# Fissure Port by Biothing

Biothing entered the competition for Kaohsiung's (Taiwan) Port Terminal and designed parametric canyons that strongly contrast with the current paradigmatic trend of hadidian (!) floppy structures... In fact, here, Alissa Andrasek and Jose Sanchez decided to start from a virtual pure mass and then carved it with programmatic voids whose sharp edges narrate the cut of the mater.

More (text, pictures, videos) about the Fissure Port project on Biothing's website.

biothing
Alisa Andrasek + Jose Sanchez_ principal designers
design team: Knut Brunier – Gabriel Morales – Denis Lacej

# Spontaneous Architecture Competition #1

Spontaneous Architecture is a series of small competitions organized by the Columbia Studio X and tries to trigger quick reactions from architects to answer to a problematic.
The first one, launched on January 1st and with final submission on January 15th is about developing a vision of what the future might look like.
The conditions of the competition are a bit unclear and the 5$ fees are frankly debatable but I do think that the results could be interesting enough not to despise it for that.

Here is the brief of this first competition:

New Year's Day 2010. Welcome to the future. Y2K is ten years behind us, and 2012 is at our doorstep.

The promises and terrors of our previously projected futures have both manifest and been forgotten. We are not living in a world of flying cars, intergalactic civilian travel, hovercraft skateboards, or robot assistants. No, but we have real-time video chat, the Hubble telescope, maglev trains, and smart phones. We are not living in the wasteland aftermath of nuclear war, but global warming is melting the arctic.

Images of our present future have historically been either utopian or dystopic. The technologies that were going to save us or destroy us have arguably done both to some degree, creating our greatest problems and our most significant solutions. We have more information at our fingertips than ever before and fewer critical tools to navigate that information with discrimination. We are more connected through our myriad telecommunications and more disconnected due to a growing class divide. The future is more complex than could've been predicted. It is more nuanced and diverse than Huxley, Orwell, Le Corbusier, or Nostradamus knew.

Times of crisis and calamity, like today, always put ideas in high demand: big ideas and big dreams to foster the next wave in invention and innovation on our way toward tomorrow.

We are living in what has historically been the future. Now that we are here, what is next? What is our future? This an open call for visionaries.

Answers to this question can take many forms: renderings of future imagined cities, advertisements, photographs, collages, maps, etcetera. There are no limits on content, only limits on format. All submissions must be formatted as a single letter sized (8.5 inch by 11 inch) landscape image, which contains no more than 100 words of text.

# Make Me A Mountain! by Liam Young

Make Me A Mountain ! is a project developed by Liam Young from Tomorrow Thoughts Today (see former post) for the Natural System D3 Competition (the winners of this competition Lorene Faure and Kenny Tsui should be published soon on boiteaoutils).
Make Me A Mountain proposes to uses New York City's urban cracks to insert a folded zoo trying to expand vertically on existing buildings' facades. The specificity of animals (bats) is bringing wildness in the city in a non-naive trendy sustainability but rather in a more interesting renouncement to a certain degree of control. The zoo is no longer a animal exhibitionist cage but rather an animal dwelling within the city.

I am also particularly interested by the process of construction of this mountain (see picture above):

1_MOULDED GRP PANELS
Structural shells are prefabricated from injection moulded 80% recycled Glass Reinforced Plastic (GRP). The entire Bathouse is made from an arrangement of just 5 modular GRP panels.
2_PUBLIC OCCUPIED VOLUMES
Prefabricated shells are assembled on site with minimal foundations forming the core public
spaces. These volumes form a closed public circulation route independant of the bat occupied spaces. This intertwining provides complex and intricate bat viewing possibilities without ever
intruding directly into habitat. Set into the GRP shells are clear acrylic windows arranged at points where the bat caves intersect.
3_WATER PIPE AND MESH REINFORCEMENT
Steel piping acts as both concrete reinforcement bars and conduits channelling water from the lagoon through the building around the public and Bat spaces. The water is heated and pumped using solar power to regulate internal temperature for the bats. Some pipes also seep water into the porous material feeding plant species growing in, over and around the Bathouse. The steel mesh surrounds of the bat caves are tied to this structure.
4_COMPOSITE PEAT-MOSS SHOTCRETE APPLICATION
The Bathouse form emerges from the liberal spray application of a Peat-moss and Shotcrete mix. The material, a variation on the “Hypertufa’ commonly used by home gardeners, is lightweight and highly porous. It binds the other elements together, the whole structure performing with the same properties as reinforced concrete.
5_PLANT AND ANIMAL LIFE GROWS
The material functions as an organic water reservoir which over time, like an artificial reef, develops its own micro ecology on the building’s surface. It permits airflow to root structures and
supports the growth of plant and insect life providing a key food source for the bats. The structure can be added to indefinitely using the same application method so as to adapt to the occupation preferences of the bats.
6_ORGANIC BREAKDOWN OF MATERIALS
At the end of its useful life the composite Shotcrete mix can be broken down and used as a soil conditioner closing the ecosystem loop. The injection-moulded shells can be re-used in other locations and for other programmes.


