Month: August 2020

Waugh Thistleton Architects or WTA has won an international design competition in collaboration with In Praise of Shadows and Land Arkitektur, to deliver the new head office of Gotlandshem, the national housing association of the Swedish island of Gotland in Visby, Sweden. The project, low carbon, and low impact building will be a multifunctional place, providing a healthy hub for businesses, accessible by the whole community.

Proposing a reflective “floating garden” to counterpoint the existing absolutist castle, MVRDV has won the competition for the masterplan of the Ettlinger Tor area in Karlsruhe, Germany, taking joint-first place alongside Max Dudler Architekten. Inspired by the historical fabric of the city, the project imagines a new composition, blurring divisions, and bringing more greenery to the area.

Mclldowie Partners designed an eight-story podium building at the center of a new Jewish cultural hub for Elsternwick in Melbourne, Australia. Housing the performing arts and co-working spaces, the project will include both the Kadimah Jewish Cultural Centre and National Library, as well as the Jewish Museum of Australia. The building is made to celebrate Jewish life and culture while bringing Melbourne’s major Jewish institutions together.

How do we define “home”? 

In the 20th Century, New York City became an epicenter of newly constructed buildings that quickly gained an iconic status. While they greatly influenced new ways that we think about aesthetics and space, many of them met their demise less than 60 years after their commissioning. It seems that in the modern age of mass development, and where a wrecking ball symbolizes progress forward, no building is safe. The tenacity to tear down even these structures deemed to be culturally significant speaks to how architects are quick to dismiss ideas about how long we plan for buildings to live and how we decide when its time for them to come down.

Now more than ever, architecture is in need of innovation. The pandemic has made us fundamentally rethink the functioning of our cities, public spaces, buildings, and homes. Meanwhile, the recent Black Lives Matter and racial justice protests have us questioning architecture’s complicity in broader socioeconomic issues. These challenges are pressing, and we cannot put off changing architecture any longer.

On the hillside of the Magical Town of Valle de Bravo, a restful enclave popular among city dwellers only a 140km drive from Mexico City, we can find Casa Di Dox. 13,000 sqft of a very modern avant- garde architecture built with local materials. The design bets on intersecting volumes prioritized by dimension and finished by optimally leveraging the natural slope of the site, reflected on the Architectural brief. Christian Magaldi, the Architect, tried to point everything inside out with a focal point in the epicenter of the central tower and main stairs that will guide us round the building, also accommodating for the different natural levels of the lot. This was all formulated using a structure of exposed concrete and steel.