Green architecture award: Green Villa and Tower in Almere, Netherlands

The green residential building complex designed by Faro Architecten BV has won a competition to design an urban villas and residential tower of Almere, Netherlands. 57 residences are in the tower and the green balconies will serve as public space.

Completed with photovoltaic and PCM panels, this building will save energy throughout the year. The gardens of the tower will live with rain collected water.

+ via ecofriend

'Cool' public space in hot Abu Dhabi by Emergent Architecture

A public space that is hi-tech, like Zaha Hadid's deconstruction museum is in Abu Dhabi made by Emergent, an architecture firm in Los Angeles. This open space is inteded to be used as public space in a very hot environment that can reach 120 degrees Fahrenheit, with water pool to cooler the air, in term of evaporative and psychological. With atmospheric and spatial solution, this environment will attract people to come and enjoy the daytime hours.

The surface of the plaza plane has rooms below it, that become media center and converence rooms that serves the other three buildings around it.

This surface-to-volume transformation is an extension of an investigation into surface-to-strand geometries in recent projects. Hybrid, transformative geometries offer a wider range of flexibility than surface, strand, or volume systems alone. 

via Emergent Architecture 

Farming in urban city - winner of green architecture competition

A chance to farm in urban areas.

This the winner for green architecture competition. Mithun Architects designed an urban farm building, a building for farming that will produce vegetables, fruits, even chicken farm.

Explained in the website Ecogeek.com:

Some features of the "Center for Urban Agriculture" (CUA):

• Fully self-sufficient building: in energy and water.
  • 31,000 sq ft rooftop water rainwater collection
  • Recycling of gray water (including an ability to handle some of the surrounding area's waste water up to "20 times its own discharge potential")
  • 34,000+ sq ft of solar PV cells with hydrogen gas backup
• "Agricultural features include fields for growing veggies and grains, greenhouses, rooftop gardens and even a chicken farm."
  • Local produced food is critical for changing energy patterns as "40 percent of an individual's ecological footprint is generated by the embodied energy in food."
• 318 apartments (studio, 1 & 2 bedroom units)
• Restaurant & Cafe (The "Greenhouse" using building grown food.

Interview with Ken Yeang - his vision of future architecture

In 2003, Yeang's work was included in the exhibition "Big & Green: Towards Sustainable Architecture in the 21st Century" curated by David Gissen at the National Building Museum

Yeang's 1992 Menara Mesiniaga building in Subang Jaya Selangor, Malaysia is a catalogue of his bioclimatic techniques, including daring "vertical landscaping", external louvers to reduce solar heat gain, extensive natural ventilation and lighting, and an "active Intelligent Building" system for automated energy savings.

Like William McDonough, Yeang's concentration on energy conservation and environmental impact is a radical departure from mainstream architecture's view of the profession as an art form. Yeang has written, "In practice, architectural design is a craft, and a variable one at that. Post modernism has successfully shown up the volatile nature of this craft by its unrestrained use of architectural symbolisms, its frivolous multiplication of the surface area of the built envelope, its prodigious use of unnecessary building materials, its indifference to engineering economy, its extravagant use of land, and its irrational subservience to whim and history instead of the allocation and restriction of excessive consumption of energy resources." Yeang is very innovative, and who might know that his original idea can save the world? (Wikipedia with little changes).

INTERVIEW WITH KEN YEANG.



An interview with architect Ken Yeang, on CNN's 'Just Imagine' programme.
Ken describes his vision for the future of buildings - and how we might live in and organise our cities in 2020, to make them greener.

Mobile Performance Venue - Mobile Building that can be put everywhere

on grass...


on water...


on dessert...

The first time I saw this design... It was really interesting because it can stand everywhere and mobile too.

This was posted in Pushpullbar forum, by Jimmern, a PushPullBarian, and an architect in Various Architect, Oslo, Norway. He said:

The following design principles have driven the development of the concept:

• Create a unique, iconic, and sculptural object to house the Identity Of The Soul performance and represent Arts Alliance Productions worldwide
• Design a calm inner space that will enhance the experience of the performance
• Create an exciting and inviting exterior in contrast to the inner surfaces and spaces
• Create a lightweight mobile venue that can be transported in standard shipping containers with quick erection time and set-up onsite
• Design a flexible solution that would suite different locations, sizes, and types performances
• Use durable materials, long lasting with repairable and replaceable parts where possible

Which I think was quite outstanding design. Congratulation!
Visit the complete explanation about this design here.

Urban Acupuncture for a 'sick' area below fly overs

The design concentrate on 'healing' sick area below fly over road in Bandung, Indonesia. The architect being a suggester of the urban acupuncture said that this might be a way of making better land use without compromising the weakness of the government.

In Indonesia, known as a developing country, the problem of area below fly overs becoming slum and unattended area is common, and being repeatedly happened in Jakarta. This concept proposal derrives a method of healing such area. Via sa98