MAD-ness: Huaxi City Centre

There are definitely too many blog references to this project to name... so going straight to the source: "MAD recently organized a collaborative masterplanning project in South West China. Ten young international architects were invited to take part in an urban experiment, to design a new city centre on a scenic natural site close to the city of Guiyang. The participating architects were: Atelier Manferdini (USA), BIG (DENMARK), Dieguez Fridman (ARGENTINA), EMERGENT/Tom Wiscombe (USA), HouLiang Architecture (CHINA), JDS (DENMARK/BELGIUM), MAD (CHINA), Mass Studies (KOREA), Rojkind Arquitectos (MEXICO), Serie (UK/INDIA), Sou Fujimoto Architects (JAPAN).


:: image via Designboom

"China has become the global laboratory for urbanization, where the logical endpoint of current architectural trends can be seen, and the effects of leaving private developers to create cities can most keenly be felt. This experiment is not intended to create an idealized urban reality: rather, it is an attempt to push these trends to their purest form. ... The masterplan was jointly designed by Shanghai Tongji Urban Planning and Design Institute, Studio 6 and MAD."






:: images via Designboom

With this cast of players, there's definitely some compelling visuals... and it's always an interesting phenomenon to see many diverse designers work juxtaposed into a singular master plan... (although it seems a recent trend). Some of the more veg.itectural highlights (all images via a comprehensive post on Designboom):

Mass Studies





Sou Fujimoto



JDS



Serie



Rojkind Architects



BIG



Dieguez Fridman

Google Earth Ecoroof Tour

One of the fun elements of Google Earth is the steadily growing library of buildings that have been modelled in a simplified 3-D format (perhaps by many of the unfortunately unemployed with time on their hands). I stumbled upon the Multnomah County Green Roof (Amy Joslin Memorial Ecoroof) and thought it was pretty cool.

:: Multnomah County - images via Google Earth

There's definitely some washed out quality of the vegetation (perhaps due to aerial photography, or perhaps just due to season) - but you can definitely read the vegetative quality, particularly when there is a pattern, such as the banding on the Portland Building Ecoroof below.

:: Portland Building Ecoroof - images via Google Earth

I decided to randomly fly around town, taking some aerial shots of some of the great buildings around town with some greenery... obviously this is not a complete survey, but a fun diversion.

:: Broadway Housing - image via Google Earth

:: SoWa Condos - image via Google Earth

:: OHSU Center for Health and Healing - image via Google Earth

:: Jean Vollum Natural Capital Center - image via Google Earth


:: Brewery Blocks (The Louisa + The Henry) - image via Google Earth

Some of them are unfortunately a bit mis-scaled and badly represented, such as the two small-scale ecoroofs atop the People's Food Coop building below - nothing like the real thing, which is lovely:

:: People's Food Coop - image via Google Earth

DailyLand: Parc Nus de la Trinitat

Parc Nus de la Trinitat, Barcelona, 1993 by Joan Roig & Enric Batlle found via VULGARE. "...is in north east Barcelona, inside a circular motorway junction. The scale of the six hectare park is definad by a framework of trees forming a spactially effective filter between the motorways and the park. A circular gallery divides the park into an inner and an outer area."




:: images via VULGARE

The park's location is definitely difficult, with multiple lanes of converging traffic. The use of buffering bands of vegetation, water, and berming creates separation from the immediate context, to the point where you can't see any of the trafficways from the park interior (or maybe some fine compositional cropping from the photographers)...






:: images via VULGARE

Obviously connectivity is the key to making this a successful space... as well as the size, to allow for spaces to be separated from the traffic lanes to a degree where they can stand on their own, with adjacent buffering. See the map view of the project below - via the original case study from the University of Virginia School of Architecture, which shows the open space in context with the rest of the urban form.


:: map image via Urban Arch Virginia