Woodbury University’s new studio building, designed by Los Angeles-based Rios Clementi Hale Studios, completes the school’s architecture facilities.  Adding a publicly prominent new structure to the Burbank campus, the architects created a two-story building that comprises studio and critique space for approximately 200 students, as well as all-school exhibition space.

“We wanted to make a space the students could learn from,” says Jennifer Charles, project architect for Rios Clementi Hale Studios.

As an anchor for Woodbury’s architecture program, the studio building complements the existing five separate one-story buildings on the southeast corner of the 22-acre campus.  Rios Clementi Hale Studios designed the space with an open, flexible floor plan to accommodate future changes in the architecture school, teaching philosophies, or administrative needs.

Last month, we introduced The Baupiloten ,  a group of students at the architectural faculty of the TU Berlin who carry out building projects under the guidance and supervision of the architects Susanne Hofmann, AA Dipl. and Dipl. Ing. Martin Janekovic.

The second project that they completed is the refurbishment of the Kindergarten Traumbaum (”Tree of Dreams”), located on Dessauer Street 27, Berlin.

When the kindergarten got new management in 2004 the somewhat perfunctory post-modern building (completed 1990) received a new, more poetic name, “Tree of Dreams”. Reason enough for Die Baupiloten to take up this imaginative thread and follow on from there. The sombre corridors and the central atrium were transformed into a light, airy and phantastic world for children. The aim has been to encourage the children to communicate and interact spontaneously and experimentally.

All photographs are courtesy of Jan Bitter

We would like to briefly break away from the mold of projects and architects that we have typically featured at Archinnovations and shed the light in a series of articles on Baupiloten, hoping that it would inspire Architecture schools to adopt similar programs that encourage architecture students to get involved and accomplish real life projects.

 All photographs are courtesy of Jan Bitter

As explained by its founder Suzanne Hoffman : « The Baupiloten are a group of students at the architectural faculty of the TU Berlin who carry out building projects under my guidance and supervision. This allows the students to have the unique chance to experience all the various building phases starting with design methods and concluding with cost control and site supervision. The Baupiloten learn how to develop and detail their design within a given budget and how to convince the client of the project through presentations and information, while displaying their competence and knowledge. Throughout the design process the students are able to consolidate their team project within all relevant disciplines, for example technical subjects, CAD and quantity surveying. »

A new school has just been inaugurated in the town of Sipoo, close to Helsinki, Finland. The building was designed by K2S Architects Ltd, who had won the design competition in 2004.

All photographs are courtesy of Marko Huttunen photographer.

The center, located in Trevisio, Italy, is designed by the talented spanish architect who conceived the project as a square box made up of nine squares.  The square in the center emerges to take light from the height of the vestibule.  The classrooms are arranged in the surrounding squares.

The project is a revolutionary new £2.5m learning and resource centre, designed by leading sustainability architects Architype for Somerset College of Arts and Technology in Tauton, UK.

The purpose of the new Genesis Centre is to showcase a variety of techniques and materials for sustainable construction, by using them to construct the Centre and exposing them to view.

CLASSROOM OF THE FUTURE.

The new classroom at Mossbrook in South Yorkshire, England, is a science teaching space designed for learning about the natural environment through direct interaction with it.

The school teaches the National Curriculum. For children with learning difficulties this is done in a demonstrative and experiential way, but the approach is relevant to all children and the new classroom is a resource for pupils from schools throughout the Sheffield area.

The new Faculty of Music brings a breath of freshness to Montreal’s McGill University campus. This eight-stories building designed by Architects Saucier + Perrotte is located on a narrow strip of land at the South-East corner of McGill at the intersection of Sherbrooke and Aylmer streets. Design Principal Gilles Saucier did a careful reading of the urban context assimilating its components and deriving the conceptual guidelines for the building’s exterior.

South of the McGill Campus lies the Montreal downtown area. All the way to Sherbrooke, the land is relatively flat. Then it starts ascending upward to the mountain of Mont-Royal. Gilles Saucier was inspired from these topographical conditions; "It's as if McGill acted like a geological plate that shifted the city grid, so the building design accentuates that fact." The architecture of building was imagined as exposed strata that were eroded from Mont-Royal.