The Cloudscape of Haikou opened on April 21st, 2021, welcoming users and park visitors from the coastal city of Haikou, China, to the intimate library and waystation. Commissioned by the city’s Tourism and Culture Investment Holding Group, the sinuous concrete Cloudscape is the first of 16 coastal pavilions that will be built to rejuvenate the public space along
Dan Kaplan, FAIA, LEED AP, is a Senior Partner at FXCollaborative, a New York City-based architecture, interiors, and planning design firm. Dan serves in a design and leadership capacity for many of the firm’s complex, award-winning projects. Adept at creating large-scale, high-performance buildings and urban designs, he approaches each project with the mission that it
Fellow of the American Institute of Architects Yen Ong, FAIA, is a founding partner of 5G Studio Collaborative. He is instrumental in the development of 5G’s widely published award-winning portfolio, covering projects in the United States, China, Vietnam, and Indonesia. He directs 5G’s architectural research, is a contributing writer to design publications, and frequently serves
New York may be the city that never sleeps, but developers seem to be holding that expression to truth as the city continues to grow through a tough year. New developments can be seen in many boroughs, from Manhattan to Brooklyn, especially as taller residential buildings and swaths of reimagined neighborhoods, like Hudson Yards or
New York based firm Archi-Tectonics has master-planned an eco-village in the heart of the bustling skyscraper district of Hangzhou, China, for the upcoming 2022 Asian Games. Integrated within the existing city fabric, this eco-village sits on a mile-long landscape of 116 acres with program and park fluidly integrated. Two stadiums, the Hockey Field and Table Tennis
The city of Guangzhou rests at the border of the Pearl River Delta and the South China Sea and is the capital of Guangdong, China’s most populous and prosperous province. As one of the largest economic centers and entrepots in the region—a role dating back to the formation of the Silk Road—the city has undergone
When Interface Studio Architects designed XS House, they wanted to make the most of an extremely narrow site along the Vine Street Expressway in Philadelphia’s Chinatown neighborhood. While most of the expressway’s oddly shaped, leftover lots are used for surface parking, XS House adds urban density by making the most of a code variance through
Houston is a city of contrasts where, because of a dearth of zoning codes, shimmering high-rises dwarf anonymous strip malls and suburban bungalows abut oil refineries. Sandwiched between the Rice University campus, Hermann Park, and a tangle of highways, the Museum District is no less idiosyncratic, even if it is more high-brow in its aspect. The district itself
Robert Heintges is an influential architect and teacher who has advanced envelope design through his eponymous practice, Heintges & Associates, and through his teaching at Columbia GSAPP and Rice Architecture. This interview is part of my effort to document how different forms of specialized design expertise inform multiple architecture practices at once, and produce unstable forms of architectural authorship.
Over the last two decades, as the ownership of American and European-produced cars has proliferated in China, car manufacturers have pushed to establish a prestigious presence in the country in the form of showrooms and high-designed office parks. Designed by Gensler, The Cadillac House Shanghai is an exemplar of this trend and joins the scene with a
AN surveyed some of the leading practices in timber structure and facade engineering about the most innovative projects they worked on over the past year. Their responses highlight advanced applications of timber, ranging from a hybrid tower underway in Canada to greenhouse domes popping up in China. Paul Fast Founding Partner, Fast + Epp Perhaps the most groundbreaking
For what will be the eighth-tallest building in the world when finished in Tianjin, China, later this year, SOM didn’t want to do a by-the-numbers glass facade. Which is good, because the designers couldn’t have even if they wanted to—the Tianjin CTF Finance Centre’s convex and concave surfaces, along with its tapered shape, meant to help shed
On a beach in northern China, light cannons emerge from the tops of a dune, hinting at a structure buried beneath the sand like a lost Courbusian villa. But the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art Dune Museum (UCCA Dune) is neither lost nor buried, but carved into the sands of Bohai Bay by the Beijing-based
The Xiqu Cultural Center, located in Hong Kong’s Kowloon district, was developed as a regional hub for traditional Chinese opera. The project, designed by Vancouver and Hong Kong–based architecture firm Revery Architecture, was inspired by the diaphanous theater curtains. About 13,000 curved aluminum fins, arranged as a series of waves, clad all of the structure’s elevations. The project rises as
With an imposing set of towers rising from a tabula rasa-like setting, one could at first mistake Bernard Tschumi Architects (BTA)’s Tianjin Binhai Exploratorium as a contemporary take on medieval fortifications. Designed between 2013 and 2014, and completed in the fall of 2019, the museum houses artifacts from Tianjin’s heavy industrial past and displays of
The district of Pudong in Shanghai has exploded over the last two decades with approximately 10 percent annual population growth, while the city’s skyline has soared eastward to the East China Sea. FGP Atelier, a Chicago-based firm founded by Francisco Gonzalez-Pulido, has imprinted its distinctive style in the district with the Land Rover tower-and-retail complex featuring a ceramic fritted
Five years ago, Fuzhou hosted an international competition for a new cultural center to affirm the city’s as a premier destination along the Strait of Taiwan and the East China Sea. Opened in October 2018. The Strait Culture and Art Centre is a five-pronged complex on the banks of the Minjiang River designed by Helsinki and Shanghai-based PES-Architects.