Designed by C.F Moller Architects, this 34 storey wooden skyscraper in Stockholm is designed as one of the proposals for the HSB Stockholm’s architectural competition 2023. HSB Stockholm – Sweden’s largest building society – is 100 years old in 2023. At that time an ultra-modern residential high-rise building will be completed in Stockholm city. Three architectural teams are now preparing the competitive proposals for the spectacular house that will be placed at one of three different sites in Stockholm.

The building will be built over a wooden construction with a concrete core, and it is intended to give the people of Stockholm a new and characteristic beacon and meeting place in their city. Wood is one of nature’s most innovative building materials: the production has no waste products and it binds CO2. Wood has low weight, but is a very strong load-bearing structure compared to its lightness.Wood is also more fire resistant than both steel and concrete. This is due to 15% of wood mass being water, which will evaporate before the wood actually burns. In addition, logs get charred which protects the core.Wood secures a good indoor climate, perfect acoustics, helps regulating the inside temperature and can be exposed without being covered with plaster or other costly materials.In Berg | C.F. Møller’s wooden skyscraper, the pillars and beams are made of solid wood. Inside the apartments, all the walls, ceilings and window frames are made of wood as well and will be visible from the exterior through the large windows.

Each apartment will have an energy-saving, glass-covered veranda, while the building itself will be powered by solar panels on the roof. At street level there is a café and childcare facility. In a new community centre, local people will be able to enjoy the benefits of a market square, fitness centre and bicycle storage room. A communal winter garden will provide residents with an opportunity to have allotment gardens.

If you like this project, you’d want to consider checking out our article featuring the Wooden Skyscraper in Vancouver by architect Michael Green.

+ C. F. Moller Architects

Description:  The Association of Registered Graphic Designers (RGD) invites international submissions of graphic design projects done under the theme of communication design for social good; work with the power to incite action and make meaningful change in the way we live our lives.

Today’s graphic designers have an ever-greater responsibility to visualize the significant issues facing our society and find new and powerful ways to incite change in the way we behave. When we approach these issues creatively, we can make a real difference in the world. The Social Good Design Awards gives voice to the important work designers are doing and can do to change the way we think and act.

Eligibility: RGD invites submissions of communication design projects from all designers worldwide. Projects must have been created, conceived or produced between June 1, 2008 and July 1, 2013. Conceptual concepts are welcome.

Categories:

1. Not-For-Profit Client-Initiated Projects
2. For Profit Client-Initiated Projects
3. Designer Initiated Projects
4. Government Initiated Projects

Judges:

• David Berman RGD, author of “Do Good Design: How Design Can Change our World“
• Frances Edmonds, Director of Environmental Programs at HP Canada
• Ben Hagon RGD, Founder and President of Hagon Design
• Dmitri Siegel, Vice President of E-commerce & Executive Creative Director at Patagonia

Recognition: Winning entries will be featured on the RGD website, in a printed catalogue (5,000 copies) and in a free iPad app, as well as recognized at the 2013 DesignThinkers Conference.

Fees: 

$30 for non-members
$15 for members* (including members of RGD, GDC, SDGQ and members of other Icograda Associations)

Deadline: Entries, forms and fees must be received by no later than 5PM EST on Monday, July 8, 2013

For full entry details, visit http://www.rgdontario.com/sogood. Questions? Email programs@rgdontario.com or call 1.888.274.3668 x27

‘Head in the Clouds’ is a cloud shaped pavilion created from over 50,000 recycled bottles for the FIGMENT’s 2013 City of Dreams art celebration on New York’s Governors Island. Created by Studio KCA, the pavilion spreads on an area of 800 sq feet where visitors can enter into and contemplate the light and colour filtering through the ‘cloud’ from the inside, out. A series of ‘pillows’ made from one gallon jugs form the exterior, while sixteen and twenty four ounce bottles line the interior. Sand, water, and a curved aluminium frame provide structural integrity and create a small seating/dreaming area for 50 people at the base.  ’Head in the Clouds’ was open to the public on the 8th June 2013 at the Governors Island in New York.

Photo Credits: Chuck Choi

+ Studio KCA

With offices in London and Seoul, design firm JHP was appointed to create a complete branding package including interior design of the international restaurant chain BBQ in Seoul. The design consultancy has been working with the restaurant chain for the past 8 months on the creation of a revolutionary new casual dining concept which includes brand identity, the brand story, architecture, internal experience, photographic suite, menu design, uniforms, crockery, consumables, merchandise and packaging.

