Month: February 2021

OMA and GMP have been selected as the winners of the Chengdu Future Science and Technology City Masterplan and Design competition in China. The team will develop the first phase of the overall masterplan, which will include an International Educational Park in the west, and a Transit Oriented Development (TOD) in the southeast led by GMP. The pilot project is one part of the innovation industry driving the development of the city around the new airport east of Chengdu.

The Weyerhaeuser Corporate Headquarters in Federal Way, Washington is one of the most iconic projects bringing architecture and landscape together. The current owners of the site, Los Angeles-based Industrial Realty Group (IRG), have shared plans to clear-cut 132 largely forested acres on the 425-acre campus to build 1.5 million square feet of warehouses. Now the group is facing pushback from architects, preservationists and landscape architects across the country.

Walking down the streets of cities like Hanoi and Saigon in Vietnam, you might encounter houses with surprisingly narrow facades in contrast to the stacking of three to five floors, with windows for ventilation and natural light only on the front facade. These are the famous traditional Tube Houses. According to ancient popular culture, this type of housing emerged due to property taxes being based on the width of the facade, but the true reason is to optimize land use, allowing a larger number of plots in the same square.

The global COVID-19 pandemic has forced us all to adapt quickly to new ways of living: new ways of working, communicating, buying groceries, and so much more. That adaptability is the key to navigating our changing world. Modular and flexible building systems can help us adapt our physical spaces to the new realities of social distancing or even to the need for rapidly deploying field hospitals.

Urban infrastructures provide comfort to inhabitants and mitigate the risks of disasters such as flooding. Underground systems specifically conceal urban infrastructures from public view and are configured as real mazes under the streets. The distribution of drinking water, urban drainage, sewage, and even electrical wiring and fiber optics in some cases, pass under our feet without us noticing. To this end, the industry developed precast concrete parts for about 100 years that provided construction speed, adequate resistance to force, and durability against time. Concrete pipes with circular sections, in many diverse diameters, are perhaps the most used conduits and are ubiquitous around the world. But there are also those who use these apparently functional elements in creative architectural contexts as well.

In its suburban context, the house appears as an extraneous object of a scale difficult to gauge and of an intriguing character. Standing at the end of a cul-de-sac between detached houses and vineyards, the pitched volume in concrete rises devoid of any symbol of domesticity, carved by the cut of the garage and a folded roof, reading as a monumental, introverted form. A mineral garden path leads into a door, mimetised within the concrete frontage.

This small house for a family of four occupies a three-meter-wide plot in a densely-populated city in Tokyo. Selma Masic—in collaboration with Sei Haganuma (Haryu Wood Studio)—designed the house for her family home. The architects conceived the total area of 63 square meters as a three-story house with a loosely-defined program for each area. The difference in level between living spaces had been designed to merge without harsh boundaries, providing residents with settings for a range of activities depending on their needs and the time of day.