Archinect - News

Apple's first flagship store in India, designed by Foster + Partners, opens to the public

2023-04-18T15:30:00-04:00

Apple’s first flagship store in India, designed by Foster + Partners, is now open. It is located in the Bandra Kurla Complex, a business and residential district in Mumbai.

Employing many design elements synonymous with Apple stores around the world, Apple BKC attempts to blur the boundaries between inside and outside: A 26-foot-tall glass façade highlights the double-height volume within and the outdoor areas. Greenery is invited into the store, with a row of ficus trees slotted along the inside of the glazing.

Image: Foster + Partners

The connection between the interior and exterior spaces is further emphasized by a hand-crafted timber ceiling that extends beyond the glass façade to the underside of the exterior canopy. The ceiling is made up of a triangular grid of 450,000 individual timber elements. Each of the 1,000 ceiling tiles is formed using 400 pieces of oak timber (reportedly sustainably sourced) arranged in a lattice woven pattern. This was inspired by the work of cane an...

OMA's Prestige Liberty Towers break ground in Mumbai

2021-09-21T17:24:00-04:00

OMA has announced that construction has begun on the Prestige Liberty Towers mixed-use complex in Mumbai, the firm’s first project in India.

The development is situated in the historic textile mills area of Mahalaxmi in the heart of Mumbai. The complex is another contribution to the city’s rapid transformation from industrial city to global financial center, along with its new transport networks, high-rise residential, retail, and office spaces.

As per the architects: “OMA’s design takes advantage of the views overlooking the Mahalakshmi Racecourse to the Arabian Sea with two staggered towers of 200 and 290 meters — at 270,000m² [2.9 million square feet] one of the largest office developments in the city. The rectangular column-free floors, combined with full-height curved glass facades, are designed to maximize the office plan efficiency with light-filled, high-quality workspaces. The restrained material selection of Indian black basalt and glass provide a counterpoint to the urb...

Rahul Mehrotra selected to lead GSD's Department of Urban Planning and Design

2020-02-20T12:42:00-05:00

The Harvard University Graduate School of Design (GSD) has named architect and academic Rahul Mehrotra as the new Chair of the Department of Urban Planning and Design at the school.

Mehrotra is also being named to the position of John T. Dunlop Professor in Housing and Urbanization. Mehrotra joined GSD as a faculty member back in 2010 and served until 2015 in the same position he is being elevated to once again. At that point, Mehrotra shifted to become the Director of the Master of Architecture in Urban Design Degree Program and Co-Director of the Master of Landscape Architecture program. NBBJ principal architect and academic Alex Krieger is currently serving as the Interim Chair of the Department of Urban Planning and Design; He took over the position from Diane Davis in 2017.

Mehrotra is the founder and principal of RMA Architects, a Boston and Mumbai-based firm that works cross a variety of project types, including speculative work. The practice helped craft a conservation plan...

Two new mixed-use towers in Mumbai to begin construction this summer

2020-02-04T11:50:00-05:00

Mumbai-based White Red Architects have been selected to design and deliver two new mixed-use towers located on the Western Express Highway in Mumbai, India. The new development will include residential, commercial space, offices, four cinema screens, and a roof-top cafe. One tower will contain the commercial components of the program and sit facing the Western Express Highway, shielding the separate residential tower from the busyness of the highway.

Study models.

Jesus Jimenez, director at White Red Architects, said in a statement: “The team at White Red Architects is excited to see our proposals for this challenging redevelopment project reach the next stage. We have been working closely with key stakeholders to create a scheme which is attractive and playful – a striking addition along one of the main transport routes through the city – and which is also practical and most importantly, enjoyed by the people who will be living and working in the buildings.”

...

Mumbai-based architecture firm NUDES thinks outside the box with an everyday material, cardboard

2019-04-02T15:30:00-04:00

Many may remember playing with cardboard boxes as children. The material is widely common and found almost everywhere. However, it is rarely seen in a contemporary design setting. Now imagine having coffee in a fully functioning cafe built almost entirely out of cardboard. Thanks to Mumbai-based architectural firm NUDES, that idea was made into a reality. The new Mumbai-based cafe Cardboard is turning heads with the use of a familiar, cardboard. From light fixtures to chairs and tables, corrugated cardboard fills the entire landscape of the cafe. The interior is comprised of flowing undulating walls made from carefully sculpted cardboard sections.

