Although a shorter month for those returning from holidays, January was an eventful one in the design industry nevertheless. It kicked off 2015 with a bang and barely gave us time to recoup from our Christmas excesses.
There was good and bad news from both overseas and from our own shores. There were new projects from Peter Stutchbury and Andrew Maynard Architects, as well as some interesting product innovations and new apartment design models.
Here are the top 10 most read stories for January 2015.
Click on the title or images to be taken to the original story, and let us know which your favourites were - or what else we should have covered.
Dubai’s Nakheel Tower by Woods Bagot is the world’s tallest building never to be completed, says the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat. The council curated a list of 20 unbuilt skyscraper projects that began construction but were never finished. The Nakheel Tower, expected to reach 1,400 metres in height, was a clear winner on the CTBUH list but not necessarily the most interesting. Follow the link to see all the projects.
The competition for the contract of a multi-billion dollar Brisbane Queen’s Wharf Integrated Resort Development in Queensland was narrowed to just two in December last year. The plans from Greenland Group and Crown Resorts, and the Destination Brisbane Consortium were both visionary. Click on the link to see the plans in detail.
The latest residential project from Andrew Maynard Architects takes the concept of open planned living to the extreme. The firm left “Cut Paw Paw” house deliberately unfinished so that it is almost impossible to distinguish the line between internal space and external space.
Good news is always welcomed when returning from holidays, particularly as a new year begins. This is just what architects received when they returned to work from the 2014/15 summer break when job search engine SEEK released a report that showed the Design and Architecture industry had experienced significant employment growth in 2014.
The competition to design Melbourne’s Flinders Street Station was won by Hassell and Herzog & de Meuron back in 2013 and everything was set for the extravagant redevelopment of the CBD station. But since the recent change of the Victorian state government, the proposed design—which would have featured a series of vaulted latticework arches to roof the station’s platforms and tracks—is likely to be dumped. Reader comments were interesting for this story.
‘Augmented’ and ‘reality’, put together in that order, are two words you’ve probably heard a lot of, and will continue hearing in the coming years. Commonly known as AR, augmented reality refers to technology that duplicate real-world environments while augmenting (rather than replacing) a user’s view of their physical surroundings with computer-generated sensory input, such as video, graphics, sound and even GPS data. While new to the design industry, the uptake of AR products has been swift. Our list covers the main players in the AR design and build industry.
No one was injured but when an 80 kilogram chunk of concrete fell off Zaha Hadid’s Library and Learning Center at the University of Economics and Business in Vienna, everyone was worried. Was Hadid to blame? Follow the link to find out more.
The Australian residential design sector began 2015 with a bang following news from the NSW Blue Mountains that a Peter Stutchbury Architecture project had reached completion. ‘Pirramimma’, Aboriginal for ‘under the moon and stars, is the latest from the Sydney-based firm that gave us the 2014 House of the Year, Invisible House, also located in the Blue Mountains.
Breathe Architecture, along with a number of architects from other studios, has plans for a new multi-residential block in Melbourne that could set the benchmark in new apartment style living for the country. The Nightingale, a 20-unit development that would sit across from the practice’s multi-award winning project The Commons, is designed to challenge the way Melbourne builds its apartments, and change the way its people perceive these buildings.
10. “Architect martyred, details sabotaged”: Jean Nouvel boycotts opening of own concert hall
“There were no acoustic tests of the concert hall. The schedule did not allow the architectural and technical requirements to be respected. This despite all the warnings which I have been giving since 2013,” said Jean Nouvel before he boycotted the opening of his €390 million Philharmonie de Paris.
