Studio Shift | Retail Center | Riverside Miyi, South Lake

Studio Shift newest retail center runs along the riverside in Miyi, and its position allows it to capitalize on the naturally cleansed waters of the South Lake area. The center creates a significant public space with a direct connection to the water so the complex becomes a destination for relaxation and water-based recreation due to the favorable climate. Retail is arranged such that equipment for various watercrafts, which can be launched directly from the rental facility, line the channel while restaurants and a cafe sit along the pier.

More about the retail center after the break.

Evoking the materiality and massing of the mountainous terrain of Miyi, the three buildings are conceptually carved from one solid entity and reconnected through the public plaza. The subtractive process frames views to the surroundings. The stone-clad facade suggests weight and permanence and utilizes locally-sourced materials.

Arhdaily

An extensive climbing wall that can be used both from the exterior and the intrior is articulated as a glass-clad void inserted into the solid mass of the structure. The south-facing plaza maximizes sun exposure as it extends outward, its edge disintegrating into the water as a series of steps enabling residents and tourists to immerse their feet in the refreshing and naturally cleansed waters of the South Lake. It is here where the descending plaza stairs meet a gradually submerged plane, providing the critical, yet casual transition from land to water-based activity.

Buckminster Fuller Challenge 2010 | Semifinalists

The distinguished jury will select a winner who will be presented with the OmniOculi sculpture and the $100,000 prize money to honor and encourage further development of their work at a public ceremony in Washington DC, on June 5, 2010.

The thirty proposals currently under consideration have undergone a rigorous review for adherence to the entry criteria including an interview with the individual or team behind the strategy. They were advanced from a pool of 215 entries submitted. The titles and project leads of these entries are listed below. The jury will spend the next two months reviewing the entries and determining finalists.

SEMI-FINALISTS for the 2010 BUCKMINSTER FULLER CHALLENGE
(in the order they were submitted)