Cardboard interior. Image © Mrigank Sharma

Diagram illustrating the relation between the ‘micro’ and ‘macro’ elements of the material. Image courtesy of Nuru Karim of NUDES

Many may be thinking what about the moisture and humidity in the area? However, NUDES founder Nuru Karim put much thought into transforming this common material into a ...

Elon Musk starts digging for the Hyperloop in D.C.; Richard Branson plans to bring it to India first

2018-02-22T15:47:00-05:00

Elon Musk’s tunnel-boring project has received more vague government approval for its equally vague plans to build an underground hyperloop between New York and Washington, DC. Last week, Washington, DC’s Department of Transportation issued a preliminary permit to Musk’s Boring Company to start digging at an abandoned lot in the northeast section of the city, according to The Washington Post.

The extend of the building permit for Musk's The Boring Company is still vague though and currently limited to an empty parking lot at 53 New York Avenue NE next to a Mc Donald's. As the Washington Post reports: "The District’s Department of Transportation is figuring out what other permits the Boring Company would need to cut under city roads and other public spaces."

Hold on to your pants.

Meanwhile in India, Virgin Group founder Richard Branson, and now also Chairman of Virgin Hyperloop One, is spearheading efforts to connect Mumbai with Pune via magnetically levitated pod travel within the next five to seven years, cut down travel time from several hours to 25 minutes, and make the nation with its population of 1.3 billion people home of the first operating Hyperloop line.

Mumbai high-rise at the center of Adarsh Society scam to be demolished, High Court rules

2016-04-29T15:05:00-04:00

In an order that sends a strong message against corruption, the Bombay High Court on Friday ordered the Union Environment Ministry to demolish 31-storey Adarsh Co-operative Housing Society. [...] The society, originally meant to be a six-storey structure to house Kargil war heroes and war widows, was converted into a 100-metre-tall building with politicians, bureaucrats and army officers allegedly conspiring to get flats allotted to them in the cooperative society at below-market rates.

Click here to learn more about the Adarsh Housing Society scam and corruption scandal.

India on the brink: what's in store for the country's architectural future

2016-04-04T14:02:00-04:00

It was less than a century ago that India consolidated itself as a nation, after hundreds of years of foreign domination. Since its independence in 1947, it has worked tirelessly to define its identity; from the political stage to its day-to-day social engagements, India has established itself on the global stage as a rapidly emerging power. Its population is soaring, and is projected to surpass that of China in less than a decade. By 2050, around fifty percent of India’s inhabitants will live in cities, amounting to over 800 million people—over 2.5 times the entire US population today. In such a rapidly evolving society, how can architecture position itself to serve a vastly diverse country while maintaining a unified identity?

The State of Architecture: Practices and Processes in India, co-curated by Rahul Mehrotra, Ranjit Hoskote, and Kaiwan Mehta, explores the place of architecture in present-day India. The event, organized by the Urban Design Research Institute (UDRI), ran throu...

Top 13 floors of India's tallest skyscraper were built illegally, High Court says

2016-01-28T13:37:00-05:00

In a fresh setback for India's tallest skyscraper, Palais Royale at Worli, the Bombay high court on Wednesday held that the 13 upper floors of the 56-storey building as well as a 15-storey public parking tower next to it were "completely illegal". [...] The builder also sought to claim that the tower with 900 parking spaces was in public interest. The HC disagreed, saying "but for the incentive FSI (that the developer could claim) they would not have constructed it for social service".

H/T CTBUH.

World's first Slum Museum is coming to Mumbai

2016-01-12T13:39:00-05:00

Mumbai’s gigantic slums are one of the city’s most prominent—and problematic—features. Dharavi, located in the heart of Mumbai, is home to upwards of 1.5 million people, giving it the distinction of being one of the largest slums in all of Asia. [...] it will also be home to what organizers are calling the first slum museum. [...] The museum itself will be a small, flexible mobile structure, which will make it easy for it to be pulled through the slum’s streets on a bike or small vehicle.

Urban fingerprints reveal a city's fundamental character and composition

2015-09-17T15:10:00-04:00

Like humans, cities and neighborhoods have their own unique fingerprints. The maps were created by researchers at the center’s Urban Age program, who have been studying how the layout of rapidly urbanizing cities can affect their livability.

New York is a grid, London is an airy whirl, Hong Kong is dense: at least, that's according to the black and white "fingerprint" maps put together by the Urban Age program at the London School of Economics and Political Science. The project helps researches see at a glance the macroscopic characteristics of urban environments, from density to wealth disparity to room for growth. The project has profiled urban centers all around the world, including Rio de Janeiro and Mumbai.