JHP created a ‘BBQ’ brand story that is built on the success of chicken as a universal food. The new brand story tells the story of the flightless bird that has nonetheless managed to appear all around the world, finding its place on almost any menu in global cuisine. By creating an entirely new and more relevant brand experience, JHP radically changed the BBQ brand proposition and format resulting in an offer that is universally understood and that is inherently adaptable for such a vast store estate.

The new BBQ store concept represents the brand’s outward looking attitude and international aspiration to spread the message and its growing franchise network around the world.

+ JHP

King Kong on Stage

At one time marionettes were relegated to shadow theatre and children’s pantomime but Australia’s Global Creatures Technologies and producer Carmen Pavlovic have taken puppetry to newer heights. Their animatronic uber-puppet King Kong is as tall as a house, requires 16 people to manipulate him and is so heavy (he tips the scales at 1,100 kilograms) that he needs to be tethered to a crane to move him about the stage. Kong is the central character in an upcoming stage musical about the beauty and the simian beast.

“I see him as a sculpture,” says creature designer Sonny Tilders, the man who designed the creation and supervised its construction. Tilders’ sculpture is made of aluminium and latex. A layer of inflatable balloon bags is stretched over the armature – they simulate contracting and expanding muscles – which flex and contort with the aid of 16 microprocessors wrapped inside the torso. The head alone is packed with 15 industrial servo motors and two hydraulic cylinders which gives the off-stage operator precise control over the eyebrows, eyelids, nose, mouth and jaw.

Check out the Promo Video of King Kong on Stage:

And yet Kong is more than a machine controlled by someone with a joystick. “We made a decision early on not to go down the hyper real path”, says Tilders. That meant acknowledging the fact it’s a huge puppet and not blacking out the people who manipulate him, in effect letting people in on the artifice. And here’s where it gets tricky. 13 puppeteers are always on stage. Not only are they visible but they’re part of the story, moving the puppet’s feet when he lopes across the stage or jumping off Kong’s shoulder to provide a counterweight when he raises his arm.

Collectively called The King’s Men and drawn primarily from the ranks of Melbourne’s National Institute of Circus Acts, these are the athletic, robust folks that give the puppet a personality or for lack of a better word, its soul. “Every action of the Kong involves these three departments working together,” says Puppetry Director Peter Wilson referring to the two people working the controls off stage, one crew member working the automation and the 13 puppeteers on stage.

Introducing the puppeteers to the audience has done before. Bunraku, the traditional puppet theatre of Japan, employs three visible manipulators to bring each of their small puppets to life. The puppeteers become part of the performance. More recently, South Africa’s Handspring Puppet Company introduced us to War Horse. A simple sculpture in wood and fabric, War Horse becomes a living, breathing character, and a sympathetic one too, when manipulated by two puppeteers under the body and another manually moves its head.

“The challenge,” says Peter Wilson referring to Kong’s on stage debut “is to maintain that emotional engagement so that the audience will suspend their disbelief throughout his entire journey.  A puppeteer has this absolute awareness of everything on stage,” adds Wilson “but it is all seen, observed and felt through the character.”  In other words the manipulator is an extension of that character and if successful becomes invisible. It remains to be seen whether audiences will buy the conceit but regardless of whether they deem the musical a hit or a miss, Tilders and his crew will have pushed the envelope, using expression and technology to re-define what we consider puppet theatre. “That’s really what animatronics is, a combination of those renaissance skills, the aesthetics and the science,” says Tilders.

Presently in previews, King Kong opens in Melbourne on 15th June 2013 . The producers hope to take Kong, all 330 metres of electrical cable and microprocessors of him, to Broadway after his Australian run.

Check out the video below for an interview with Sonny Tilders and see his finished creation crash about the stage.

Designed by a team of talented designers & coders of art studio Red Paper Heart, Pool Party is an interactive water projection created by laying 65,000 ping pong balls on the entire surface of the pool water. The floating ping pong balls were used as a solution to creating a projection, which otherwise, would not be possible on the surface of water as it would create distortions. The coders even created an application which mapped to the pool and displayed a floating river of graphics, pulled by an invisible tide. Audio reactive visuals bumped along with the various D.J’s and musical acts taking place poolside. The tactile quality of swimming through ping pong balls, combined with animated colours and light created an interactive event worth telling stories about. The design team decided to use live models in the pool to create an interactive experience. Simply Mind Blowing!!

+ Red Paper Heart

Mr Smith by Daniel Young and Christian Giroux

Mr. Smith is an award winning sculptural installation by Daniel Young & Christian Giroux created as a reference to the late American sculptor & visual artist Tony Smith. The 13 feet high sculpture is built out of wooden struts & panels and aluminium joints. Young and Giroux love the idea of utilizing basic, readily available materials and objects that can be easily found at a nearby Home Depot store or IKEA, which makes their works very interesting and at the same time invokes a sense of curiosity. “It’s about making the viewer a little bit more aware of their own body as they move around the work,” – says Christian Giroux.  ”Mr. Smith is also intended to be fun.  It lends itself to a kind of imaginative play in one’s mind about how else it could be configured. It’s not the final form itself which is as important as the possibility that it could take an endless number of forms.”