#	Project Title	Name	50 Word Summary from the Entrant
1	Watergy Greenhouse	Martin Buchholz, Inventor and Initiator of Watergy	Watergy is a bionic concept, immitating the biosphere within an enclosure, using wind, rain and related energy dissipation. It allows 85% recycling of irrigation water, while accumulation of CO2 leads to higher rates of photosynthesis. Further applications are plant protection (no pesticides), processing of greywater, desalination and heat supply.
2	Aclima: A system for creating and harnessing collective eco-intelligence for cleaner air and reduced climate change emissions	Antero Garcia, Davida Herzl, Reza Naima, Greg Niemeyer	Aclima implements a bottom-up approach to monitoring and managing air pollution and GHG emissions. Our distributed system relies upon and empowers individuals to measure air, as opposed to the current institutional approach. Leveraging affordable sensors, cloud-computing, crowdsourcing, and social networks, our system enables transformation at personal, community and global scales.
3	Barefoot Women Solar Engineers of Africa, Asia and Latin America	Bunker Roy of The Barefoot College, Tilonia, Rajasthan, India	The Barefoot approach has reached remote rural inaccessible villages in 15 of the least developed countries in Africa. Illiterate rural mothers and grandmothers who have never left their villages in their lives within 6 months of training (without using the written word) in India have solar electrified their own villages.
4	GrowTown: It's for Everyone - It's Sustainable - It Starts Now	Beth Hagenbuch Kenneth Weikal Stephen Deak David Peterhans Danny Bulemore	GrowTown is a non-profit organization dedicated to enabling neighborhoods, left fragmented in post-industrial cities and landscapes, to self-organize. Through grassroots community-driven design and local leadership, the Local Food Economy is the catalyst for growing resilient and sustainable neighborhoods that can respond to the important challenges of our time.
5	Operation Hope - Permanent water and food security for Africa's impoverished millions	Allan Savory on behalf of Africa Centre for Holistic Management Trustees and staff	This project demonstrates how to reverse desertification of the world's savannas and grasslands, thereby contributing enormously to mitigating climate change, biomass burning, drought, flood, drying of rivers and underground waters, disappearing wildlife, massive poverty, social breakdown, violence and genocide.
6	Jaaga	Freeman Murray Archana Prasad Matias Echanove Rahul Srivastava	We design and market pallet rack based housing kits which provide the urban poor and disaster relief organizations with inexpensive high density shelter & services. Our systems are extremely modular, can be erected and disassembled very quickly, and have a positive environmental impact on the land upon which they rest.
7	Tibet is the High Ground - 3rd Variation	Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison	The work "Tibet is the High Ground III" proposes an ecologically conceived resolution to the present de-glaciation and subsequent catastrophic outcomes to the 2.5 million square kilometer Tibetan Plateau and the seven major rivers that flow from it through Asia, a bio-cultural approach at the scale of the problem.
8	The Acceleration Of Innovation	Jeff Rose- Executive Director Jock Brandis-Director of Research and Development	The Full Belly Project (FBP) – Acceleration of Innovation Program empowers the entrepreneurial poor by training them to manufacture and sell locally produced low-cost technologies. Simple technolgoies catalyze change by creating new businesses, increasing household income, increasing efficiency, improving the environment and improving health.
9	Seed-Scale: A Universal Process for Community Change	Daniel Taylor, President of Future Generations Carl E. Taylor, Professor Emeritus of the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health and Senior Health Advisor for Future Generations	There are no universal solutions for cultural, economic, and ecological sustainability, but there is a universal process to identify local solutions. The Seed-Scale process enables communities to gather their own human energies and invent sustainable solutions that expand to more communities.
10	Sheltering U.S. Persons Unsheltered: Creating Legally Conforming, Economically Sustainable Emergency and Transitional Shelter	Bruce LeBel, Executive Director, World Shelters Steven Elias, Co-Founder, World Shelters	World Shelters' mission is to provide temporary and transitional shelter for persons in need, including persons unsheltered in the U.S., a.k.a. "homeless". We have developed an economically sustainable, jurisdictionally conforming and technically unique design for emergency and transitional shelter that we propose to demonstrate in three jurisdictions in California.
11	LIFT	Prithula Prosun	The design solution addresses the critical need of low cost housing to provide shelter for the rising number of slum inhabitants in flood prone areas. With the alarming rate of urbanization along with projected effects of global warming, flood protection will soon be a necessity for many low income communities.
12	Sustainable Disaster Response	Scott Gibson, Eric Klein, Simon Draper, Alissa Sears	Sustainable Disaster Response, SDR, is an integrated, sustainable disaster response and recovery system that utilizes available people and resources to implement innovative renewable energy solutions that transform tragedy into sustainable community reconstruction. SDR uses disasters time of change to maximize efforts towards building a sustainable future.
13	Synchronicity 2: Public Water Purification Island	Jakub Szczesny	The island is a floating platform with nine outdoor fitness machines pumping polluted Vistula water through four filters to a basin placed in the center of the island giving drinkable water. The platform will be floating on Vistula river in the center of Warsaw.
14	ColaLife	Simon Berry	ColaLife harnesses sea-changes in corporate social responsibility and mobile-based micro-payments, proposing its AidPod distribution system, allowing local health agencies to make simple low-cost life-saving health supplies and awareness materials, ubiquitous, well-understood and easily available in the developing world, over-coming current transport, logistical and commercial barriers.
15	Plastic Island	Mr. F. K. R. Eilander Mr. D. J. Den Hartog	The goal of the Plastic Island Project is to use the existing Great Pacific Garbage Patch that was discovered twelve years ago by Charles Moore, to develop a self-sustaining island inhabited by around 800 people that will collect and recycle the tons of plastic floating around our oceans.