For news about other innovative designs using aerially-compiled urban patterns, do read:

• UpStarts: Four O Nine architecture and design

Celebrating concrete architecture in a mini "block party"

2015-07-15T13:04:00-04:00

Long inspired by historic modernist concrete structures throughout the last century, Mumbai-based product designers Nitin Barchha and Disney Davis of Material Immaterial made an artful ode to concrete's lasting architectural influence in "SPACES", a collection of miniature blocks cleanly carved into charming homes.

The designers made each humble yet sophisticated abode using a particular concrete mix to replicate the material's smooth finish. Each of the nine pieces — which measure at 62 x 62 x 51 millimeters — has its own design of volumes and voids that enable numerous arrangements when grouped altogether in the central "Kund".

h/t Ignant

Check out more of these crafty architectural designs on Archinect:

Stephanie Clark’s embroidered architecture

Artist Charles Young crafts mini paper metropolis on the daily

These "Stalaclights" are a witty tribute to the forever-growing skyscraper

Deconstructing architectural icons, with gifs!

"Birdbnb" exhibits elaborate birdhouse replicas of over 50 ...

"An Angry Passion": Round-Up of Global Tributes to Charles Correa

2015-06-18T13:31:00-04:00

Although memorial tributes are rarely upbeat, an unusual tenor of melancholy pervades the world's reaction to Charles Correa's death late Tuesday at age 84. The architect named "India's Greatest" by RIBA in 2013 has, in his passing, seemingly become an emblem of an entire subcontinent's struggles as much as the "open-to-sky" spaces which he leaves behind. In a tribute titled "Charles Correa wanted to design a better Mumbai – but the city let him down" in The Guardian, Bachi Karkaria portrays Correa as a visionary who was forever denied the recognition he deserved by Mumbai. "Correa’s real passion was the designing of cities that are easy to live, work, play – and commute – in. But his karma was Mumbai, which can check none of these boxes with a straight face," Karkaria writes. "The man who described cities as “places of hope” was fated to live in a city of disappointments. It’s not just because its skyline resembles an alarming ECG. More specifically, Mumbai mindlessly sabotaged two...

Charles Correa, legendary Indian architect, dies at 84

2015-06-17T13:43:00-04:00

Born in 1930 in the southern Indian city of Secunderabad, Mr. Correa studied at St. Xavier’s College in Mumbai and then went on to attend theUniversity of Michigan and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the U.S. to study architecture. “To work in India is the great advantage of life in the Third World. The issues are so much bigger than you are; they give you a chance to grow,” Mr. Correa wrote in his book ‘Housing and Urbanization.’

Charles Correa died at home Tuesday night in Mumbai, after a bout of brief illness (according to BBC news). He is known for the diversity and far-reaching quality of his work in India and elsewhere, including affordable housing, master planning, and high-profile academic and diplomatic structures. In 2013, RIBA named him "India's Greatest Architect". Up until his death, he served as a consulting architect with the Goa government in India.

After studying at St. Xavier's College in Mumbai, Correa earned architecture degrees from the University of Michigan and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Some of his best known architectural works include the Mahatma Gandhi Memorial in Ahmedabad, the Kanchanjunga Apartment tower in Mumbai, MIT's Brain and Cognitive Sciences Center in Boston, and the Parumala Church, as well as his master planning work for Navi Mumbai in the 1960s.

RIP Charles Correa, 1930-2015

↑ British Council, Delhi

↑ Mahatma Gandhi Memorial, Ahmedabad

↑ Kanchanjunga Apartm...

Mumbai's Dharavi 'slum': Opportunities & challenges

2015-05-18T14:45:00-04:00

The slum, of course, is the hottest button in urbanism. Beneath the cliché that half the world’s population lives in cities — and that urban populations will double by 2050 — is the fact that only bottom-up informal settlements, or slums, can absorb several billion new residents in the timeframe. [...] URBZ is notable in that it offers a third way at looking at Dharavi — as both a failure and a better path to success than stillborn smart cities or other attempts at top-down instant urbanism.

Steven Holl Architects wins star-studded competition to design Mumbai City Museum North Wing

2014-12-09T16:09:00-05:00

Out of a super-star list of competitors, a team led by Steven Holl Architects won the competition to design the North Wing -- or the Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Museum -- of the Mumbai City Museum in India. The museum is one of India's leading cultural institutions and is undergoing a renewal process to establish itself as a cultural destination. The new 275 crore (approx $44.3 million) building will include new galleries and facilities.

