Archinect - News

JAHN-Designed Japan Post Tower to Open in Tokyo

2013-03-13T13:53:00-04:00

Tokyo has a new skyscraper: the Japan Post Tower, a 38-story high-rise building designed by Helmut Jahn's Chicago firm in collaboration with Mitsubishi Jishu Sekkei, will hold its official grand opening for all commercial space Friday, March 21, 2013.

Frank Gehry designing new tower in Santa Monica

2013-03-04T11:52:00-05:00

Frank Gehry is designing a new 22-story tower that developers want to build in downtown Santa Monica, near the intersection of Ocean Avenue and Santa Monica Boulevard, according to the official website for the project. The structure will feature space for a hotel and condominiums, as well as restaurant and retail space.

United Bank of Addis Ababa Entry by Söhne & Partner Architekten and BET Architects

2013-02-26T19:29:00-05:00

Viennese practice Söhne & Partner Architekten has shared with us their competition entry for the new United Bank building in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The tower design with the dragon-scale facade was conceived in collaboration with Ethiopian firm BET Architects.

Essence Financial Building by OMA

2013-02-07T13:17:00-05:00

Yesterday we published a first image of OMA's latest competition win, the Essence Financial Building in Shenzhen. Here is the project now in more detail.

Previously: OMA to Design Essence Financial Tower in Shenzhen

OMA to Design Essence Financial Tower in Shenzhen

2013-02-06T17:25:00-05:00

OMA has been awarded the first place in the international design competition for the Essence Financial Building in Shenzhen, China. OMA Partners David Gianotten and Rem Koolhaas are heading the project which they intend to be a new generation office tower for Shenzhen.

UPDATE: Click here to see the project in more detail.

BIG Designs Sexy Observation Tower for Phoenix

2012-12-19T17:19:00-05:00

News just broke that BIG has been commissioned to design a sleek 420 ft tall mixed-use observation tower for Phoenix, Arizona. Quite possibly the city's new symbol?

Zaha Hadid to design Miami tower

2012-12-19T13:08:00-05:00

Hadid’s tower will be built at the site that is now occupied by the BP Station at 1000 Biscayne Boulevard, directly across from Museum Park. The selection of Hadid was confirmed Monday by the investment group behind 1000 Biscayne Tower, which is managed by local developers Gregg Covin and Louis Birdman.

MAD completes the Absolute Towers in Mississauga

2012-12-14T13:53:00-05:00

Encountered on the street, they are enigmatic and shifting, even voluptuous. They appear carefully controlled, but their underlying geometry is far from obvious. Driving or walking by causes the towers' profiles to change continuously, and it would require significant mental acrobatics to map the relationship between profiles and construct a complete mental model of the building. From a closer vantage point, the geometric enigma remains, but a feature at another scale begins to dominate.

Gehry’s 8 Spruce Street Wins Emporis Skyscraper Award

2012-12-12T14:45:00-05:00

The ten winners of the 2011 Emporis Skyscraper Award have been announced with New York City's 8 Spruce Street tower taking home the top place. The winners were chosen from over 220 skyscrapers completed in 2011. Now in its 12th year, the award program rewards ten skyscrapers completed in the previous calendar year.

Swarovski Crystal to build luxury towers in Pune, India. Seriously.

2012-12-07T13:15:00-05:00

Gateway Towers 1 is designed to please even the most exacting and fussy Corinthians. That's why every home here is fully automated, giving you the most advanced technology of the century and making your life smooth and easy. Even the amenities have been handpicked with special attention, right from the designer fixtures to the Swarovski lobbies to the private theatre within the towers.

Cladding core holds the key to Dubai tower inferno

2012-11-20T16:30:00-05:00

It is believed 70 per cent of the buildings in the UAE have some form of facade cladding that has a combustible thermo-plastic core between two sheets of aluminium.

First Plans Released For Huge Towers Next to Capitol Records

2012-11-01T13:39:00-04:00

The new buildings will be designed by Gary Handel Architects and Roschen Van Cleve Architects, but these renderings, like the rest of it, are conceptual. Landscape starchitect James Corner Field Operations (of New York's High Line and Santa Monica's Civic Center Parks) will design "extensive open space, street-level plazas, and enhanced pedestrian circulation encompassing approximately 25 percent of the entire site."

