Interior Design Sense

Amsterdam City Council recently held ‘The Silo Competition’ which involved the adaptive and reuse design for two former sewage treatment silos in the city’s Zeeburg district.

For the competition NL Architects proposed silos dedicated to climbing, sports and culture. In their design the existing structures were extended to the maximum height to benefit from the views.

The cultural silo consists of two theaters with dressing rooms and rehearsal spaces, spaces for workshops, exhibition spaces, music studios and a space for hair design. A bridge connects the silos at the height of the original roof level and office spaces will be positioned on top. The top level will be dedicated to a restaurant with 360 views and a roof terrace.

Seen at designboom. More images after the break.

Earlier this year, we featured the Taipei Performing Arts Center proposal of Morphosis, NL Architects, and Abalos+Sentkiewicz, in a competition that was finally won by OMA.

Today, we show you Francois Blanciak Architect’s proposal. As a cultural reference to a taiwanese aboriginal construction technique using slabstone heaps, the project similarly piles up 4 slabstones (3 containing theaters, 1containing administrative spaces) in a cairn-like structure. In order to emphasize the public nature of the building, it is elevated on top of a wide upper plaza, upon a plinth that liberates the movement of pedestrians on the ground level.

Seen at designboom. More images after the break.

Stockholm-based Petrén Merom Architects and Scheiwiller Svensson Architects Office have designed the SWAN, in Gävle, Sweden.

This 150 meter high building will include offices, hotels, conference and residential service.

More information here (in Swedish). More images after the break.

The glass tower by Eric Owen Moss Architects is posed to be encourage a re-development in South Central Los Angeles. The building has been in planning since the nineties but was stalled for some years until it was re-designed in 2006 as a single tower.

A rail line installed nearby spurred the redesign. The structure is part of the redevelopment of South Central LA, an area plagued with poverty and violence for many years. The project was originally conceived of with a structural strategy, consisting of curvilinear ribbons wrapping two main volumes.

The new design remains very similar with the same ribbon theme, but as a single volume. as the area’s only high-rise, office tenants will enjoy wide, open views of the city. a train stop sits directly outside the building, but car parking was also a main concern for the architects. The aforementioned ribbon scheme provides the building’s structure, making each floor completely open. The ribbons are made from steel tubes filled with concrete. Each floor was the same flexible plan but comes in three distinct heights of 13, 16 and 24 feet, to offer further flexibility.

Seen at designboom. More images after the break.

The Rice Design Alliance Prize, presented annually, has been created by Rice Design Alliance (RDA) to recognize exceptionally gifted architects in the early phase of their professional career. The jury saw avant-garde architecture and a personal language in the work of Antón García-Abril that is at the forefront of the contemporary architectural scene.

RDA – a committee of architects and academics – will meet annually to review the work of national and international architects, young talents that exemplify excellence in design and are within their first 15 years of professional practice.

The inaugural “Rice Design Alliance Prize” was formally delivered to Antón García-Abril, founder of Ensamble Studio (Madrid), on April 15 in Houston. In addition García-Abril gave a lecture to present his latest work.

More images, after the break.

Here’s a little game developed by AutoDesk. You get to see 10 images. Some of them are photographs of real objects or scenes, others are created by computer graphics (CG) artists.

Test your ability to tell which among the array of images are real, and which are CG. Play here.

Our friends from visiondivision sent us this interesting project. A Swedish family wanted a dream house in the south of Spain that at the same time could be turned into an invisible fort when the client is not there. Passing the house on the nearby road one will only see a garage. If you would accidentally walk pass the hidden garden you will see a façade with a flower patterned mesh.

The client will experience a totally different house. Inside the garage there is a spiral staircase inside a steel cylinder leading down to a big living room, and as the mesh is flipped into sun protecting panes, the panoramic view towards the surrounding mountains will appear from all the social rooms and the bedrooms. The bathrooms are located towards the hill and will have a cave-like appearance.

More images after the break.

One of the latest projects by Foster and Partners, a 5-star hotel and conference center near the Heathrow airport in the UK, just got the city Mayor´s approval.

The project, developed by Riva Properties, has 60,000sqm aprox distributed among 13 stories. Some of these are sunken, resulting on an exterior height of only 25m.

The rooms are contained within six pavilions above the ground, linked by bridges and wrapped in a unifying glass envelope, which not only acts as a barrier to aircraft noise but also to flood the public spaces with daylight, contributing to a highly efficient energy strategy.

The entrance lobby has a floating glass deck with views down to the sunken restaurant level, shallow pool and waterfall. This restaurant floor is accessed via a timber walkway and incorporates a business centre, as well as a variety of venues to eat and drink. The double-height conference facilities, which have their own reception to allow separate access from street-level, encircle a top-lit atrium that brings natural light deep into the building and down to the lower levels.

More images after the break.

All images © Foster + Partners

British practice Mackay & Partners shared with us this nice residencial building in London, England. You can see some more images after the break.

This award winning residential development was created on a derelict site. Mackay + Partner’s brief was to create a high density urban apartment building which effectively combined contemporary architecture with sustainable environmental concepts. We were eager to develop effective solutions for this high density building.

With a vacant 20,000 sq ft site in Islington we managed to achieve a density of 150 living units per hectare.

Singapore-based WOW Architects designed this hotel in Tanzania. It has two buildings, and the overall design was inspired by geological processes that shape rock formations in nature.

Flowing gardens spill out of the building’s windows and the orientation was planned so that the sunlight enters the interior courtyard in the center, providing  the hotel guests a warm and inviting space to mingle.

For more information, click here. More images after the break.