Archinect - News

BIG's garden-like Suzhou 'art oasis' tops out

2024-08-09T13:45:00-04:00

Another museum project in China from BIG, the 646,000-square-foot Suzhou Museum of Contemporary Art, topped out recently ahead of its scheduled 2025 opening. The project, a "tribute to the rich garden heritage of Suzhou," includes 12 separate small pavilions, which are united by walkways covered by a sheltering envelope of ribboned roof eaves to form a village-like concept. It stands as the centerpiece of the ongoing Jinji Lake redevelopment.

"The result is a manmade maze of plants and artworks to get lost within," Bjarke Ingels commented on the design scheme created in collaboration with ARTS Group and Front Inc. "Its nodular logic only becomes distinctly discernible when viewed from the gondolas above."

View this post on Instagram A post shared by BIG - Bjarke Ingels Group (@big_builds)

OPEN releases design for under-construction campus center in Suzhou

2022-05-12T13:54:00-04:00

OPEN Architecture has unveiled the design for a new campus center in the Chinese city of Suzhou. The Shangfeng Academy project, which topped out at the end of April, will be the site of a new K-12 international school and will also act as a cultural hub for the local community.

For this undertaking, OPEN was challenged with establishing a major new urban project while being mindful of the artistic and cultural tradition of the city.

The construction site.

The campus will serve close to 2,000 students and will include a library, art center, gymnasium, swimming pool, grand theater of 1,000 seats, a black box theater, and a forum. Given the variety of users and programs, OPEN decided to divide the school into five individual buildings interconnected by covered walkways. As a result, voids are formed, which make way for four gardens and semi-outdoor spaces. The walkways accommodate large numbers of students, and the gardens act as buffer zones.

A render of the Autumn garden and the for...

The future of 3D printing will be...neoclassical villas?

2015-02-26T14:03:00-05:00

Outside, across the car park of this otherwise unremarkable industrial estate, is a grand, neoclassical mansion that recently became a global internet sensation . It is the world’s first 3D-printed villa. [...] Not all architects are convinced that 3D printing is good for architecture as a discipline. [...] "It may come without economic cost at a small scale but in architecture, if we are not careful, this is at the expense of integrity.”

Previously: Rapid Construction, China Style: 10 Houses in 24 Hours

China's obsession with vertical cities

2014-10-30T14:04:00-04:00

By the end of next year one-in-three of the world’s 100m+ skyscrapers will be in China, as its state-orchestrated urbanisation drive prompts a megacity building bonanza [...] China now has over 140 cities of more than one million people; America has nine

From Tower Bridge to Sydney Harbour, welcome to China's city of clones

2014-06-03T13:21:00-04:00

Suzhou is like many Chinese cities. It has a historic core, including nine Unesco world heritage sites, as well as many beautiful gardens, waterways and temples. [...] But Suzhou has also embarked on another fascinating project: urban mimicry. From Venetian-style “water town” districts to Dutch-style suburban living, Suzhou hosts what journalist Bianca Bosker calls “original copies”: simulations of western landmarks. The city is fast becoming China’s city of clones.

Previously:

Rapid Construction, China Style: 10 Houses in 24 Hours

2014-04-18T12:00:00-04:00

Chinese companies have been known to build major real-estate projects very quickly. Now, one company is taking it to a new extreme. Suzhou-based construction-materials firm Winsun New Materials says it has built 10 200-square-meter homes using a gigantic 3-D printer that it spent 20 million yuan ($3.2 million) and 12 years developing.