*️⃣Tunnel of light

Architect #MAD
City #Koide close to #Nagano
Country #Japan #AP

🔤MAD Architects, led by Ma Yansong, has completed the restoration of the Kiyotsu Gorge Tunnel in Japan’s Niigata prefecture. The revitalization project sees the installation of several permanent artistic spaces along the historic lookout tunnel, with the intention of bringing back the cultural energy that once empowered the region.

Drawing on the ‘five elements’ of nature (wood, earth, metal, fire, water), MAD’s scheme transforms points along the historic tunnel through the realization of several architectural spaces and artistic atmospheres. The designs rethink the relationship between humans and nature, and seek to re-connect locals and visitors alike with the majestic beauty of the land.

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Colour #reflective
Material #rawconcrete
Function #public #museum
Feature #interior #renovation #water
Address: Koide, Tokamachi, Niigata 949-8433, Japan
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pics by #Nacasa
text by architects

*️⃣ Burj Khalifa

Architect #Smith #AdrianSmith as #SOM
City #Dubai
Country #UAE #ME

🔤The architecture features a triple-lobed footprint, an abstraction of the Hymenocallis flower. Its Y-shaped floor plan aims to maximize views of the Gulf. The shape of the plan also provides the maximum amount of perimeter for windows in living spaces without developing internal unusable area.

Soaring 828 meters above Dubai, the Burj Khalifa—the world's tallest building—is a feat of design and engineering that has redefined the limits for skyscraper construction. #record

SOM’s architects and engineers developed innovative strategies to meet the unique challenges of building a tower of unprecedented height. The simple Y-shaped plan reduces wind forces and also enhances constructability. Each wing, with its own high-performance concrete core and perimeter columns, buttresses the others via a six-sided central core, or hexagonal hub. The result is a tower that is extremely stiff torsionally.

At each setback, the building’s width changes. The advantage of the tower’s stepping and shaping is, in essence, to “confuse the wind.” Wind vortices can never coalesce because the wind encounters a different building shape at each tier.

Subsequently, in a surprise move at its opening ceremony, the tower known as Burj Dubai was renamed to Burj Khalifa, said to honour the UAE President Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan for his crucial support to save the Dubai economy fro collapse after the financial crisis. After the opening due to low demand, around 825 out of 900 apartments were still empty.

Project was selected by #CTBUH as the Global Icon Award in 2010. #award

The new “Global Icon” award recognizes those very special tall buildings that make a profound impact, not only on the local/regional context, but on the genre of tall buildings globally. Innovative in planning, design and execution, the building must have influenced and re-shaped the field of tall building architecture, engineering, and urban planning.

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Function #mixeduse #residential #office #hospitality #hotel
Feature #skyscraper
Address: 1 Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Blvd - Downtown Dubai - Dubai - United Arab Emirates
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pics by #IwanBaan, aljvd and architects
text by burjkhalifa.ae, Wikipedia and CTBUH

#bonus@simoderna (Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol had a scene filmed here)

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*️⃣Les Étoiles d’Ivry

Architect #Gailhoustet #ReneeGailhoustet and #Renaudie #JeanRenaudie
City #Paris
Country #France #EU

🔤As the slab and tower housing typology came into prominence in the late 1940s in France, ushered in by the beginnings of the term Brutalism with Le Corbusier's Unite d'Habitation, Gailhoustet, slightly more than a decade removed from this context, pioneered a more urban form of brutalism, where staggered terraces and urban gardens were deployed, and where there was an attempt to harmonize brutalist housing with their street-level context.

Launched by the local authority in the late ’50s, the renovation of Ivry’s centre responded to an urgent postwar need for housing in the Paris region.

Made up of sharp angles, the Étoiles d'Ivry-sur-Seine is more sculptural, being an example of brutalism on a busy road that takes visual prominence in its streetscape. Offices, apartments, and shops are incorporated into the complex, connected by a fluid system of public and private streets.

As brutalist icons of the past continue to delight, and divide, contemporary audiences, Renée Gailhoustet's urban brutalism is difficult to categorize – a sound legacy for a form of practice that has seen concrete macrostructures, against their usual stylistic norm, sensitively engage with people and the city.

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Material #rawconcrete
Function #residential
Feature #greenery #retro
Address: 93 Av. Georges Gosnat, 94200 Ivry-sur-Seine, France
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pics by #Novaro and Leopold Lambert
text by Archdaily and architectural-review.com

*️⃣Borisov Arena

Architect #OFIS
City #Borisov close to #Minsk
Country #Belarus #EU

🔤The arena forms a unified rounded dome, giving the impression of a single enclosed object.
The Skin of the dome gives an impression of a fragile stretched perforated textile pulled over the stadium skeleton.

Internally, the rounded arena provides good acoustics and encourages an extrovert atmosphere from the players and the fans alike during the game, but focuses concentration during training time.

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Colour #metallic #monochrome
Material #aluminium
Function #entertainment #sport
Feature #nightlight
Address: Ulitsa Gagarina 119, Barysaw, Minskaja voblasć 222511, Belarus
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pics by Tomaz Gregoric
text by architects

*️⃣Opus

Architect #Hadid #ZahaHadid #ZHA
City #Dubai
Country #UAE #ME

🔤The Opus is designed as two separate towers that coalesce into a singular whole— taking the form of a cube. The cube is then ‘carved’, creating a central void that is an important volume within the building in its own right—providing views to the exterior from the centre of the building. The free-formed fluidity of this eight-storey void contrasts with the precise orthogonal geometry of the surrounding cube.

This curved façade was designed using digital 3D modelling that also identified specific zones which required tempered glass.At night the void is illuminated by a dynamic light installation of LEDs within each glass panel.

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Material #curvedglass
Function #mixeduse #hospitality #hotel #office
Address: Al Amal St - Business Bay - Dubai - United Arab Emirates
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pics by #Ghinitoiu and melia.com
text by Archdaily and architects

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