The Sheffield Winter Garden is the second phase of the £120m Heart of the City regeneration project, following the £15m Sheffield Millennium Galleries. It is one of the largest temperate glasshouses to be built in the UK during the last hundred years, and the largest urban glasshouse anywhere in Europe. Housing more than 2,000 plants from all around the world, the garden was the most generous part of the scheme, rises from either end through glazed elliptical timber arches, and through its center the galleries appear to ripple towards the street.

Read the rest of this entry »

Sheffield Millennium Galleries is a pair of inspirational, landmark buildings by Pringle Richards Sharratt Architects who won the commission in competition in 1995. The Millennium Galleries is an art gallery in the City of Sheffield, England, finished in 2001, then the Sheffield Winter Garden in 2002. They were conceived as the most important parts of the Heart of the City Project and located in the city center close to the city library, Sheffield Hallam University, and the city’s theater district, also covered links in a new pedestrian route between the station and city center, helping restore part of the urban fabric that had been unravelled by post-war road schemes and redevelopment.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Svalbard Governor Administration Building was designed by Einar Jarmund and Hakon Vigsnaes, which was completed in 1998. The building is located approximately 400 m above the sea, and has a view overlooking the Advent Fjord towards the northeast, the Is Fjord towards the west and the Longyear Valley towards the east. Located nearby is the governor’s estate built in 1950, together they comprise the governor’s headquarters.

Read the rest of this entry »

Riverwalk Kitakyushu is a prestigious commercial complex, 10 minutes walk from Kokura Station, the gateway to northern Kyushu, and surrounded by the Kokura Castle gardens, Katsuyama Park and Yasaka Shrine. Facing Murasaki River, it was surrounded by nature and with its own rich greenery and history, is important in terms of culture, art, dispatching of information, and commerce. Riverwalk Kitakyushu was opened as part of the Kitakyushu Renaissance policy on April 19, 2003.

Read the rest of this entry »

The name of this complex means ‘New Journey’ in Sanskrit, a fitting title for a community for people with intellectual disabilities, working children, street children, orphans or others who cast aside by society’, in the words of Laurie Baker, the architect. There they will be trained to craft handmade paper, cards, lamps, diaries, calendars, murals, screen printing, terracotta, batik, candles, natural soaps and shampoos. Nav Yatra is a beautiful and unique facility that consists of seven buildings which create harmony between nature, people and architecture.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Meteorit Exhibition Center is an exhibition and entertainment complex by German energy company RWE to showcase their activities and products, consists of three distinct components: an extruded aluminium hull that hovers over upward-sloping ground, a glazed entrance structure and the main exhibition space which is largely buried underground, which each of its layout indicating clear functional differences. Tod Machover from Propeller Z has reasons as he composed and produced all of the music and sound for Meteorit Exhibition Center with three primary goals in mind.

Read the rest of this entry »

The National Maritime Museum Cornwall is a world-class attraction designed by Long & Kentish Architects to reflect the historic traditions of the area with dramatic internal spaces that are themselves part of the exhibition displays. A combination of key skills was brought into part in the design and construction of the museum, including architects, builders, curators, woodworkers, artists, designers, shipwrights, writers, film-makers, digital imagers and computer programmers.

Read the rest of this entry »

Oslo-based architects Stein Halvorsen and Christian Sundby was commissioned for designing the Sami Parliament Building. Shaped in a half circle, it has an area of 5,300 m² with total cost of 127 million NOK. The main assembly hall has the form of traditional Lapp tent, lavvo, which acts as the focal point of the whole building. There are perhaps two methods of making architecture for a culture whose people are nomadic inhabitants of their territory. Either it makes a building that echoes this itinerant lifestyle, touching the ground lightly, or it makes something that is a solid, monumental figure, an icon of permanence.

Read the rest of this entry »

Hak Sik Son was approached by 5 parents who wanted a private space in which their musical children could rehearse and perform. Located in a busy, retail area of Seoul, he designed OPUS Concert Hall that accommodates a 150-seat underground concert hall 6 m high, a restaurant and bar on the first and second floors, a leasable office space at the third floors which now owned by a graphic design studio for a company that serves the music recording industry, and the remaining top three floors contain 5 music studios for the clients who are music teachers and performers.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Visitor Center in Karijini National in the sparsely populated Pilbara region of Western Australia is located in the most extraordinary landscapes of ancient weathered hills, cliffs and gorges of black ore and deep red ochre. The Visitor Center is so well integrated into the landscape of this place that it is possible to miss it. The purpose of the project is to create a self effacing setting for the interpretative experience for the park, its geology, flora, fauna, people and history.