boards are high resolution so you can click on them and explore the project

The D3 Competition Exhibition will be visible (after a very poor situation in NY City College) in Cleveland in fews days. See here for more information...

“Make Me A Mountain!” By Liam Young of Tomorrows Thoughts Today.
Project team: Andrew D’Occhio and James Pierre Du-Plessis.

# Reburbia Competition Finals

Dwell Magazine and Inhabitat.com's competition called Reburbia is coming to its finals with some more or less interesting twenty projects but anyway worth it to look at (and potentially to vote for). This competition was proposing to question the statute of American suburbs and it is quite interesting to notice that as a lot of competitions, every original and provocative propositions have not been selected in the top twenty but put in a classic "Notable Entries". See below Zellnerplus' Gordon Matta Clark glass houses, Nogo Voyages' Let them burn, Weber Architecture's Infill house and Choi-len Tan's Bricks habitats.

(picture above: Selected Miller|Hull Partnership's Bumper Crop)

# Imagining Recovery by Eduardo McIntosh

Eduardo McInstosh (whose former work has been already published here and here on boiteaoutils) kindly sent me his last work which was his entry to the Imagining Recovery Competition. This time architecture is used as self-metaphor of an existing Plato's cave system and a fictional one both assumed as keeping their statute of "prisons". Nevertheless one imply a difficult active involvement of its actors who are invited to participate to act in the field of possible just like Borges describes it in the Babel Library.

As I told him, I just have a little discrepancy of opinion as far as the "Beaubourg effect" is concerned. As a former post was showing, thirty years after its construction Pompidou Centre is still hated by a lot of people in France and its presence within Paris' core is a continual question about architecture, art, public space and urbanity.

However I really egg you on reading the whole text, because it tackles some issues which may be less politically correct in a era which is trying to impose ecology and mediatization as architectural dogmas...

# Design Act’s Finalist Proposal for Singapore World Expo Pavilion on Bustler

Here is an article in Bustler about Shanghai 2010 Singapore's pavilion's competition which has seen as a finalist this surprising voxel project by Design Act.

# Rouse[D] Competition

Rouse[D] is a competition in order to re-invent Detroit in any scale. Competition just opened and will stop on july 31st. The jury has been chosen in a (re)generation of international young architects:

David Pigram of SUPERMANOUEVRE
Marc Fornes of THEVERYMANY
Skylar Tibbits of SJET
Michael Ashley of MASH-ARKT
David Jackowski of ALVATRON STUDIO
Peter Macapia of DORA
Brian Dubois of 2:37AM
Jason K. Johnson of FUTURE CITIES LAB

# Taipei Performing Arts Centre by NL Architects

You may already have seen the winner OMA project of this Performing Arts Centre in Taipei, but this was NL Architects' entry. It looks retro-future and seems to inspire itself from Paul Andreu's Roissy 1 and Rogers and Piano's Pompidou Centre.
found on Archdaily

# Evolo 2009

Fourth evolo skyscrapers competition's winners have been announced. Like every years, some of them stand in a conservative trend, but some others like this "instant high rise" by Farzin Lotfi-Jam and Jerome Frumar bring some new refreshing idea justifying the persistence of this competition.
See the three winners and fifteen mentions on official website.

# 2009 PS1 Competition won by MOS

This is the new New York PS1 pavilion designed by Hilary Sample and Michael Meredith from MOS.

