We always encouraged green buildings and projects therefore we are pleased to announce that RIBA awarded a green design as the visitor center at the new Brockholes Wetland and Woodland Nature Reserve in Preston, Northern England. The project consists of zero-carbon floating buildings and it’s called “A Floating World”.
The area around the Persian Gulf is full of extraordinary architecture and this doesn’t surprise me because those guys have a lot of money thanks to the enormous oil store. Now, it looks like they love renewable energy as the Bahrain World Trade Center has finally got their three massive wind turbines activated and fully operational.
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On our road to a cleaner world, green architecture plays an important role and now we can be proud of the first LEED certified parking garage in the United States. The Santa Monica Civic Center exceeds a big part of the LEED guidelines with the help of the solar photovoltaic array on the roof. Also, the construction materials used for the parking structure were recycled and they are completed with low-VOC paints.
It seems like prefab materials are the latest trend and after Rocio Romero’s LV Prefab Home, it’s Andrade Morettin’s turn to design an interesting house made of prefab materials. The architect build his Residencia RR in Sao Paulo, Brazil, in the middle of the dense vegetation where the humid climate is very “aggressive”.
My favorite place in the world is Dubai because there you will find the most impressive structures. But there’s a country that likes to keep up with the latest architectural designs - Malaysia. Everybody heard about the Petronas Twin Towers, in Kuala Lumpur. A new project called Precinct 4 will be built in Putrajaya waterfront, about 30km of Kuala Lumpur.
The Precinct 4 was designed by Studio Nicoletti Associati and Malaysian-based Hijjas Kasturi Associates, also responsible for the Putrajaya waterfront. Their idea was to design sustainable residential buildings destined to fit in well with the landscape and their inspiration came from a fleet of ships. The buildings will be powered using alternative energy and they will emit about 50 percent less CO2 than any other projects like this residential.
We are already accustomed with those extraordinary buildings in Dubai, but we never get bored because there is always something new. The facade of the Pixel Tower will have 18-stories and it was inspired from bubbles in a champagne glass. This new structure is destined for Dubai’s Waterfront and it was designed to minimize the heat-gain and provide a better view over the Persian Gulf.
The author of the incredible design is James Law and the Pixel Tower is a part of his Cybertecture. Pixel Tower and it facade are scheduled to be completed in 2010.
As soon as it was revealed, Napa Prefab has managed to receive praises from everyone. This concept was designed by Rocio Romero and first was shown to the US public in Missouri and about a couple of months ago in Hudson Valley, New York. Now you can visit it on the West Coast, in northern San Francisco.
Rocio Romero is known for his extraordinary LV Home Series and the LV Prefab Home doesn’t make an exception. This fantastic house gives you 3,000 square feet of space in which you will find four bedrooms and 3 bathrooms among others. Also, LV Prefab Home features a pool warmed by the sun, but we are impressed by the idea of building it from prefabricated materials and by its very low pricing.
It seems like we need a special reason to construct some cool buildings. In this case the demographic growth was the one that forced the Copenhagen authorities to build a new college for students. A new college was build in Ørestad City and it provides spaces for studying science, social science and human science.
The stories of the college are boomerang-shaped and the interior was designed to be flexible in order to create spaces that will help small groups to rearrange however they want to. This is a very important project for education because this is a priority. I’m out of words and I will let the pictures speak for themselves.
The first LEED Gold certified art museum has been completed and this was possible thanks to a $60 million funding. The construction is the Grand Rapids Art Museum which was expanded and now it features about 125,000 square foot. This is about three times larger than the original structure.
I never would have thought that one of the most interesting structure designs could be a botanical garden. I am talking about the botanical garden in Medellin, Colombia which was re-designed by the Plan B Architects. Their new built contruction is called Orquideorama and it consists of metal and steel flower-tree structures with a hexagonal-organic shape.
The architects who designed the Orquideograma are Felipe Mesa and Alejandro Bernal and their idea was to build interconnected modular structures and as we said, with a hexagonal-organic structure and what’s better than honeycombs?
Via Plan B
