Archinect - News

Major cantilevering hotel tower for Midtown Manhattan revealed by Marin Architects

2024-01-29T11:28:00-05:00

New York City-based Marin Architects has revealed its design for a 42-story tower near Bryant Park in Manhattan. Named the Xadia Hotel, and located at 57 West 39th Street, the scheme seeks to “make a tasteful impression on the city skyline through a unique, cantilever façade and eye-catching interior lighting design,” according to the design team.

Image credit: Marin Architects

From the outside, the scheme is defined by an illuminated crown sitting atop the tower. In placing the crown above the tower’s otherwise minimalist facade treatment, the team sought to represent “a departure from excessive ornamentation, focusing instead on the power of understatement.”

Image credit: Marin Architects

The exterior also sees a significant 25-foot cantilever over an adjacent property, which the team estimates has allowed for the inclusion of an additional 68 units in the scheme. Inside, meanwhile, the tower will contain 173 guest rooms, a rooftop bar and restaurant, a plaza, and an arcade.

Image c...

35-story Raffles Boston becomes Hancock Tower's newest neighbor

2024-01-10T13:32:00-05:00

The Architectural Team (TAT) has completed a mixed-use tower in Boston featuring the city’s first sky lobby. The Raffles Boston Hotel & Residences features a 400-foot curved glass form and is described by the team as a “sophisticated new skyline statement within a challenging and historic context.”

Image credit: Ed Wonsek

The 35-story high-rise comprises 146 homes, 147 hotel guestrooms, and 16 amenity spaces. To compensate for the site’s narrow plot, the tower’s design sees a cantilever at the fourth-floor extent over the adjacent historic University Club to support the upper 29 stories, with a further cantilever occurring at the 17th floor.

Image credit: Ed Wonsek

In addition to increasing the internal area of the tower, the cantilevering approach forms a distinctive design element of the scheme’s exterior, “granting the tower a contextually scaled street presence while also allowing the building to express itself as a sculptural form on the upper levels,” according to the team. To d...

J. MAYER H. completes cantilevering pavilion for FOM University’s Düsseldorf campus

2023-07-05T11:13:00-04:00

J. MAYER H. has completed a new pavilion for the FOM University campus in Düsseldorf, Germany. The structure adds to a larger university building completed by the firm five years ago, bringing a new social space to the 86,000-square-foot campus on the site of a former cargo train station.

Image credit: David Franck

The pavilion features shaded outdoor terraces underneath a cantilevering floating roof. Described as an annex to the main building, the inside of the facility offers over 1,000 square feet of social spaces.

Image credit: David Franck

“The FOM Pavilion adapts to the amorphous green landscape that interweaves the various levels of access to the university building and as a soft soil sculpture covers the underground garage beneath,” the design team explained in a statement. “As an addition to the university building, the pavilion provides spaces for seminars and lectures, workshops and social gatherings.”

Image credit: David ...

BIG and Safdie complete jagged new tower additions to Quito's skyline

2022-12-07T05:00:00-05:00

A pair of landmark projects in the Ecuadorian capital of Quito is now complete, representing firsts for both BIG and Safdie Architects, respectively.

QORNER, the 24-story Safdie-designed tower, is the firm’s first residential project on the continent and serves as an extension of its founder’s indoor-outdoor vision with garden terrace-lined residential offerings from the micro-apartment to the penthouse level.

IQON (left) and QORNER (right). Image courtesy of Uribe Schwarzkopf.

QORNER. Image courtesy of Uribe Schwarzkopf.

Its northern facade features a living green wall that defines a vertical core, while the staggering of its eastern and western facades creates a “hillside” form resembling a “cliff face” with room for double-height corner terraces with views of neighboring La Carolina Park.

QORNER. Image courtesy of Uribe Schwarzkopf.

Finally, a tree-lined infinity pool is placed on the rooftop level in a nod to their iconic Marina Bay Sand...

Foster + Partners completes Shenzhen DJI towers with large cantilevering volumes

2022-10-06T09:00:00-04:00

Foster + Partners has completed the new headquarters for leading drone and camera company DJI in Shenzhen, China. Described by the design team as a “heart of innovation” for the company, the scheme’s two towers rise 40 and 44 stories to a height of 105 meters (344 feet).

Inside the headquarters, office and research spaces are arranged as floating volumes cantilevered from central cores, supported by large megatrusses and circular profiled steel suspension rods.

Image courtesy of Foster + Partners

Such a system, rare for high-rise towers, was chosen to negate the need for internal columns and to allow for quadruple-height drone flight testing labs. The imprint of the quadruple-height labs can also be seen on the external façade via distinct V-shaped trusses.