The difference between PS1 pavilion and what we could call its equivalent in Europe, the London Serpentine Pavilion is the budget allowed for it. American one is much smaller and this economy becomes the principal challenge of this competition. How to deal with complex geometries and small money ? Each winner (see the official page) got his part of the answer and this year also brings its proposition.

# SELF-CONSTRUCTION /// I.A.A.C. 2nd Advanced Architecture Contest

Last Issue of the I.A.A.C. Institue of (Advanced Architecture of Catalunya) architecture 2007-2008 competition was about "self fab sustainable housing", following you'll will see the 3 prizes that have been decerned to international students/architects.

Awarded projects:

1st Prize: F1C243
Ming Tang
Dihua Yang
CHINA
This proposal uses a traditional local material, implementing geometry elements in a pertinent way creating structures able to transform and re-inform themselves . The jury values its landscape integration and the possibility of being constructed as prototype.

2nd Prize: 5923BC
Luis Aguirre Manso
SPAIN
The jury values the hybridisation of light construction systems that rise from the ground, and the
functional scheme surrounding the chimney, that follows principles of traditional architecture.

3rd Prize: C2BD4E
Shinya OKUDA
Kung Yick Ho Alvin
Lam Yan Yu Ian
HONG KONG
The jury values the use of advanced technologies in the manipulation of biodegradable materials to create a system that can be assembled as a sustainable construction.

1st prize:





2nd prize:



you can see better picture of the second prize wich is for me the most interesting : here




3rd prize:

# Alexandre Pachiaudi & Gaëtan Kohler, lauréats aux architectures vives

Un très grand bravo à nos amis Pico et Gaëtan qui ont remporté le prix du festival des architectures vives de montpellier grâce à ce superbe "abri 177" fabriqué à l'atelier bois de l'ESA !
--> texte







"L'abri n°177 est opérationnel !
Nous sommes heureux de pouvoir vous montrer quelques photos de son premier parasitage.
Cette premiere intervention a eu lieu dans la cour de l'hôtel de Griffy rue de l'Aiguillerie à Montpellier. Les voisins et badauds ont tous été fortement intrigués.
La structure composée d'aluminium, de bois et de kevlar est assez légère pour tenir sur trois pointes de parapluies grand-golf, sans renfort."

# SPAN wins the Brancusi Museum Competition, Paris

L'agence SPAN vient de remporter l'appel à idées pour le dessin d'un nouveau musée pour les œuvres du sculpteur Bancusi. Les jeunes architectes Matias del Campo & Sandra Manninger ,basés à Vienne, Autriche), propose un shape remarquable et dynamique, boosté à la (désormais classique) sauce maya+maxwell.
Un projet tellurique venant remettre en cause l'actuel bâtiment de Renzo Piano, et le travail de la "Plaza" élément fondateur de l'implantation urbaine du centre Georges Pompidou.
Plus d'info sur leur propre Blog

Ce concours était organisé par the ICARCH Gallery, Evanston, Chicago, IL .

Les membres du jury étaient :

Ed Keller – Faculty Columbia University, New York,; , SCI Arc, Los Angeles.
Carla Leitao – Aumstudio, New York, Faculty Cornell University
Joaquin Bonifazga – architect, New York
Gabrielle von Bernstorff – architect, Vevey, Switzerland
Dan Coma – ICARCH Gallery, Chicago, Competition Organizer.

# Jean Nouvel, architecte officiel de Paris

J'avais déjà évoqué le concours pour la tour Signal à la Défense dans un précédent post et la médiocrité des réponses proposées. Finalement, et Le Figaro en fait sa une, c'est Jean Nouvel (encore lui...toujours lui) qui remporte la compétition avec un World Trade Center d'ores et déjà traversé et en flamme, et qui ne vient en aucun cas interroger la notion d'urbanisme vertical. Le concours laissait pourtant suffisamment de liberté aux architectes pour repenser cette même notion, mais de la même manière que pour le développement durable, la France, en retard sur cette réflexion, préfère produire ce que d'autres pays accomplissaient il y a 10 ou 20 ans, plutôt que de commencer par une grande mise à jour.

Le titre du Figaro ne s'y trompe d'ailleurs pas, en employant le terme "retour" qui implique une nostalgie d'une époque qui en l'occurrence n'a jamais existée, et celui de "gratte ciel", notion totalement désuète aujourd'hui...