The Architecture of the City

The project gives the Boston-based communications and arts school a permanent home on the west coast.

The 10-story, $85 million project will accommodate 217 students in suite-style housing located in the two vertical towers. These living spaces flank the academic and administrative core, which include classrooms, a state-of-the-art digital screening room, a lecture hall with distance-learning capabilities, performance spaces, editing suites, and more. 

Designed by architect Thom Mayne of Morphosis, the dynamic, aluminum-clad structure—really a self-contained campus—stands poised to become a symbol of its rapidly changing neighborhood.

Technological innovations echo the school’s own zeitgeist. Among the building’s energy-saving systems are exterior louvers that open or close automatically in response to the weather and the sun’s intensity. And two intriguing metal scrims, made from 17 different aluminum shapes that were digitally generated and manufactured, shade the interior faces of the residential towers.

The largest natural biome in the world is the maroon colored Taiga, a Russian word for forest, covering large parts of Canada, Europe and Asia with coniferous forests.

The term “Boreal” forest refers to the southern part of this biome and has heavier tree cover while the Taiga refers to the northern portion which is a mostly barren area that borders the Arctic treeline. In order to understand how biomes work, scientists and researchers have created projects like Biosphere and Eden.

The design refers to the integration of architectural structures into natural ecosystems, emphasizing a symbiotic relationship between buildings, landscapes, people and nature.

Part office, part exhibition space, a new London landmark aims to challenge our assumptions about green design.

A new building in east London’s Royal Victoria Docks aims to change public perceptions of green architecture – while trialling some new sustainable technologies and approaches at scale. There’s not a green roof or thick insulated wall in sight. In fact, the structure, which is called the Crystal, is everything we’ve come to believe a sustainable building shouldn’t be: lightweight, angular, glazed from top to bottom and with a roof made out of steel.

Part office space, part interactive exhibition about the future of cities, the building is intended as a living experiment in sustainability that business leaders, politicians and the general public alike can learn from. “The building is a great demonstration of the ‘art of the possible’”, says Martin Hunt, Head of Networks and Partnerships at Forum for the Future. “It’s refreshing to see an interactive exhibition that visualises what our cities could be like – based on high quality research and thoughtful benchmarking. It brings the big issues of urban living – such as water and energy consumption, public health and safety – to life in a way that engages people and inspires them.”

Daylight is a highly cost-effective means of reducing the energy for electrical lighting and cooling. Education often reduces the aspect of daylight to eye-catching effects on facades and scarcely discusses its potential effects – not just on cost, but on health, well-being and energy.

This Light Matters will explore the often unexplored aspects of daylight and introduce key strategies to better incorporate daylight into design: from optimizing building orientations to choosing interior surface qualities that achieve the right reflectance. These steps can significantly reduce investment as well as operating costs and so much more...

Thomas Heatherwick's Learning Hub for Nanyang Technological University democratizes the learning experience with cylindrical towers.

The design resists the idea that university buildings need be compositions of artificially lit, endless corridors with a distinct cylindrical shapes that maximize daylight and encourages the incidental meeting of fellow entrepreneurs, scientists or colleagues. 55 tutorial rooms are devoid of traditional hallways and organized around a central space that links the towers together.

Students can enter the corner-free spaces from 360 degrees and engage with colleagues and professors on rooftop gardens. The upper floors and green rooftops enjoy views of picturesque synthetic and natural landscapes. Award-winning green measures include the use of hydrophilic polymers, a material process that eliminates the need for irrigation, vertical greenery and recycled concrete aggregate as a material. The design will be completed in 2014.

Gardens by the Bay is the newest addition to Singapore's green space innovations, making this architecturally brilliant metropolis truly a “City in a Garden.”

Still a work in progress, Gardens by the Bay was named the World Building of the Year at the World Architecture Festival 2012. The use of innovative energy saving technologies is a noteworthy element of this unique project.

More than 217,000 plants belonging to approximately 800 species and varieties are represented in the Gardens “with the hope that it will help to promote awareness of the wonders of nature and the value of plants to Man and the environment.” In this way, visitors are instilled with new or renewed awareness of plants, while experiencing different ecosystems without disturbing original forests. Gardens by the Bay also supports the sustainability of culture through a wide array of “edutainment” available onsite — from school programs to concerts  – to further enhance an understanding of this experience...