Image courtesy of Foster + Partners

The two towers are linked by a 90-meter-long (295-foot-long) suspension bridge, described by the design team as “a lightweight element that creates an elegant connection between the two volumes...

BIG and Barcode complete cantilevering residential building on Amsterdam waterfront

2022-07-15T11:39:00-04:00

Work has been completed on Sluishuis, a residential project in Amsterdam by Bjarke Ingels Group and Barcode Architects. The scheme, which comprises 442 homes, a public green roof garden, and maritime jetties, is defined by a cantilevered form meeting at a high corner.

Photograph © Ossip van Duivenbode

The architects describe the project as a “remarkable building with a unique volume that seems to float on the water thanks to the double cantilever.” Towards the water, the building’s untreated aluminum facade rises to meet at the cantilever, creating a gateway to the inner harbor at the building’s core. On the opposite side, the stepped form contains a stairway to the rooftop garden and private residential terraces.

Photograph © Ossip van Duivenbode

The 442 energy-neutral homes, which vary between owner-occupied and rental units, are designed for a variety of income levels and age categories. Typologies include compact studios, water sports apartments, and duplex penthouses. The steppe...

Our coming apocalypse is now being recorded thanks to this new intervention

2021-12-09T13:37:00-05:00

A digital record of earth’s man-made demise is about to begin thanks to an intervention in Australia called Earth's Black Box.

A remote part of Tasmania is the home of the ominous new steel box that’s meant to capture and record climate data such as oceanic acidification, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, and land and sea temperature increases in addition to information about population growth, energy use, and newspaper stories related to climate change.

The box runs on a combination of batteries and solar power and can collect the data thanks to an algorithm that was developed by the communications firm Clemenger BBDO with the help from the University of Tasmania, and the artist collective Glue Society, which had help from architects Thomas Bailey and Kate Philipps of Room11.

Image: Earth's Black Box

“The idea is if the Earth does crash as a result of climate change, this indestructible recording device will be there for whoever's left to learn from that,” Clemenger’s Jim Curtis ...

Inside Olson Kundig’s LeBron James Innovation Center for Nike

2021-10-05T14:01:00-04:00

Nike has offered a glimpse inside the Olson Kundig-designed LeBron James Innovation Center, located in Beaverton, Oregon. The 750,000-square-foot facility, which opened this week, will be used by the global sports brand as a base for research, prototyping, and testing for both data analysis and products.

Image via Nike

The building will house 700 employees dedicated to material and product innovation. Outside, a 500-foot-long 15% incline ramp folds down to an entrance plaza underneath the building’s imposing cantilever. The interior, in addition to housing a state-of-the-art sports research lab, features a restaurant named after LeBron’s mother Gloria Marie James, complete with a mural depicting highlights of the sports star’s career.

Image via Nike

The cantilevering top floor of the center hosts the Nike Sports Research Lab, an 84,000-square-foot facility, home to the world’s largest motion-capture installation with 400 cameras. The lab also houses a full-size NBA basketball court, ...

Texas architects create semi-Brutalist home in Dallas

2020-06-11T18:16:00-04:00

New York and Austin-based firm Specht Architects has recently completed the Preston Hollow home, an 8,000-square-foot residence influenced by the classic Dallas modern homes of the 1950's and 1960's.

Among the defining features of the home are its heavy cast-concrete walls that extend from the interior our into the surrounding landscape, creating outdoor spaces and courtyards that help frame views from inside the home. The concrete walls were cast using a custom-fabricated formwork that creates a corrugated appearance.

"This technique, a staple of Brutalist architecture from the 1960's and 1970's, creates a play on shadows and pattern that changes throughout the day," said Scott Specht, founder of Specht Architects. "Unlike the Brutalist work from that era, however, the heavy walls here are countered by delicate steel columns, thin window frames, and the hovering edges of the roof. The concrete is a grounding element that provides a contrast to the overall lightness of the spaces."

...

Dramatic cantilevered bridge complete with elevated park wins AISC's 2020 Forge Prize

2020-05-26T14:42:00-04:00

Rosannah Harding and Matthew Ostrow of HardingOstrow have won a first prize of $10,000 for the American Institute of Steel Construction's (AISC) 2020 Forge Prize. Their winning concept is a cantilevered pedestrian bridge and elevated park intended for a site in Manhattan that connects to the existing High Line.

Weathered steel creates a grid frame that holds the span of the elevated park. From beneath the cantilever, one can see impressions of shining concrete that each act as planters to hold trees and other vegetation in the park above.

Harding and Ostrow worked with fabricator STS Steel, Inc. to refine their design and to streamline the imagined construction process of the structural frame.