16	Fighting SAM (Severe Acute Malnutrition) in India	Compatible Technology International	Produce shelf stable, high energy, high protein ready to eat food products suitable for community-based treatment of Severe Acute Malnutrition for children under 5 years old. We will utilize locally available ingredients and transfer the technology to women-led local self help groups and small scale enterprises to promote self sufficiency.
17	GoodBank - a high transparency design for ethical banking	Bruce Cahan, President of Urban Logic (a 501(c)(3) nonprofit)	GoodBank is the high transparency design for a commercial bank, reconnecting money and meaning. Saving, shopping and investing true to one’s ethical values improves customer's credit rating at the bank, earns cash-back rewards for environmental and social causes, and inspires new transparency tools to enhance social financial literacy.
18	Resources	Elizabeth Damon	Re-Sources: Saving Living Systems: a replicable, multi-disciplinary, integrated-systems project addressing ecological degradation and cultural genocide. Phase one is the rich, undocumented water culture in the Tibetan areas of Western Sichuan. With grassroots, collaborative strategies, we will use the roots of this culture to teach sustainable practices for economic survival.
19	CITYSINK	Denise Hoffman Brandt	CITYSINK is a meta-park of dispersed landscape Infrastructure boosting carbon stocks in both short - term biomass storage and through formation of long- term sequestration reservoirs for soil organic carbon in New York City. Urban-landscape is reshaped into apparatus, empowering citizens to affect global ecologies through civic practice.
20	MicroEnergy Credits	April Allderdice, James Dailey	MicroEnergy Credits leverages the unprecedented growth of the $120 billion carbon markets as a catalytic source of funding to mobilize the 12,000 microfinance banks now reaching over a billion people, to help their microentrepreneurs affordably switch to healthy and clean energy sources as part of their journey out of poverty.
21	Living Building Challenge	Jason F. McLennan and Eden Brukman	The Living Building Challenge is a visionary strategy for creating a socially just, culturally rich and ecologically benign built environment. Rather than providing points for incremental improvements in building performance, it measures success against the end goal of true sustainability and provides a framework for restoring balance in the human ecosystem.
22	Eco-Boulevards	Martin Felsen + Sarah Dunn	Chicagoans discard over one billion gallons of Great Lakes water per day. This "wastewater" never replenishes one of the world's most vital resources. As a remedy, this project re-conceives the Chicago street-grid as a holistic Bio-System that captures, cleans and returns wastewater and storm-water to the Lakes via "Eco-Boulevards."
23	The Green Initiative: Self-Sufficiency for NGOs through Clean Energy	Dr. Basil Stamos, Social Investor John Tucker, CEO, Co-founder of New Hope for Cambodian Children (NHCC) Tim Waterfield, Chief Technology Officer for TGI Richard Cook, Partner Cook + Fox Architects	The Green Initiative is a social venture to increase the self-sufficiency of NGOs in the developing world through clean, affordable, reliable, and sustainable fuels. By allowing participants to simultaneously control operating costs and reduce dependence on fossil fuels, this solution reinforces the NGO network and represents a new model of financial and energy independence.
24	New York City (Steady) State (book, research, web project)	Terreform Inc.	New York City (Steady) State is an alternative plan for New York City based on a single predicate: it is possible for the city to become almost entirely self-sufficient within its political boundaries. At its conclusion, our project will have proven this and outlined the necessary steps to achieve it.
25	Light For All	Sameer Hajee	Reduce global CO2 emissions and light up rural households in developing countries by distributing an innovative and affordable lighting system to replace fuel-based lighting. The design and delivery model of Nuru Portable-on-demand (POD) lights, using human power to recharge, allows a greater reach and more immediate environmental impact than other lighting solutions.
26	The Green Island Project	Skip Staats, Dr. Tama Copeman, Glenn Rambach, Conrad Oakey, Valerie Kausen	Green Island Project is an isolated (or isolatable) municipality that meets some or all of its energy needs from local renewable sources. A post-industrial energy ecosystem that creates local jobs while reducing fossil fuel dependence, an opportunity to innovate next-generation sustainable infrastructures outside of the restrictions of legacy industrial models.
27	The S.A.T. Project, 4D City concept	Architects Jorge Serrano, Norma A. Pecorari, Valeria Serrano and Alejo Serrano, Sofia Serrano	Megacities around the world are at a crossroads, regarding climate change, sustainability of the built environment and urban gridlocks. The concept of 3D Transportation builds the technological platform to rethink the present concept of cities. S.A.T. PROJECT is the first mass public-private 3D Transportation system for people & freight in the world.
28	A Call to Farm : FarmShare	BK Farmyards	FarmShare reconnects farmers and consumers as co-producers of the foodscape. The strategy uses social media to pool all the resources of Brooklyn into a crowd-sourced decentralized farm. Voting for local food with their forks already, Brooklyn food activists will pool their time and their waste in A Call to Farm.
29	Samasource: Microwork for the Developing World	Leila C. Janah	Samasource enables marginalized people to receive life-changing work opportunities via the Internet. We provide microwork, technology's answer to microfinance. By training women, youth and refugees to complete paying remote tasks, we give them the ability to build livelihoods and become part of the digital economy.
30	STRUCTURES FOR WAVE ENERGY ABSORPTION AND COLONIZATION OF MANGROVES	The Center for Architecture, Science and Ecology	The research will test geosynthetic landscape systems to support human development in tropical regions simultaneous to critical mangrove biological processes. The interconnected structural networks are intended to facilitate ecosystem recovery, dissipate catastrophic storm impact, mitigate erosion and enable large-scale building development to co-exist with restorative mangrove-type vegetation.