View more from the Millennium Hollywood website.

UPDATE: Massive mixed-use project in Hollywood clears a hurdle

Guangzhou International Finance Center Wins 2012 RIBA Lubetkin Prize

2012-10-15T15:43:00-04:00

Guangzhou International Finance Center in China by London-based Wilkinson Eyre Architects has won the RIBA 2012 Lubetkin Prize for the best new international building. Now in its sixth year, the RIBA Lubetkin Prize is awarded to the architects of the best new building outside the European Union.

Barkow Leibinger’s Tour Total Opens in Berlin

2012-10-12T17:41:00-04:00

Tour Total, the latest project by German firm Barkow Leibinger, opened yesterday in Berlin. The 18-story tower, new home to the Germany headquarters of oil company TOTAL, is the first piece of the so called "Europacity" behind Berlin Central Station.

Tokyo Opens World’s Tallest Tower to About 200,000 People

2012-05-21T17:37:00-04:00

The Tokyo Skytree, twice as tall as the Eiffel Tower, and its surrounding retail and office complex opens today to an estimated 200,000 visitors. [...] Tokyo Skytree, which took four years to build, surpasses the 600-meter Canton Tower in Guangzhou, China, as the world’s tallest, according to the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat. Dubai’s 828-meter Burj Khalifa is the tallest building, according to the council.

To be precise, the opening ceremony for Tokyo Skytree is scheduled for Tuesday morning, May 22 at 9:15 a.m. local time.

REX unveils residential tower in Seoul's Yongsan International Business District

2012-05-15T11:30:00-04:00

YONGSAN INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS DISTRICT “PROJECT R6”
Seoul, Korea

CLIENT Dreamhub Project Financing Vehicle Co., Ltd.
PROGRAM 47,800 m2 (514,500 sf) of luxury housing for short-term residents, 27,000 m2 (290,600 sf) of retail, and 929 parking stalls
AREA 115,500 m2 (1,240,000 sf)
CONSTRUCTION BUDGET Confidential
STATUS Commenced 2011; completed Schematic Design 2012; completion expected 2016
DESIGN ARCHITECT REX
KEY PERSONNEL Tiago Barros, Adam Chizmar, Danny Duong, Luis Gil, Gabriel Jewell-Vitale, SeokHun Kim, Armen Menendian, Romea Muryń, Roberto Otero, Se Yoon Park, Joshua Prince-Ramus, Lena Reeh Rasmussen, Yuan Tiauriman
EXECUTIVE ARCHITECT Mooyoung
CONSULTANTS Barker Mohandas, Buro Happold, Front, Level Acoustics, Magnusson Klemencic, Scape, Shen Milsom Wilke, Tillotson Design

YIBD “Project R6” is an urban boutique residence for short-term business people, young urban professionals, and foreign residents. Due to the transience of its target users and the short durations...

Record breaking lego tower in Seoul

2012-05-14T11:49:00-04:00

The world's tallest lego tower with more than 50,000 bricks stands in front of Seoul's Olympic Stadium. The lego tower measuring 31.9 meters took five days to build and broke the previous record set in France at 31.6 meters.

AS+GG Designs Dancing Dragons Complex for Seoul’s Yongsan District

2012-05-10T17:51:00-04:00

Chicago-based firm Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture just released its design for Dancing Dragons, a pair of landmark supertall mixed-use towers for the new Yongsan International Business District in Seoul, South Korea. The buildings, which include residential, “officetel” and retail elements, consist of slender, sharply angled mini-towers cantilevered around a central core.

The AS+GG towers will find themselves in close proximity to MVRDV's highly controversial The Cloud towers.

Tokyo’s skyline takes on a foreign flavor

2012-03-09T15:11:00-05:00

Although Japan boasts some of the most highly regarded architects in the world, many of the buildings that define the Tokyo skyline are the work of foreign architects.

Foster + Partners-designed Hermitage Plaza Granted Building Permit

2012-03-07T17:17:00-05:00

Foster + Partners announced today that Hermitage Plaza, the ambitious high-rise project in Paris, France, has been approved and was granted the Permis de Construire. The twisted twin towers – at 320 meters aiming to be Western Europe's tallest mixed-use towers – promise to create a new community to the east of La Défense, bringing the life of central Paris to the business district with a riverside park lined with cafes and restaurants.

