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Doors recently opened at PALÄON, the Research and Experience Center Schöningen Spears at the edge of the tiny German town of Schöningen and its opencast lignite mine. The center sits at the site of the world-famous Schöningen Spears archaeological find – the oldest preserved hunting weapons ever discovered.
PALÄON was designed by Swiss firm Holzer Kobler Architekturen in collaboration with pbr AG and landscape architects Topotek1.
— bustler.net
SPIEGEL: Mr. de Meuron, Mr. von Gerkan and Mr. Ingenhoven, architecture's reputation in this country is worse than ever. How much of the blame do you bear? — Der Spiegel
Stuttgart's train station, Hamburg's concert house and Berlin's airport: Three projects in Germany are currently competing to be seen as the country's most disastrous. SPIEGEL spoke to the star architects behind the construction sites. View full entry
With so much discussion going on with former Nazi Party relics these days, German developers are trying to revive a valuable real estate, the Nazi built Prora resort complex which served to Hitler's upper ranks. Once it is fixed and put on the market, it will be called "Sea Symphony" with a... View full entry
A new apartment complex in Hamburg, Germany, intends to generate heat, as well as revenue, from growing the micro-organism. The five-story Bio Intelligent Quotient (B.I.Q.) building, which was expected to become fully operational on Wednesday, has a high-tech facade that looks like a cross between a Mondrian painting and a terrarium but is actually a vertical algae farm. — nytimes.com
Big Air Package is the latest project from artist Christo installed at the Gasometer Oberhausen in Germany, a facility that still holds the record as the largest disc-type gas holder in Europe that was converted into an exhibition hall in the 1990s. Big Air Package is the largest ever inflated envelope without aid of a skeleton (Gasometer Oberhausen bills it as the largest indoor sculpture in history) and reaches 90 meters high, with a diameter of 50 meters and a volume of 177,000 cubic meters. — thisiscolossal.com
Richard Meier & Partners’ mixed-use building was selected in an international competition topping submissions by Foster + Partners and Zaha Hadid Architects. The challenge, Bernhard Karpf, associate partner-in-charge, said was to create a hybrid building that was “like a city in itself,” which creates “property lines” that carves out distinct areas for rentals, offices, and shops, but still comes together in a unified and coherent design. — The Architect's Newspaper
In true Studio Berlin fashion, this last summer's group has put together a short film on their escapades throughout Europe. Enjoy! — archinect.com
Modern retailers go to extremes to make their mark and compete within an increasingly competitive market. This often goes beyond out the box design ideals such as virtual retail or smartphone-based shopping processes. — DesignBuild Source
A recent structural discovery that was recently found buried beneath 30 tonnes of rubble has the global industry abuzz.
The architectural secret, which was dubbed ‘Berlin’s best kept architectural secret,’ is a three-storey German Music Hall Theatre, designed by famous architect and business owner Oscar Garbe and built in 1905.
— DesignBuild Source
UNStudio’s recently completed Haus am Weinberg, located on the outskirts of Stuttgart, affords pastoral views of the stepped terraces of an ancient hillside vineyard on one side and cityscape vistas on the other. Whilst structurally the Haus am Weinberg and its garden landscaping reflect... View full entry
"I was very fortunate because the first building in Germany was the Museum for Applied Art, which was a competition that I won. After that I was invited to do other competitions. There's an appreciation for architecture in Germany that doesn't exist in many other places." — Deutsche Welle
When asked, the German-born “Father of Fonts” insists that there is nothing similar about designing a typeface and designing a house. “They’re totally different,” he says, in excellent English peppered with correctly implemented expletives. “With a typeface, you design a space. A letter is defined by the inside space, more than it is by the outside. You design for shape, but also for function.”... “In either case,” he concedes, “the design is as much about function as it is about aesthetics.” — dwell.com
The general Idea from my interpretation was to produce a lightweight structure that uses minimal material yet uses technology to account for the lack of girth and material. - Rogelio Mercado — Rogelio Mercado
The buildings are always designed with redundant structural assemblies to resist forces that might happen maybe .001 time of their existence and sometimes never. So what happens when all that structural apparatus and weight has taken out from an experimental "structure" is explained to a group of... View full entry
Threats by left-wing activists in Berlin prompted New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation to cancel a planned stop in the city’s Kreuzberg district for its mobile laboratory, the BMW Guggenheim Lab. — bloomberg
The city was initially prepared to contribute €77 million to the project – but this figure has since gone up by nearly five times to more than €323 million – more than half the expected €600 million total cost. And the original completion date of 2010 has been pushed back to 2014.
The building’s designers had underestimated certain costs – such as an acoustic panelling for the main concert hall which cost five times as much as expected, adding more than €10 million to the bill.
— thelocal.de