Overlooking the San Francisco Bay with a view that spans from the Golden Gate to the Bay Bridge, this attractive Oakland house by Kanner Architects uses its minimalist composition to bring in both the surrounding view as well as natural light that manipulates natural light to articulate the space.

Olson Sundberg Kundig Allen Architects (OSKA) have designed the Wabi Sabi house in Houston, Texas for developer Carol Isaak Barden + Company. The house represents a singular commingling of Eastern and Western aesthetics and the sensual use of natural materials. Rick Sundberg was the lead architect on the project, his first in Texas.

“It was exciting to work in a city like Houston,” says Rick Sundberg. “The climate is so different from ours, and it raises unique challenges. Working on a spec house has its own challenges – creating a home that can accommodate a wide range of lifestyles and families; from active young families to empty-nesters.”

Ole Scheeren of OMA introduces a new residential typology to Singapore with The Interlace, a large-scale complex of interconnected apartment buildings stacked in an innovative hexagonal arrangement, developed by CapitaLand and Hotel Properties Limited.


The Interlace is located on an elevated eight-hectare site, bounded by Alexandra Road and the Ayer Rajah Expressway, amidst the verdant Southern Ridges of Singapore. With about 170,000m2 of gross floor area, the development will provide 1,040 apartment units of varying sizes with extensive outdoor spaces and landscaping. The site completes a green belt that stretches between Kent Ridge, Telok Blangah Hill and Mount Faber Parks.

Here is another innovative project by dutch architects of the Office of Metropolitan Architecture. CCTV will be one among many towers in Beijing’s new Central Business District, all striving to be unique – all different expressions of the vertical dimension.

The tragedy of the skyscraper is that it marks a place as significant, which it then occupies and exhausts with banality… This banality is twofold: in spite of their potential to be incubators of new cultures, programs, and ways of life, most towers accommodate merely routine activity, arranged according to predictable patterns. Formally, their expressions of verticality have proven to stunt the imagination: as verticality soars, creativity crashes.

© All photographs courtesy of CCTV/OMA Rem Koolhaas and Ole Scheeren photographed by Iwan Baan.

This house for a family of five explores spatial gradation from communal to private, in an urban domestic condition: children’s bedrooms on the third floor lead to a collective play space for the three children, which is connected to the communal family spaces on the ground floor via a stair, skylight and aluminum screen.



The skylight serves to bring light into the center of the home; the screen acts simultaneously as guardrail and light filter.  

The Richmond Olympic Oval is major venue of the 2010 Winter Olympics. Conceived by Cannon Design to be one of the world’s largest speed-skating facilities, the Oval displays a massive wood wave roof encompassing 6.5 acres. This innovative roof system is one of the longest clear spans in North America, and built almost entirely from wood.

The building is mainly composed of a 33,000-m2 oval. For the 2010 Olympic Games, It will house a 400-metre speed skating track with a capacity for approximately 8,000 guests. After the Games, the facility will be converted to multipurpose sports use. The main sports hall will become an indoor activity area divided into three sections: ice, court and track and field. The ice section will have two ice rinks.

The court section will be a combination hardwood and rubber surface playing area capable of hosting a wide variety of sports, while the track and field section will have a rubberized turf surface that will be home to an indoor running track and other sports. The space will be convertible to different configurations that allow the facility to be used for a combination of ice and dry sports as demand warrants, including occasional reconfiguration for major short track and long track speed skating events.