Articles by Tom Dobbins

The winners of arch out loud’s competition Reside – in which entrants were to design a mixed residential development on one of the last remaining sections of undeveloped Mumbai coastline – have been announced. The architectural research initiative challenged entrants to design for “both the indigenous fishing community that has occupied the site for hundreds of years – as well as a new demographic drawn to the affluent neighborhood that now encompasses the site”.

Wickside is a £120m “permeable, mixed-use neighborhood” that will provide 475 homes and 300 jobs for the surrounding community. Designed by BUJ Architects and Ash Sakula Architects, the neighborhood has recently received the all-clear from the LLDC planning committee. Almost nine years in the making, the scheme uses “urban blocks set around ordinary London streets” to create a complex, diverse townscape with a variety of uses. The neighborhood is housed within a 28,800 square meter former waste transfer site in Hackney Wick, London. Integrating the context’s existing buildings and cultural heritage, Wickside aims to develop the existing creative community through “retention and regeneration,” and is one of the largest development sites in the area.

Found at the junction of two famous roads, the Shoreditch Hotel reacts with its unique context in a striking, ship-like form that preserves, and creates, public space for the surrounding area. Designed by AQSO Arquitectos, the proposed scheme includes a hotel at its front, while a cinema and various retail outlets are separated by a public atrium at its rear. The mixed-use facility “explores a formal response to the site conditions with an alternative contemporary language,” the resultant blending of perspectives creating a  gateway to London’s creative heart. 

Found at the junction of two famous roads, the Shoreditch Hotel reacts with its unique context in a striking, ship-like form that preserves, and creates, public space for the surrounding area. Designed by AQSO Arquitectos, the proposed scheme includes a hotel at its front, while a cinema and various retail outlets are separated by a public atrium at its rear. The mixed-use facility “explores a formal response to the site conditions with an alternative contemporary language,” the resultant blending of perspectives creating a  gateway to London’s creative heart. 

The Dubai-based firm, X-Architects, have found inspiration in the cultural and architectural heritage of Islam for their new design. The Revelation Mosque, a +2500 square meter project, aims to create a new “heart of the neighborhood” in Abu Dhabi, UAE. In creating a generous urban void among a towering context, the proposal offers an immersive escape from everyday life, where the public (regardless of religion) can gather, communicate, and interact with one another.

Designed by Henning Larsen Architects and MSR Design, the New Public Service Building for the city of Minneapolis aims to consolidate several departments, currently found across multiple different sites, into one unified building. The scheme promotes the health and well-being of its 1,300 employees through maximizing daylight and green space throughout, integrating a significantly sustainable remit within the 385,000 square foot, 11 story proposal. Located diagonally across from the existing city hall, Henning Larsen brings a “knowledge-based Scandinavian design approach” to the high-performance office space, hoping to set a “new architectural agenda in North America.”

A 100 meter stretch of land beneath a train overpass in Koganecho, a district of Yokohama, Japan, underwent a progressive refurbishment in which five different types of community space, each designed by a different architect, were built within a pre-set spatial grid. Historically there were many social issues in the area, largely in relation to its profitable but dangerous black market and red-light district. Once the illegal activity was eradicated in 2005, the underpass presented a great opportunity for social re-development, and the resultant project – the Koganecho Centre – emphasized an age-old Japanese cultural commitment, where what was once broken is used to make something new. 

After being knighted in 1990 for services to architecture, winning the 1999 Pritzker Prize and then gaining peerage in the same year, it could be argued that there is no living architect that has had a larger impact on urban life than Norman Foster. In a recent talk, Foster addressed a sold-out Barbican Hall on the future of our growing urban landscape, in the seventh installment of the Architecture On Stage series organized by The Architecture Foundation with the Barbican. While the content was full of grandiose statements and predictions, of a scale similar to the projects Foster’s practice undertakes, it was the problem-solving approach he showed that gave more of an insight into the man himself. The following 5 lessons gleaned from the presentation won’t guarantee Foster-like levels of success, but they may be able to help you navigate the challenges that architecture can present, both personally and professionally.

Appreciated within the industry but often maligned by the general public, brutalism came to define post-war architecture in the UK, as well as many countries around the world. In his 1955 article The New Brutalism, Reyner Banham states it must have “1, Formal legibility of plan; 2, clear exhibition of structure, and 3, valuation of materials for their inherent qualities as found.”

Surrounded on all sides by “business blocks of architectural beauty and metropolitan dimensions,” the intersecting planes of Pershing Square in Los Angeles provide a modernist retreat for many Angelinos in the downtown area. While to some, the square’s large stucco tower and aqueduct-like water feature serve as a cultural landmark, the park has drawn negative press due to its lack of green space and abundance of drug-related activity. John Moody purposefully concentrates on the perception, memory, and identity of the space in his documentary Redemption Square—winner of the Best Urban Design Film 2017 at the New Urbanism Film Festival. Using the voice of strangers, residents and those who used to call it home, Moody guides you from the park’s formation in 1866 to its impending renewal: a “radically flat” redesign courtesy of Agence Ter and Gruen Associates.