Via

Gon Zifroni (Metahaven) | Void House | Brussels, Belgium

Void House, 2008–2009
Architecture: Gon Zifroni (Metahaven) assisted by POM-Archi for the construction
Photography: Filip Dujardin
Address: Sint-Jobsesteenweg 400, 1180 Brussels
The program and plan are structured by floors for the agency of spaces and voids outside and inside the house.
The house seen from the street. The architectural envelop as a limit between the public and the private is put to test and reprogrammed. The house is designed from the standpoint of the commissioned program—a private house for two—but also from that of the common non-program—public space.
The main working-living area on the first floor. Placed on concrete slabs, the wooden structure is made entirely of fir from the Black Forest. The walls and floors are lined with bamboo.
Second floor view including the coated steel stairways and windows starting at eye-level up to the highest roof line.
A slightly tilted, seven-meter roof opening allows daylight to reach all parts of the house.
The ground floor can be closed with pivoting wooden fences, yet keeping a permanent 5 meter deep public space under the built volume.
More at Abitare

rhiza A + D | Timberline Lodge | New Winter Entrance

The historic Timberline Lodge has a new winter entrance designed by Portland-based architecture firm rhiza A + D.
In 1956 a temporary winter entrance, made of corrugated metal, was first constructed to combat the high snow drifts that accumulate at the entrance every year. It continued to make an appearance every winter until now.
The new entrance is a reticulated structure that can be assembled at the onset of each year’s snow season and disassembled the following spring.
The entrance has been designed to withstand the snow and wind loads encountered on Mount Hood, Oregon.
Constructed of a series of parabolic arches, each profile of the entrance is waterjet-cut from half-inch-thick aluminum plate. Each arch is composed of three segments to allow for efficient handling and storage. Each arch module is 30 inches wide, reaching 20 ft across by 20 ft high at the front facade.
To support the double skin of translucent polycarbonate panels, each profile is interlaced with continuously welded ribs. The translucent polycarbonate panels are lightweight, durable and replaceable.

Project Details

Completed October of 2009
Architect rhiza A+D
Structural Engineer - Madden & Baughman Engineering, Inc
Lighting Design - Luma Lighting Design
General Contractor - Hoffman Structures, Inc.
Fabricator - Innovative Metal Design, LLC
Owner - US Forest Service
Fundraising Organisation - Friends of Timberline
Lodge Operator - RLK & Co

More at ARPLUS

Jennifer Aniston's House | Beverly Hills, California | Stephen Shadley

On a hillside overlooking Beverly Hills is a house that “vibrates with the love that created it,” says its owner, actress Jennifer Aniston.

