Archinect - News

WWII German bunker adds "green mountain" on top in radical repurposing

2017-05-30T17:48:00-04:00

Repurposing and renovation are some of the hottest new trends in architecture, but architects in Hamburg may have elevated the stakes by their proposal to place a 19-meter high "green mountain" atop a World War II bunker in Hamburg, Germany. The new mountain would offer residents lots to grow vegetables, as well as "a bit of plain hedonistic pleasure" according to a statement released by the designers. The bottom of the bunker has already undergone substantial transformation: it currently hosts a nightclub, a graphic design agency, a music school, a music shop, and a photographer’s studio.

Rejecting modernist master planning notions, MAD's Milan master plan repurposes dilapidated rail yards by symbiosis

2017-04-27T14:02:00-04:00

Repurposing and renovation have gained greater appeal in the years since the overwhelming success of The High Line, extending to a variety of applications and structures. At the recent Milan Design Week, MAD took this to a new level by showcasing their proposal for a new masterplan of Milan, which transforms dilapidated rail yards into a series of thriving new city districts, or micro-systems.

According to MAD, these spatial districts, termed “City of Connections,” “City of Green,” “City of Living,” “City of Culture,” and “City of Resources" each address "a vernacular development typical of Italian cities, where various typological elements and scales are overlapped into dense systems of relations. Designing first at the human scale within recognizable landmarks, the broader urban scale is connected to smaller ones through the interjection of topographic landscapes, serving to unify the continually changing relations of the pedestrian, city, and nature. Each of the yards, following t...

Indoor malls are out as LA's brick-and-mortar shopping centers get renovated

2016-12-13T20:25:00-05:00

Sometime in the not too distant future we will look back at traditional malls as an anachronism – something that started with the post World War II move to the suburbs, peaked in 1990, and faded away, according to the billionaire Los Angeles developer Rick Caruso, whose properties include the Grove and the Americana at Brand.

Millions of dollars are being spent on refurbishing and renovating malls in Los Angeles in an attempt to offer online shoppers an incentive to go outdoors. According to this report by KPCC, the big-league mall masterminds, including Grove guru Rick Caruso, are purposefully trying to redesign malls to center around activities like eating and socializing, experiences which are arguably better in person (and which indoor malls frequently sequester to dimly lit food courts). Although many are predicting the outright death of indoor malls, others are simply repurposing them into religious centers, hospitals, and occasionally dwellings in housing-crisis plagued cities.

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An architect helps transform dangerous alleys into cultural hotspots

2015-08-27T14:26:00-04:00

It soon became apparent that the alley was not a great place to be: Further down the way was a cardboard box used as a makeshift toilet. Once, he saw a pool of blood and the apparent weapon, a pointy umbrella... Vogel asked an architect friend what he should do. “She said the answer was simple: All I needed to do was put people in it [the alley],” said Vogel.

Although the traditional civic approach to dangerous alley behavior (violence, drug use, impromptu toilets) is to block off public access and turn them into garbage-only collection points, director of the International Sustainability Institute in Seattle Todd Vogel decided on the opposite approach: put the public back into them, en masse. Poetry readings, World Cup viewings, circus acts, and neighborhood-maintained planters soon transformed the alleys into destination points and greatly enriched the city's civic life. Crucially, the initial idea for all of this came from an architect, of course.