MAD Architects is one of six architecture firms competing to design the “Southbank by Beulah” tower in the heart of downtown Melbourne. Located at City Road and Southbank Boulevard, the skyscraper must include a mixed-use program of more than 220,000 square meters. The other competing teams are BIG, Coop Himmelb(l)au, MVRDV, OMA, and UNStudio.
For their proposal, MAD Architects looked to Melbourne's historic parks and natural local terrain. With a building area of 225,238 square-meters, their concept is a single, 360-meter-tall skyscraper of “organic” forms resembling a mountain, tree, and most interestingly, a cantilevered cloud structure at the top. The design “establishes open connections between the interior and exterior spaces in the form of large terraces, gardens, and public art zones,” MAD says.
The podium level of the tower features a “mountain village” comprised of vertically stacked urban spaces landscaped with lush green walls and trees to make visitors feel like they're “immersed” in nature — even if they're in the middle of the city.
Emerging from the mountain village like a tree, the tower is clad in transparent glass and a glulam wood facade structure that looks like tree roots twisting upward, MAD describes. Sky gardens are interspersed throughout the tower.
Finally, the tower is topped by a cantilevered “cloud” structure that houses the hotel's lobby, restaurant, bar, and observation deck, plus a 360-view of the city. Composed of an ETFE membrane facade, the “cloud” is lightweight and offers various degrees of transparency. Mimicking the airy appearance of a real cloud, the structure becomes more transparent toward the edges.
The winning proposal is expected to be announced on August 8.
Find more project images below.
Project details
Typology: Mixed-use commercial, cultural/arts, entertainment, hotel, office, residential
Site Area: 6,000 sq.m.
Building Area: 225,238 sq.m.
Building Height: 360m
Principal Partners in Charge: Ma Yansong, Dang Qun, Yosuke Hayano
Associate Partner in Charge: Tiffany Dahlen
Design Team: LI Cunhao, SUN Shouquan, Marco Gastoldi, Jennifer Perez-Rojas, WANG Xinyi, Thoufeeq Ahamed, LEI Lei, Jaime Cadarso, Reinier Simons
Looks very Australian...they often do things there that don't make any sense and which reinterpret other concepts or styles in a contemporary Po-Mo kind of way.
All 8 Comments
I love this crazy fucking thing, better than any Marc Foster Gage shit.
Gage is bad porn. MAD is good porn.
i give it props for being different, but a giant glowing booger atop a phallus? i'll pass.
Fucking mess.
This is some Zapf Dingbats rendering done to impress a few pretentious and ironic Yale second years that will never be architects — there is a lot to learn from classical revivals, but this is garbage
Also, MAD has actually built things
um. hate ti break it to you, but after 30 secs, i'm fulfilled. this dickish thing, is like running a concurrent video clip of a horse continuously kicking a man in the balls. i mean sure some like it, but generally it's going keep me from being fulfilled.
Looks very Australian...they often do things there that don't make any sense and which reinterpret other concepts or styles in a contemporary Po-Mo kind of way.
This is probably the best description of Australian architecture I've ever come across lol.
They have of course the National Museum by Howard Raggatt, which just literally took Liebeskind's Jewish Museum and ran with it:
Raggatt also did a Savoye by the way... http://armarchitecture.com.au/...
But wait there's more:, this is by LAB Architecture Studio (former Liebeskind architect)
RMIT's Queen.
I’m don’t like most MAD projects, but this one is good. But it needs more Clouds. One is an elitist gimmick, five would be a better design strategy
it's almost nihilistic how Yansong borrowed from the projects of BIG, ZHA, and MVRDV to create this cynical combo of developer friendly architecture which at the same time dog whistles to academic formalist strategies and the flattening of any project into a basic aesthetic. you see literally green symbolic sustainability, diagrammy stacked volumes, sinuous parametric structure, and anti-abstraction formalism reminiscent of their Beverly Hills project. It's honestly hard to read between the motives of whether this was an innocent borrowing of successful design models to create a safe proposal based off past success or if it truly was an analysis of our time where riffing and collaging is the M.O. and new ideas no longer exist
"Nihilistic" ? Your description seems like you are fresh out of school
It's one thing to render some fanciful cloud scheme, it's another thing entirely to design something that can be built - especially in a way that will even vaguely resemble the proposal.
Here a link to visuals of the other proposals, text in Dutch but you'll get the picture: https://architectenweb.nl/nieu...
Each one worse than the next. Gotta love the greenwashing, though. Has anybody figured out how to maintain lush landscaping on a highrise yet? Or even keep the stuff alive in those conditions?
And another Anish Kapoor cloud ripoff. These big firms are pathetically bad: corporate money mentality poorly disguised as contemporary art. And the clients are too ignorant to know the difference.
I could easily do a soft drink metaphor for these firms but couldn't be bothered because I don't drink soda.
Lush landscaping actually can be done in highrises:
(not a rendering, Stefano Boeri's Vertical Forest)
Nice to see some real effort being put into this idea. Requires a lot of long-term planning and specialty cultivation. Climate and locations sensitive of course. Easy to put on a drawing, a completely different matter to pull it off - just like the floating cloud.
this is a nice picture of the evolution of those trellis, they really work to cool the west facing facade.
this was the first big project I worked on, in 1990, in Chile.
no light pollution laws?
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