“I want to say this just right,” she muses. “I am so proud of this house. And I want to celebrate the people who made it: the master craftsmen who poured so much of themselves into its creation.” Not the least of these is designer Stephen Shadley, who worked with her on the project for nearly two and a half years. “I’ll be lucky if I ever do anything with this kind of team and freedom again,” raves the designer. “It was a project without a problem.”

The designer has collaborated with Diane Keaton on two of her residences in Southern California (see Architectural Digest, November 2008 and April 2005) and one in Arizona (see Architectural Digest, April 1998) and with Woody Allen on the interiors of his apartment in New York City (see Architectural Digest, November 2008). He and Aniston had come close to working together on two other residences.

“I’d heard about this place, and when I saw it, I loved it. I knew it was my metier,” he explains. The house, which was designed by architect Harold W. Levitt in 1970, was under renovation at the time and was, Shadley recalls, “in rough shape. We essentially tore the house apart and rebuilt it.”

Via

SANAA Designs Artificial Landscape

Students and faculty at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale (EPFL) in Lausanne, Switzerland, will begin hiking the internal topography of the new Rolex Learning Center when it opens on February 22.
Designed by SANAA, the Japanese firm headed by Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, the 398,000-square-foot library and campus hub presents visitors with a concrete floor that slopes and swells like the surrounding Swiss landscape. People with mobility problems or those just feeling tired can take specially designed “inclined elevators,” glass boxes adapted from standard lift design.
The architects’ goal was to create one fluid space where students and researchers from the school’s various disciplines (science, engineering, technology, and architecture) can mingle in an environment with almost no traditional partitions. Instead of using steps, stairs, or walls, SANAA separated different functional areas by placing them in floor valleys or tucked between the five outdoor “patios” cut within the building’s rectangular footprint. These ovoid patios, which are surrounded by glazing, provide a variety of landscaped places for socializing and bring daylight into all parts of the one-story facility.
More here

Zaha Hadid | Fluidity & Design | Shaikh Ebrahim bin Mohammed Al Khalifa Center for Culture and Research, Bahrain

17 February 2010 - For her inaugural exhibition in the Gulf, Zaha Hadid - Fluidity & Design, the Pritzker Prize winning architect presents her practice’s continued exploration and research towards a new architectural language of fluidity that encompasses all scales of design – a built manifesto informed by originality and innovation. Evolving from the demands of greater complexity and variety in contemporary society, this new language is driven by the latest advances in computational design processes and stateof- the-art fabrication technologies.
Zaha Hadid views the fields of urbanism, architecture and design as inherently interrelated, with the fluid sensibility of her design projects impacting our own perception of space. In a dialogue of complex curvilinear geometries - each design morphologically conceived and shaped further by typological, functional and ergonomic considerations - Hadid reinvents the balance between object and space – establishing a direct discourse with the Cartesian galleries of the Shaikh Ebrahim Center and presenting the unbounded possibilities of her formal repertoire.

Showcased in the Bin Matar House, one of the traditional Bahraini houses restored by the Shaikh Ebrahim Center, Zaha Hadid – Fluidity & Design reveals the spatial complexity of Hadid’s visionary creations. The exhibition brings together a selection of works that articulate our immediate tactile environment, demonstrating Hadid’s radical reinterpretation of the space we occupy. The works included within the exhibition range from jewellery to large-scale furniture pieces, each produced as unique or limited edition pieces, giving the visitor a true overview of the range of Zaha Hadid’s design practice.
More here

Town Town Erdberg Vienna | COOP HIMMELB(L)AU

For its project Town Town Erdberg, COOP HIMMELB(L)AU will receive the Sustainability Award of the 2010 MIPIM Architectural Review Future Project Awards. The distinction will be presented during a prestigious ceremony at the international real estate summit MIPIM on March 17, 2010 in Cannes.