The Steven Holl Architects team included local architects Opolis Architects, Guy Nordenson & Associates as structural engineers, and Transsolar as sustainability consultants.

Learn more about this project on Bustler.

MoMA's “Uneven Growth” case studies conclude with exhibition this month

2014-11-13T13:03:00-05:00

MoMA began its "Uneven Growth: Tactical Urbanisms for Expanding Megacities" initiative last year aiming to advance international discussion on disproportionate urban development and its potential consequences. To address this issue, six interdisciplinary teams spent 14 months in workshops designing proposals that investigate new architectural possibilities for six metropolises. Each case study will be exhibited to the public at MoMA starting on November 22.

But the discussion doesn't end there. MoMA also created a user-generated Tumblr that collects examples of emerging modes of tactical urbanism taking place in the six cities.

Here's a glimpse:

LAGOS
By NLÉ (Lagos, Nigeria and Amsterdam, Netherlands)
Zoohaus/Inteligencias Colectivas (Madrid, Spain)

HONG KONG
By MAP Office (Hong Kong, China)
Network Architecture Lab (Columbia University, New York, U.S.)

ISTANBUL
By Superpool (Istanbul, Turkey)
Atelier d’Architecture Autogérée (Paris, France)

MUMBAI
By URBZ: user-generated cities (Mumbai, India)
Ensamble Studio/MIT-POPlab (Madrid, Spain and Cambridge, U.S.)

RIO DE JANEIRO
By RUA Arquitetos (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil)
MAS Urban Design at ETH (Zurich, Switzerland)

NEW YORK
By SITU Studio (New York, U.S.)
Cohabitation Strategies (CohStra) (Rotterdam, Netherlands AND New York, U.S.)

For further details and images from each case study, head over to Bustler.

The Slumdog Millionaire Architect

2014-06-23T13:08:00-04:00

From this unlikely office, Contractor is helping to create the face of 21st-century India — a nation of flourishing wealth and entrenched poverty that looks, according to the economists Amartya Sen and Jean Drèze, “more and more like islands of California in a sea of sub-Saharan Africa.” [...] Inside the high-rises, several million dollars buys not only granite countertops and Arabian Sea views but also electricity that never goes out and water that always runs.

SOM-designed Mumbai Airport Terminal 2 celebrates its inauguration

2014-01-13T18:34:00-05:00

The Chhatrapatri Shivaji International Airport Terminal 2 designed by Skidmore, Owings, & Merrill celebrated its opening late last week in Mumbai. India's Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, along with visiting dignitaries and representatives from the developer GVK, inaugurated the new terminal. The structure's design combines domestic and international services, reduces passenger walking distances, and adds 4.4 million square feet to accommodate the airport's 40 million passengers a year.

Here's some more details on the project:

"Inspired by the form of traditional Indian pavilions, the four-story terminal stacks a grand "headhouse," or central processing podium, on top of highly adaptable and modular concourses below. Rather than compartmentalizing terminal functions, three symmetrical concourses radiate outwards from a central processing core and are therefore easily reconfigured to "swing" between serving domestic flights or international flights.

All international and domestic ...

Mumbai's tallest skyscraper designed to "confuse the wind"

2013-05-03T14:48:00-04:00

Adrian Smith and Gordon Gill Architecture has unveiled plans for Imperial Tower, which would become Mumbai's tallest building and surely one of the world's most slender skyscrapers, should it come to be built. The 116-story, 400-m (1,300-ft) tall residential skyscraper has a distinctive curved shape, which AS+GG says has been designed to "confuse the wind."

City of paper urbanism: how Mumbai can make plans it may actually implement

2012-10-30T18:58:00-04:00

Problems...will continue to plague Mumbai as long as the government continues to pretend to put all its faith into a thoroughly planned city-wide manifesto that is ultimately tossed aside... In rethinking the grandiose nature of the Development Plan, perhaps the government can engage in smaller scale implementations and allow new regulations and ideas to...move beyond its paper urbanity.

Powering Mumbai with Magic Mushrooms

2012-07-18T14:52:00-04:00

... a cache of biological samples appeared through the criminal networks of Mumbai, in the vain hope that it might provide new marketable narcotic opportunities. The collective drive and expertise of the refugees managed to turn theses genetically-engineered fungal samples into a new type of infrastructure - providing heat, light and building material for the refugees. Dharavi rapidly evolved it's own micro-economy based around the mushrooms.