The book offers an inside look at the firms collaboration with architects and designers.

Continue reading " Book - Project Vitra - By Cornel Windlin & Rolf Fehlbaum - Publisher: Birkhäuser "

“Restoring the building’s dignity was integral to our design approach for the completed scheme.”

Margarida Caldeira
Project architect Broadway Malyan

Continue reading " Broadway Malyan - Rossio Station - Lisbon, Portugal "

The Marble clad roofscape forms a large public space in the landscape of the city and the fjord.

Continue reading " Snøhetta - Oslo Opera House - Oslo, Norway "

In celebration of Jørn Utzon’s 90th birthday the Danish Architectural Press have published a tribute to the man whose building became a symbol for a city.

Continue reading " Book - A Tribute to Jørn Utzon - Publisher: The Danish Architectural Press "

In order to fit in the requested program, a solid volume became the base for the design.

Continue reading " Rem Koolhaas OMA - The Brewery Site - Copenhagen, Denmark "

The exhibition about the architect and furniture designer Marks the opening of Finn Juhl’s house as part of the museum complex.

Continue reading " Home of Finn Juhl - Ordrupgaard - Ordrup, Denmark "

In 2007, the City of Portland invited architects from around the world to share ideas on the design possibilities of housing oriented to shared courtyards. Portland is promoting courtyard housing as an additional infill housing type that can provide a quality living environment at densities higher than conventional detached housing.

The competition asked invited entrants to suggest compelling solutions to several key challenges:
- How can courtyard housing be designed to serve as an attractive option for families with children?
- How can courtyards serve as useable outdoor space while also providing environmental sustainability benefits, act as a setting for community interaction while also respecting privacy needs, or serve as a pedestrian-oriented space while also accommodating cars?

- How can courtyard housing avoid a purely inward focus and contribute to Portland?s tradition of street-oriented urbanism?

This competition is part of a multi-pronged effort by the City of Portland to retain families with children in the city?s neighborhoods in the face of increasingly unaffordable conventional detached housing. This competition will be a key opportunity to explore how courtyard housing may help fill the need for new housing for families with children, as well as provide desirable options for other types of households.

The City of Portland intends to facilitate the construction of winning designs by providing funding to adapt designs to building sites and encouraging developers to partner with winning designers in an anticipated design-build competition.

The competition had two submission categories based on two types of infill site opportunities common in different parts of Portland:
1. Inner Site: 100′ wide by 100′ deep; Housing program: 4-10 units oriented to a shared courtyard with one parking space per unit.
2. Eastern Site: 95′-wide by 180′ deep; Housing program: 7-17 units oriented to a shared courtyard with one parking space per unit.

The winners in each category are:

INNER SITE:
1. Honor Award - $5,000 prize, Keith Rivera and Kristin Anderson, Santa Barbara, California (Image 1 above)
2. Merit Award - $2,500 prize, Peter Keyes, Lucas Posada, Kai Yonezawa, and Tyler Nishitani, Eugene and Portland, Oregon (Image 2 above)
3. Citation Award - $1,500 prize, Steven Bull, James Steel, and Dan Rusler, Seattle, Washington (Image 3 above)
4. Honorable Mention - $1,000 prize, Donald Rattner, Andrew Friedman, Nathaniel Brooks, Krystof Nowak, and Catherine Popple, New York, New York

EASTERN SITE:
1. Honor Award - $5,000 prize, Emory Baldwin, Shirley Tomita, Masumi Saito, Lara Normand, Jocelyn Freilinger, Shawna Sherman, and Clara Berridge, Seattle, Washington (Image 4 above)
2. Merit Award and People’s Choice - $2,500 prize, The Green Sand Inc. Architecture and Design Team of Matthew Goyke, Steven Gangwes, Morris Onishi, Ethan Levine, and Rhonda Goyke, Honolulu, Hawaii (Image 5 above)
3. Citation Award - $1,500 prize, Steven Dangermond and Christopher Keane, Portland, Oregon (Image 6 above)
4. Honorable Mention - $1,000 prize, Matthew Priest and Jerome Burgos, New York, New York

To view all the entries and obtain complete information on the competition, visit the Courtyard Housing website.

Posted by Mario Cipresso

Continue reading " Article / Portland Courtyard Housing Competition Results by Portland Bureau of Planning "

The spirit of the old foundry lives on in this chic design hotel in the red-light district of Hamburg.

Continue reading " Design Hotel - East Hotel - Hamburg, Germany "

The 380 acre redevelopment zone will be a mix of office, retail, residential, and cultural uses.

Continue reading " KK Letter - Visiting HafenCity - Hamburg, Germany "

In academia, we try to convince young architects that their charge is to design ’space’ rather than buildings. A notion that I subscribe to and one of several ideals that ‘Softspace’ sets its focus on. More often than not, architectural space is residual space. Something left over that exists between structure and conventional architectural systems and form. This is the unfortunate result of our relative inability to quantify and qualify space in the broader sense of the term. This is especially unfortunate when you consider that we only truly experience architecture as you occupy and move through it.

‘Softspace’ begins to identify the potential inherent in the use of digital tools to articulate this traditionally intangible space while referring to its precedent and then projecting and suggesting possible futures. To this end, the editors present a carefully selected series of projects and essays in a somewhat linear and accretional manner, rather than topically, that demonstrate the ability of new material understandings to represent new realities.

The projects are generally of a suggestive and theoretical nature and typically employ new media and digital fabrication techniques. For example, in Sean Lally’s SIM Residence, we find an architecture of adaptation that is less concerned with its external appearance than with accommodating varying internal conditions through systems that cycle through periods of activity/inactivity as necessary. Other works from Open Source Architecture, Servo, Ocean North and Gnuform address topics such as ‘Dissipative Procedures’ to ‘Nested Capacities, gradient thresholds and modulated environments’.

The writing, including chapters by Lars Lerup, Christopher Hight and others is as thought-provoking as the projects. The book operates well as an indicator of the potential trajectory of space making where form accommodates spatial agendas, specifically as it applies to new media and historical precedent.

Review By Mario Cipresso

Continue reading " Article / Softspace: From a Representation of Form to a Simulation of Space by Edited by Sean Lally & Jessica Young "