"roof top office" Dudelange is the extension of the company headquarters of Sanichaufer. Sanichaufer is one of the biggest Luxemburg-based firms in building services engineering, with over 50 years of experience. Sanichaufer’s main fields of activity are heating, air-conditioning and central control systems. For this reason, the “rof-top office” is designed as a showroom displaying the most modern building technologies.

Norwegian-based firm A-lab and Danish-based SEA have just sent us their winning entry for a competition focusing on a new urban development in Skien Brygge, Norway. The project comprises the transformation of a former harbour area into a new urban community. The four-hectare large harbour site is framed by the water towards the west and a steeply rising landscape towards the east. Skien is one of the oldest cities in Norway established around 1000AD. It is the 11th largest city in Norway with approximately 50.000 inhabitants. Historically Skien is shaped by the development of the harbour and the activities on the waterway.
Here are A-Lab and SEA explaining their concept:

Building a sustainable urban community
The city is – and has always been – characterized by changes. Cities are living organisms that develop according to changes in the financial, technological, and social conditions. The strong point of the city is its diversity, which facilitates meetings between people across interests, age, social status and religious affiliation. The city is a meeting place. We believe successful urban planning takes as a starting point the social interaction between people. ‘A city is a human settlement in which strangers are likely to meet’ [from ‘Fall of public man’ – Richard Sennett]

A project of 34 housing units on an island site bordered by a gymnasium, a school and suburban housing, on avenue Henri Barbusse, along with a low-cost housing development from the 50s marked for demolition.

The challenge here for the lessor is to rehouse 34 families close to their old district within a scenario of wholly revamped housing, clearly departing from the typical ‘Banlieu’ social housing.

Largely due to its double-pitched roof, the project looks like a large house, a clear departure from the typical French suburban housing developments. Avoiding the mistakes of the housing projects from past decades, the dimensions of this development are brought down to scales within the grasp and control of its inhabitants.

Overseeing the Taichung basin, the Taiwan Tower is the observatory of the central Taiwan ecosystem ranging from the Central Mountain Range to the South China sea.

The tower's envelope is composed of 2 million suspended thin metal leaves that tilt up against the wind, which operates 64 internal helicoidal wind turbines generating enough energy to make the building fully sustainable.

The facade shows patterns of air flows as a monumental expression of the natural context and its immediate climatic conditions. Its skin symbolizes the cohesion of the surrounding habitat while the evolving winds provide transformations of its form.

As we did last year, we are pleased to announce the winners of the 2010 winners of Canada’s National Design Exchange Awards. This nationwide competition is open to all types of professional designers and business’ across Canada working in a range of design disciplines. All winners are on display in an extensive exhibition at the Design Exchange from until March 27th, 2011.

As explained by the organizers, the Design Exchange Awards promote Canadian design excellence and recognizes the critical role of design in all types of organizations – national & international. The Awards celebrate the success stories achieved through close partnerships between clients and designers. Projects are recognized for balancing function, aesthetics, and economic success.

While awards were presented in 12 categories, we will report on the ones that revolve around our own subjects of interest, namely Architecture, Interiors, Landscape architecture, and Urban Design.

Hypar Pavilion is a free standing structure home to a new public lawn and restaurant, situated on the edge of Hearst Plaza and 65th Street.

The dual requirements of a destination restaurant and a public green space located within the confines of the Plaza are satisfied with a single architectural gesture. Elizabeth Diller comments, “Hypar Pavilion’s moment of invention came when we discovered how to design a destination restaurant without consuming public space on the Lincoln Center campus. The roof became a new kind of interface between public and private, with an occupiable twisting grass canopy over a glass pavilion restaurant.”

The Hypar Pavilion lawn is accessed at its single point of contact with the Plaza. The 7,200sf lawn surface lifts up at two opposing corners creating a space for the restaurant sandwiched between the Plaza level and the twisting parabolic roof. The resulting topography of the lawn above is oriented away from city noise and traffic, creating a bucolic urbanism.