Mixed-Used Development | Weifang City | Kite City | Weifang | China | Neil M Denari

Weifang is a special city in China. Not only is it well known for the history of its handicrafts such as paper–cutting and New Year’s paintings, it is the world’s most important city for kite flying and the history of kites. For more than 2,000 years, the people of Weifang have enjoyed the exhilaration of seeing these colorful objects flying in the brisk winds of the Shandong region in Northern China.
Weifang City is a 290,000 square meter mixed-used development consisting of housing and commercial in a series of tower blocks, with a 150 meter tall mixed-use tower that anchors the southwest corner of the site. The organization of the massing responds to the client’s brief to make an iconic tower on the park with a supporting world of housing and shopping around it...........more

Grouped Housing | NEW SEIFULLIN CENTER | ALMATY, KAZAKHSTAN | Neil M Denari Architects

2007-08

A New Kazakhstan
Since 2000, Kazakhstan has significantly emerged as a center of Eurasian free market systems. With an oil rich economy and nearly seventeen years of successful reforms under the leadership of President Nazarbayev, this country of fifteen million people stands at the edge of a major leap into global business leadership. As such, the rapid development of it’s largest city, Almaty, has given rise to new landscapes of diverse elements, mostly notably among them the Samal District located in the heart of the city.Through architecture, individuals and corporations alike, find identity in a world where money, borders, and cultures are rapidly changing people’s lives.

Site Organization
The site is zoned in two parts based on a rational split between Office use and Residential use, with circulation elements and the retail component as the functions that bridge these two zones.
To the north, occupying roughly 2/3rds of the site, the residential buildings are configured so as to respond to the streets surrounding the site, to the maximization of views, and to the creation of a rich spatial experience on the main site plaza. On the southern zone of the site, the Office program sits directly north of the Foster twin tower, creating a buffer between it and the residential zone. This building is set back from the site edges as an elegant sculptural volume, the connecting bridges that emerge from a 13 story high void.
Text and images from Neil M Denari Architects

CARLOW ART CENTER COMPETITION-CARLOW, IRELAND-NEIL M. DENARI ARCHITECTS

The Carlow Art Center is a 3,000 sq meter building dedicated to presenting contemporary world art. In addition to large flexible gallery spaces, the program for this competition also called for educational spaces, offices, and a cafe connected to an adjacent public plaza. Since the program of the Center virtually fills out the site, the adjacent open spaces must, including the proposed surface car park, flow into the building in order to make it accessible and more infrastructural. To enable this, a portion of the site has been lowered to –1.80 m. Not only does this produce a more continuous landscape, this sectional configuration allows the building to be reduced in apparent height. While the building at the lower levels is transparent and dynamic, the mass of the building above is organized into four opaque bands that respond to the program inside and to the site context outside.

NEW SEIFULLIN CENTER-ALMATY, KAZAKHSTAN-NEIL M. DENARI ARCHITECTS

The site is zoned in two parts based on a rational split between Office use and Residential use, with circulation elements and the retail component as the functions that bridge these two zones.
To the north, occupying roughly 2/3rds of the site, the residential buildings are configured so as to respond to the streets surrounding the site, to the maximization of views, and to the creation of a rich spatial experience on the main site plaza. On the southern zone of the site, the Office program sits directly north of the Foster twin tower, creating a buffer between it and the residential zone. This building is set back from the site edges as an elegant sculptural volume, the connecting bridges that emerge from a 13 story high void....NMDA

High Line 23-New York-NEIL M. DENARI ARCHITECTS

Developed by Alf Naman and currently in construction, HL23 is a 14 floor condominium tower that responds to a unique and challenging site directly adjacent to the High Line at 23rd street in New York's West Chelsea Arts district. Partially impacted by a spur from the elevated tracks that make up the High Line superstructure, the site is 40' x 99' at the ground floor.
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ALAN-VOO HOUSE-Los Angeles | Neil M Denari Architects

The clients for this house renovation / extension, a couple with three daughters, are a creative, democratic unit. The father directs film trailers, the mother is a graphic designer and illustrator, while the high school / middle school / elementary school aged daughters are all immersed in their own versions of their parents visual cultures. The family have asked that 1,000 sf be added to the site in addition to the existing 1,000 sf house.
The scheme leaves half of the house for the daughter’s bedrooms and incorporates the other half plus new extensions in front and back into a public zone and a private bedroom for the parents. This strategy amounts to a new 16 ft wide linear house being inserted into the existing house. Multi-toned, bright colors accentuate the new pieces which suggests a graphic expression representative of the family’s interests.








Source:Neil M Denari Architects

GQ Bank

For an issue dedicated to banking in the future, GQ Japan approached CIA Tokyo and NMDA to develop concepts around this premise. Our work focused on a 33 meter high building on corner site in central Tokyo. The exterior design is a smooth metal and glass surface that shifts and distorts according to views and internal programs. The window system and the GQ brand colors, black and white, interact to become a large scale icon or graphic logo, a technique common to NMDA projects. Like an automobile, the surface is smooth but the high contrast elements and accentuated seams and joints articulate the set of functions that go into a new bank, ie public lounges, private offices, and meeting rooms. The unique pattern of the façade describes the interactivity of people in the bank, while at the same time it suggests the flow of money in the circuitry of our lives. Indeed, the electronic world treats money as a purely digital medium, a currency not of paper but of abstract value. We are trying to reveal this system in our design.

On the inside, highly sophisticated ATM machines project holographic images of real banking people. This is the future of banking service “on the street”, a virtual expert speaking with a real customer. On the upper floors of this branch are lounge spaces that are in many ways like a club where people can rely on experts to serve them a customized banking strategy with a cinematic backdrop of projections and city panoramas to surrounds them. These spaces and their smooth architectural forms remind the client that experience is the main thing and that new design can deliver it.

TROIA | Temporary Residence of Intelligent Agents | NMDA

TROIA is a unique project and one that demanded a high level of discipline and ingenuity. Olaf Arndt of BBM (www.bbm.de) art group of Berlin asked NMDA to design a mobile building nearly 200 sq meters in floor area for a program based on their theatrical performances of robots and pixelated surfaces whose content critically asserts that the techniques and politics of crowd control lead not only to physical harm but also the dissolution of free speech, debate, and positive cultural conflict.

MUFG Bank-Nagoya

“we have had the ambition to give a new feeling to the experience of private banking. Here, the environment must be accessible and friendly, yet have a special sense of contemporary design. The two most important features to our design are first, the smooth surfaces that shape the ceiling and walls into a continuous, flowing world, and second, the contrasting materials of white plaster and two types of wood veneers. The subtle curvatures and angles of the surfaces are specially designed to help the space become embracing, while the colors and materials combine to give a fresh, warm overall feeling to the space” Neil M. Denari Architect