AD: What’s the history of Mexico City’s water problem? MP: The problem goes back 700 years, when the Aztecs decided to build a city in the middle of a swamp. It established the city’s relationship with water. This relationship is not the most harmonious, but it is a statement that we’re here to stay, and we know […]
Read More… from In Conversation with Loreta Castro Reguera & Manuel Perlo
Located in the suburban town of Chau Doc in An Giang province, Southern Vietnam, this house serves as a communal residence for three families. The architects wanted to not only have the house blend well with its environment—both in physical appearance and spirit—but also have it filled with daylight, natural ventilation and open to the […]
Although set in a rustic landscape of a mountainous lowland village, surrounded by small fields, fruit orchards and streams, this café building has a distinctively contemporary look—with clean lines and sharp edges made out of glass, steel and wood. Using local materials (old wood) and a natural colour palette, it seeks to be an architectural […]
India gives shine to 85 per cent of the rough diamonds sold globally, with Surat being the capital of this trade. Today, more than 92 per cent of the world’s diamonds manufactured in Surat are traded in Mumbai and exported to countries across the globe. However, due to inadequate suitable office spaces and supporting infrastructure […]
The new state capital of a Southern Indian state is heralded as the most sustainable city in the world. After Jawaharlal invited the Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier to build Chandigarh in the 1950s, Amaravati is the second ‘built city’ of a massive scale to come up in India. Though five decades have passed since the […]
As a commercial redevelopment project, K11 Atelier King’s Road addresses some of the common issues of office buildings, such as sub-par indoor environmental quality for human health; isolation from the local community; and underutilisation of space during non-working hours. The project is the world’s first building to have achieved the WELL Building Standard’s (core and […]
Europe’s largest law complex, the 160-metre-tall Paris Courthouse skyscraper by Renzo Piano Building Workshop (RPBW) that opened last April, has reunited the various activities of the French capital’s judiciary system under one roof. They had previously been dispersed throughout the city due to a shortage of space in its historic seat on Île de la […]
Images by Chao Zhang Designed by Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) as a ‘green’ landmark serving as a model for the 21st-century skyscraper, the state-owned Shenzhen Energy Company’s headquarters in the cultural, political and business centre of China’s Silicon Valley features an undulating building envelope, created to maximise sustainable performance and workplace comfort. Having won the […]
At the time of the plan’s development, Beijing developers were razing and rebuilding much of the city. Rather than tear down the industrial infrastructure and historic buildings influenced by Russian and German presence in the area over the years, Sasaki proposed preserving as much of the existing infrastructure as possible to capture the spirit, history […]
Stu/D/O Architects designed two projects in Bangkok that are not your typical commercial buildings. Using fragmentation and fractalisation, the architects created green spaces, embracing nature and blurring boundaries. NAIIPA ART COMPLEX How does one create architecture where the goal is to minimise the architectural presence on-site? The architects of Naiipa (literally meaning “deep in the […]
Read More… from Studio Spotlight: Naiipa Art Complex & Inter Crop Office
At FuturArc, we have long argued that architects seeking sustainable outcomes must first rethink how a building talks to the world around it. Too many, for too long, have focused primarily on what happens within site-and-shell. In this pursuit of civic-mindedness and generosity (terms that architects WOHA use to describe outcomes of relational function), form is key. So what […]
This cycle, FuturArc Prize, Asia’s foremost Green building design competition, invited biophilic designs that integrate natural elements and nature-like qualities into the environment, thereby creating positive feelings and experiences in users. Nature provides ecosystem services to the city, services like cleaning the air and water that are critical to our survival. FuturArc Prize 2018 asked […]