Read the rest of this entry »

This is a 3-storey building with offices in one wing and a golf clubhouse in the other wing. The office is for Guthrie Property Development Holding Sdn. Bhd. (GPDH). The company’s business is focused in real estate development. The nautical analogy is inescapable in a masthead building for a properly developer looking to develop a new sub-urban for the Malaysian capital. The building is intended to be a landmark building and to be the most prestigious building visible from the highway as visitors enter the site.

Read the rest of this entry »

It is a site where the stories mixed together. The Ruffi Sports Center is located in front of the St. Martin church. The building marks its territory and reflecting that in Marseilles, city has influenced by Latin culture, with the history to having together activity in sport. The viewer might be forgiven for dismissing this construction as a disused industrial warehouse. It is actually a sports complex, providing various facilities for the local community including basketball and handball courts, both indoor and outdoor, and 2 areas of marked terrain to play petanque, ready to use 24 hours a day.

Read the rest of this entry »

Mur Island has brought the Mur River back to the people of Graz. Up to a few years ago, the river had been polluted by sewage water and industrial effluent. So the fact that the Mur had dug itself 12m deeper into its riverbed after its regulation in the 19^th century hardly bothered people. Now the river connecting and dividing the city has a good quality of water again. Graz-born Robert Punkenhofer inspired the New York artist Vito Acconci, New York’s art, design and media star to design the project, an accessible artificial island space on the Mur River in Graz.

Read the rest of this entry »

Deep in the pastoral landscape of Irelands County Wexford, a shaft of concrete cleaves through a green hill like the entrance to some futuristic burial mound. This monument in the Irish rural idyll is both a symbol and a commemoration of history, marking the bicentenary of the 1798 rebellion by the Irish against English rule. Placed at the top of rising ground, at the end of a long walk, the monument consists of a grassy mound bisected by a deep passage open to the sky.

Read the rest of this entry »

This Small House by Kazuyo Sejima is a 4-story residence for a young couple and their small child on a compact site in the heart of downtown Tokyo, at the end of a short cul-desac in densely-populated Tokyo’s elite Aoyama district. It resembles a miniature tower rising on 77 sq m of floor area on an allowable imprint of 36, which precisely measures 60 sq m in its entirety. The shape of the design itself is subject to zoning and light restrictions. Facade consists of translucent glass and galvanized steel with a light impression, which provide the wrapping for this slick, futuristic, domestic container.

Read the rest of this entry »

Does it really building Asia? Brick by brick or demolition by demolition?

Read the rest of this entry »

Trapped within a curve of a motorway, this unfriendly site gave AMP Arquitectos very little to work with beyond the harsh desert landscape of the surrounding Chasna rock and the distant sea horizon. Therefore they designed the Magma Convention Center to be part of the landscape, to merge both physically and conceptually with the rock. Located right in the heart of the South of Tenerife, Magma Convention Center is an architecturally unique multifunctional building that is designed to satisfy the needs of any event.

Read the rest of this entry »

The character of Miralles & Tagliabue’s design is set by the architects’ determination to embed The Hamburg Music School’s scheme within its existing buildings of the surrounding and tries to recognize the existing context. By connecting landscape and architecture and filling the resulting structure with color and light, the architects sought to express the energy and youth of the children and music who will use the school.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Photonics Center is the facility of an organization which conducts research into optics, optoelectronics and laser technology. Taking their cue from the research into light conducted by their client, Sauerbruch Hutton have created two curvaceous blob-like buildings in which color and lighting are used to remarkable effect. The two new buildings of The Photonics Center are conceived as volumes with soft contours which create a strong identity within the existing rectilinear context and yet which do not challenge the gentle coherence of the site.

Read the rest of this entry »

The beauty of San Sebastian city lying in the midst of a complete geography, huddled by two mountains and a beach, around a river estuary in the edge of which The Kursaal Auditorium now stands, seemingly belonging to the surrounding landscape. The Kursaal site still has the flavor of the geography and Rafael Moneo proposed to erect a building that would not violate the presence of the river in the city, raising two gigantic rocks lying on the tidal wash where the river meets the sea.

Read the rest of this entry »