The judges who participated in the competition this year are Matt Dumich, FAIA, of SmithGroup; Rebekah Gandy, AIA, LEED AP, of Gensler; David Sadinsky of Turner Exhibits; Cast Connex Vice President Jennifer Anna Pazdon, PE; SteelFab, Inc. Texas Division Vice President Darren J. Cook; and STS S...

Downtown LA skyscraper with cantilevered glass-bottom swimming pools gets thumbs-up from city planning commission

2019-09-13T15:02:00-04:00

Plans for what could become one of Downtown’s most unique-looking skyscrapers received unanimous approval today from the city’s planning commission. With cantilevered swimming pools jutting out of its upper floors, the tower proposed for across the street from Pershing Square has been said to look like an in-progress game of Jenga. Commissioner Samantha Millman called it an “ambitious and audacious project.”

The Arquitectonica-designed 53-story hotel and condo tower with its precariously cantilevering glass-bottom swimming pools (hey, it's LA!) first appeared on Archinect last fall and quickly became the subject of much debate.

Additional renderings were released in May this year.

Image courtesy of Arquitectonica

If all goes as planned, JMF Development Co. aims to have the 784-foot tower completed by 2023.

Sou Fujimoto's eye-catching apartment tower, L'Arbre Blanc, is a cantilevered spectacle

2019-06-21T20:51:00-04:00

When the project was first announced in 2014, many waited in anticipation as renderings of L'Arbre Blanc tower surfaced. The 17-story tower is said to be modeled after the shape of a tree with balconies 'branching out' from the cylindrical shaped building. Located in Montpellier, France, Sou Fujimoto was joined by Nicolas Laisné, Dimitri Roussel, and OXO Architectes to complete the project.

L'Arbre Blanc by Sou Fujimoto in collaboration with Nicolas Laisné, Dimitri Roussel and OXO Architectes. Image © Cyrille Weiner

With the 113 apartment tower fully constructed, it has stayed true to its renderings. According to the project's press release, Fujimoto and his team aimed at recreating the idea of a tower while paying attention to the local lifestyles of the people of Montpellier. The eye-catching details of the cantilevered balconies help create a changing perspective depending on the viewer's angle, sun positioning, and viewpoint. The cantilevered balconies not only aide in the visu...

Arquitectonica designs a 53-story Jenga-like tower near LA's Pershing Square

2018-11-05T13:49:00-05:00

JMF Development Co. [...] hopes to construct a 53-story tower on the vacant, L-shaped lot which wraps the historic structure. [...] Arquitectonica is designing the proposed 784-foot-tall glass-and-steel tower, which is highlighted by a collection of cantilevered, glass-bottom pools for residents on the building's upper levels. While some of the protrusions would extend over the Pershing Square Building, none would hover above the public right-of-way.

Image: JMF Development Co., via urbanize.la.

A rather dramatic example of the stacked-boxes scheme might go up at 5th and Hill, near Pershing Square, in Downtown Los Angeles soon.

Designed by Arquitectonica, JMF Development Co. proposes the 53-story tower with its fiercely protruding glass-bottom swimming pools as two potential options: few condominiums + hotel/restaurant if signs of a lurking next recession became clearer vs. plenty of condos + ground-floor retail space if the economic outlook stays strong.

This Belgian concrete factory shows how industrial buildings can be functional AND beautiful

2018-01-11T20:02:00-05:00

Belgian maker of architectural prefabricated concrete elements, Enjoy Concrete, show us how the product can be the architecture in its most beautiful sense: when the company was in need of a new industrial facility in the small town of Veurne, they partnered with Govaert & Vanhoutte Architects to design a headquarters that's constructed entirely from Enjoy Concrete's own prefabricated concrete elements.

The facade follows a strict 6x3-meter grid that applies the same proportions to the concrete panels as well as the windows.

While the building is mainly a big industrial hall for production and storage, it also contains a variety of office spaces spread over four stories. Its most striking feature is a cantilevered, glass-encased board room protruding dramatically from the top corner of the otherwise compact building volume.

Since the building is situated near a green canal la...

New kid on the block: SOMA's mixed-use Bobo in Beirut begins foundation work

2014-12-10T14:09:00-05:00

The distinctive BOBO building by New York-based SOMA Architects will be the new kid on the block in Beirut's Mar Mikhael district. The design SOMA came up with for the residential building, which recently began foundation work, consists of a steel exoskeleton tied to a concrete core that will cantilever over an existing house that is located at the end of a row of structures dating back to the 1920s.

BOBO's developer, Zardman, was not allowed to demolish the house's façade. To work around this condition, the house was gutted and excavated six floors underground. Once built, BOBO will have a total of 11 stories, 13 residences (including a penthouse duplex), and retail on ground level.

More images in the gallery below.