The intention of developing the office high-rise Town Town Erdberg was to generate a building which correlates to the principle 'Aesthetics of Sustainability'.
Through an energy active façade and an integrated wind turbine the building is producing more energy than it is actually consuming.
"According to that, Town Town Erdberg is not a passive house but an active house," said Wolf D. Prix, Design Principal and CEO of COOP HIMMELB(L)AU.
The prototype of the energy façade is currently tested in cooperation with SFL Technologies. Since 2002 the MIPIM Architectural Review Future Projects Awards have been granted for un-built or incomplete projects.
Kieran Long, Editor-in-Chief of Architectural Review states: "With a strong focus on creativity, these awards are a chance to showcase schemes that are examples of fine architecture, but have also responded to the clients development brief, and considered the way in which they will impact and contribute to the community around them.
More at earchitect

The Mock Architecture Firm Competition

WHAT IS THE MOCK FIRM COMPETITION?

The Mock Architecture Firm Competition is the next step in student-design competition. It is an exciting & innovative opportunity for students interested in the design/build industry to test their skills in a uniquely collaborative environment, compete on a national level and have their work evaluated by top industry professionals.

WHAT IS THE FOCUS OF THIS YEAR’S CONTEST?

This year’s theme is “Global Challenges: Architectural Solutions.” As we continue to make adjustments for the long journey into the 21st Century, we recognize the need and the privilege to utilize our talents and ideas to improve living conditions for our communities and beyond.. This year's International Skyscraper Challenge and Regional Homes Competition endeavors to achieve innovative dwelling solutions through vertical and single-family residential communities.

IS THERE A MIN/MAX FOR FIRM PARTICIPATION?

The minimum student participation for a mock architecture firm is two (2). The maximum number is four students plus one instructor. You can register as many teams from one class or one school as you like. However, only the top entry judged from among those submissions can qualify for finals.

WHO CAN ENTER?

Students who are currently in high school, and enrolled or previously enrolled in a technical. industrial or vocational design course. are eligible for the High School Division.

HOW DOES THE COMPETITION WORK?

Entrants are to submit concept sketches of the target project as a part of contest registration. Each sketch series must be accompanied by a minimum (1) one-page synopsis of your project proposal. .

The total collection of entries from each state are judged by contest sponsors in Chicago. All entries will qualify for finals unless submissions from a particular state number more than 10 or multiple entries are received from one school. In those cases the top-judged design idea will be selected to go to finals.

These finalists will gather in Chicago over a 2-3-day period in April to present the entirety of their work to a panel of industry professionals. The 2010 Most Outstanding Mock Firm along with the following will be awarded at the conclusion of the competition.

-Top Firm Organization
-Top Building Design
-Top Innovative Design
-Top Marketing Presentation

More at Chicago Architecture Today

Shanghai World Expo 2010 | China Pavillion

Construction is finally complete on the national pavilion for Shanghai’s 2010 World Expo, which is set to start on May 1st of this year.
The China Pavilion, also known as the Oriental Crown, represents the spirit of the people of China and showcases a variety of sustainable building practices ranging from passive design to rainwater harvesting.
The Oriental Crown is one of the 5 permanent green buildings on the Expo site, and it will be converted into a national history museum upon the conclusion of the expo next October.

Numerous pavilions have been designed around the expo’s theme of “Better Life, Better City,” and many of the pavilions focus upon sustainable and energy-efficient building practices.
The China Pavilion sits right next to the Expo Boulevard and the Sun Valleys, which act as the center of the Expo.
Painted the same red as the Forbidden City, the Oriental Crown consists of four pillars with 6 floors expanding out and up.
The 30 meter high roof is constructed from 56 wooden brackets, which represent the 56 minority ethnic groups of China.
Additionally, nine folded scripts engraved on the surface of the building list the short names of China’s provinces.
Designed by He Jingtang, the director of the Architectural Academy of the South China University of Technology, the pavilion includes many energy saving technologies.
The exterior of the structure offers a temperature buffer zone and natural ventilation for the interior, and the inverted shape of the pavilion acts as shading for entire building as well as the courtyard below.
The roof of the structure includes eco-friendly landscaping and harvests rainwater.
More at Inhabitat