Second World War in Gdańsk, Poland is nearing completion, with a deadline set for Summer 2016. Presenting the narrative of the Second World War in a comprehensive way, the museum will focus specifically on the war’s impact on the everyday life of civilians and soldiers. The choice of Gdańsk as the site of the museum is also significant – not only was it where the war broke out, it was also where Solidarity emerged during the post-war division of the world.
133 years since the laying of its foundation, the construction of Antoni Gaudí's Sagrada Família has entered its final phase. This news was announced in a recent press conference by the project's directing architect Jordi Faulí, who will oversee the completion of six new towers that will raise the "Tower of Jesus Christ" to 172.5 meters-tall, making it the tallest religious structure in Europe and Barcelona's tallest building.
The final stage will include the construction of the 172.5 meter Tower of Jesus Christ, as well as five other 135-meter towers honoring the Virgin Mary and the four apostles.
More information and a video after the break.
Overlapped with commentary by the late Steve Jobs, a new video update by drone pilot Duncan Sinfield has captured Apple Campus 2 taking shape. According to the report on MacRumors, work is still being done on the main building's multi-level underground parking structure, while the west campus parking structure is nearly complete. The auditorium now has interior walls and progress is being made on the Tantau development housing research facilities.
Vo Trong Nghia Architects has begun work on FPT University Ho Chi Minh City, a building set to begin a renewal of the natural landscape previously destroyed by mass development. In the city of Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam, only 0.25% of the city is covered in greenery, contributing to environmental stress on its infrastructure - frequent energy shortages, increased pollution, and rising temperatures are more common as the city grows. Read more after the break
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Aedas has begun construction on their winning entry to design the new Sina Headquarters in China. Located south of the Beijing Zhongguancun Software Park, the building program will include open office area, conference rooms, media rooms, library, entertainment rooms, a canteen and other supporting amenities.
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MAD Architects has topped out on Chaoyang Park Plaza, a 120-meter-high mixed use development rising in the central business district (CBD) of Beijing on the southern edge of Chaoyang Park, one of the city's largest parks. A product of Ma Yansong’s “Shanshui City” concept, which aims reintroduce nature into the urban realm, the building is designed to "push the boundary of the urbanization process in modern cosmopolitan life by creating a dialogue between artificial scenery and natural landscapes."
Richard Meier & Partners has topped out on their Four Season’s expansion to the historic Russell Pancoast-designed “Surf Club” in Florida. Scheduled to complete next year, the luxury hospitality and residential project is comprised of two, 12-story towers, offering 150 private units, alongside an 80-room hotel on 9-acres of Surfside oceanfront property. Read on for more in-progress images. You can learn more about the project, here.
The Bordeaux Wine Museum’s wooden structure has been completed, the first step in an ambitious project slated to open in 2016. Designed by XTU Architects, and situated along the coast of the river Garonne in Bordeaux, France, the museum aims to stand as a beacon and “guardian angel” against the skyline of the riverbank. Inspired by the timeless spirit of French wine, the building forms flow in a continuous space without corners, evoking the circular motion that awakens a wine before tasting.
Field Condition has published a photographic tour through BIG’s first New York project, two months after W57 topped out. A “courtscraper,” as the Danish practice affectionately calls it, the 32-story, 709-unit tower is a hybrid of the European courtyard block and New York City skyscraper. It’s tetrahedral shape, “born from logic,” is designed to provide every resident in the building's North Tower to have views of the Hudson River, while allowing sunlight deep into the building's interior space. View the project from within, after the break.
The first phase of Skidmore Owings & Merrill (SOM) and Renzo Piano Building Workshop's (RPBW) expansive Manhattanville Campus plan for Columbia University is making significant progress; completion is nearing on a highly-anticipated portion of the project - RPBW's LEED platinum Jerome L. Greene Science Center, which is scheduled to open in Fall of 2016 just six miles North of the practice's soon-to-open Whitney Museum.
More on the mixed-use structure after the break.
Nearly four years after the start of its construction, South America’s first Bahá’í temple is beginning to take shape. Designed by Canadian firm Hariri Pontarini Architects, the temple is being constructed at the foothills of the Andes in Santiago, Chile. The building is comprised of “nine translucent wings, rising directly from the ground, and giving the impression of floating over a large reflecting water pool,” describes the project’s website. Each wing is designed like a leaf, with a steel “main stem” and “secondary veins of steel” supporting its cast glass exterior. During the day, the cast glass will filter sunlight into the temple, while at night the temple’s interior lighting will produce a soft glow on the outside.
The structure’s steel columns are now fully self-supported on its concrete foundation, and the steel frames and interior marble panels of each of the nine wings have been completed. In October, the project reached an important milestone as the installation of the cast glass cladding began on the outside of the wings.
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