Beach & Howe Tower Proposal Vancouver BIG Tower Bjarke Ingels Group

2012-02-14T18:37:00-05:00

The proposal is for a mixed-use development. On the Howe Street side, there will be a 49-storey residential tower with a 9-storey podium which includes market rental housing, commercial uses, and a childcare facility. The building height is at 150 metres and will be the tallest building on the southern end of downtown and the 4th tallest building in the city, unless the Ritz Carlton site gets developed before this, in which case it would be the 5th tallest.

Bank of America Plaza, the tallest building in metro Atlanta, to be auctioned today

2012-02-07T19:59:34-05:00

The foreclosure of Bank of America Plaza comes as delinquency rates for commercial mortgage backed securities, or CMBS, a type of loan for commercial properties, reached an all-time high in metro Atlanta in December, according to Trepp, a real estate research firm.

GDS Architects Wins 2nd Phase of Cheongna City Tower Competition - the World's First Invisible Tower?

2012-01-26T17:41:00-05:00

After winning Phase 1 of the design competion for the supertall Cheongna City Tower (formerly known as Tower Infinity) in Incheon, South Korea (previously on Bustler), international practice GDS Architects has now also taken the Fist Prize in the invited competition (Phase 2) to do the project through design development.

SOM to Design the Greenland Group Suzhou Center in Wujiang, China

2012-01-18T13:46:00-05:00

The Chicago office of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) has won an international competition to design Greenland Group Suzhou Center, a 358-meter supertall landmark tower, in Wujiang, China. This is SOM Chicago’s sixth project with the Greenland Group.

Unit Fusion Housing Project by Y Design Office

2012-01-03T16:37:09-05:00

International design and research collaborative Y Design Office has sent us the proposal Unit Fusion, a modular, plug-in high-rise residential typology for Hong Kong. As of yet, the 75-story tower project is still in its conceptual design phase.

MVRDV designs The Cloud for Seoul’s Yongsan Dreamhub

2011-12-08T15:32:00-05:00

And here's another Dutch firm that just designed an unusual residential tower for a booming Asian metropolis: Yongsan Dreamhub corporation presented the MVRDV-designed residential development of the Yongsan Business district in Seoul, South Korea: two connected luxury residential high-rises. A 260 meter tall tower and a 300 meter tall tower are connected in the center by a pixelated cloud of additional program offering amenities and outside spaces with wide views.

The history of the skyscraper

2011-11-17T20:52:48-05:00

Consider for just a moment the modern skyscraper. [...] The Chrysler Building in New York. The World Financial Center in Shanghai. The Burj Khalifa in Dubai, the tallest building in the world. They transform skylines and help define what it means to be a modern metropolis. But once upon a time, they were just places for people to work. Kate Ascher traces that history in her new book, "The Heights: Anatomy of A Skyscraper."

Directly related, this quote from the article's commentator KylgoreTrout: "The Burj in Dubai is a magnificent achievement: Except for the trucks waiting to dispose of the sewage hauled from it every day, in lines that take 24 hours of waiting. The visible structures are splendiferous; the non-existent infrastructure, not so much. - What happens when you flush a toilet in the world's tallest building (source: Boing Boing)"

UNStudio’s Design for an Observation Tower for ‘De Onlanden’

2011-09-22T14:00:00-04:00

The design for an observation tower for the nature reserve ‘De Onlanden’, situated to the South-West of the City of Groningen, The Netherlands, was presented today to Natuurmonumenten (the Dutch Society for the Preservation of Natural Heritage) [...]. The observation tower is the result of a study into the optimal application of Ultra High Performance Concrete by a case study team comprising of UNStudio, ABT, BAM Utiliteitsbouw en Haitsma Beton.

Adrian Smith Honored with CTBUH Lifetime Achievement Award for Supertall Buildings

2011-06-30T19:38:00-04:00

Adrian Smith, senior Design Partner at Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture in Chicago, is the 2011 winner of the Lynn S. Beedle Lifetime Achievement Award from the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat for his extraordinary contribution to the supertall building typology.