“Tony Smith described his individual sculptural works as instantiations of a ‘spatial matrix’, an underlying mathematical and geometrical basis to the material world. Developed as a building system in varying degrees by Alexander Graham Bell and Buckminster Fuller, The system consists of a Tetrahedral grid that theoretically expands endlessly in all directions (Smith employed other geometric systems as well). Made of laminated plywood struts, triangular panels and cast aluminium joints, the piece privileges the idea of the system as much as the final sculptural form. Mr. Smith is a kit for making sculptures that adhere to Smiths spatial sense without directly quoting any of his completed works. The sculpture attempts to contribute to a material discourse of space frame systems through the design of a joint that maintains the integrity of the system while accepting either a strut or a panel in the completion of a form. This allows us the latitude to alternate between an emphasis on either surface plane or structure while playing with positive and negative space.”

+ Daniel Young & Christian Giroux

ASK Italian by Gundry & Ducker

Submitted as one of the entries for the 2013 Restaurant & Bar Design Awards, the Ask Italian Restaurant & Bar situated in the Bluewater (shopping centre) in Greenhithe in Kent, England is designed by London based design firm Gundry & Ducker.

The interior design has been inspired by modern Italian design with a retro style dining area consisting of leather-padded booths and different shapes tiling with a variety of size and pattern. Although an open location, the design creates the illusion of windows with framed borders. Perhaps the attraction is the individual experience that visitors feel, each table offering different lighting, chairs and patterns. The floor is striped in contrasting grey tiles and in Oak, bespoke pendant lights hang low over a mix of white and timber tables, projecting a silhouette onto the ceiling at night that is echoed on the walls. The openness of the space is contrasted with a sense of enclosure created by high backed benches, new bar and back bar display.

The design is intended to create a warm and relaxed dining environment for both the evening and daytime, whilst maintaining a sense of the simple interiors that characterize the ASK Italian restaurants.

+ Gundry & Ducker

Best known for its ‘out of the box’ imagination & innovative designs, Riga based architectural firm NRJA’s latest creation is a low cost house called Dom(e). Designed for all seasons, the prefabricated home is easy to construct and is made from materials that are durable and eco-friendly. The internal structure consists of a glued laminated timber with metal mounts and a 200 mm insulation, while the exterior finish consists of  a fibre concrete slab and liquid rubber offering solid resistance to the external influences.

On the inside the structure is covered with birch plywood which gives an impression of a warm, homely atmosphere. Both frame and filling for the dome are prefabricated and assembled on-site. The perimeter of the house is covered with pre-prepared foundation insulation.

An underground ducting system is installed which provides the necessary supply of fresh air through four different point within the structure. Solar panels that have been mounted on the roofs are connected to the hot water tank, providing hot water in the toilets and kitchen. There is also a provision to connect the rainwater collection tanks to the drainage system located around the perimeter of the house……Dom(e) is definitely a castle for the ‘Green’ loving Adventurer!!!

+ NRJA

Proposal for Taichung city cultural centre in Taiwan

As part of a competition organized by the Taichung City Government in Taiwan, the team of architects from Maxthreads Architectural Design & Planning designed the Taichung City Cultural Centre with the aim of combining nature and innovative technology. The project defines the northern arrival gateway to Taichung Gateway Park, providing a public hub to the overall master plan.

An iconic visual corridor connects local and international arrivals (Transportation Centre) to the main cultural district of the city through a revived, vibrant pubic space. The vision is to create an unconventional and exceptional gathering space for visitors and inhabitants, animated by public programme.

The Taichung Inverted Cone: Incorporating interactive, mixed-use public spaces, recreating boundaries between each program, while defining a new typology of Library and Fine Arts Museum: ‘The Galibrary’. ‘ The architectural expression for Taichung’s City Culture Centre – ‘Galibrary’ has been inspired by the uniquely beautiful mountain-scape of Taroko Gorge National Park in Taiwan.

Maxthreads’ proposal, therefore, introduces a strong relationship between the exterior and interior public spaces integrating into the Taichung Gateway Park. The Taichung City Cultural Centre is designed thoroughly in conjunction with Taichung Gateway park, and includes the integration of culture, education, tourism, environmental conservation, carbon reduction, energy conservation and sustainability.

+ Maxthreads Architectural Design & Planning