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Over the next four years, the world’s tallest residential building with a load-bearing structure in wood will rise above the ridges in the Swiss city Winterthur, close to Zürich. The 100-meters-tall tower, Rocket&Tigerli, is named after locomotives produced at the previous industrial site.
The project marks a milestone in the construction of timber buildings – it introduces an innovative construction system that examines wood as a natural replacement for concrete. The Swiss company Implenia and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology of Zürich, ETH, have worked together in developing the new system, which allows the construction of taller timber buildings.
The concrete core has been replaced with wood, resulting in the individual beam coming in at a lower weight. This makes it possible to build taller constructions while, at the same time, ensuring that the entire building process achieves a lower amount of embedded carbon.
SHL won the international competition by celebrating the construction itself, highlighting the wooden beams as distinctive elements that give the users a feeling of living alongside the construction itself.
Learn more about Rocket&Tigerli here
Located within the rapidly growing Brentwood community, the site will become one of the final developments in the emerging town centre of the City of Burnaby, in Metro Vancouver. The masterplan for the approximately 32.000 m2 site outlines an innovative approach to urban development that aims at becoming a best-practice model for future large-scale, pedestrian-focused, and transit-orientated developments.
Offering a mix of condominiums, market rentals, and non-market rentals, the six residential towers, including the tallest all-rental tower in Western Canada, will cater to diverse user groups. While each apartment has access to a minimum of one balcony offering fresh air, daylight, and astonishing views, green common terraces are generously distributed at different levels in each tower. This as a means of encouraging residents to participate in community activities and create a strong sense of shared identity and belonging.
The towers are connected by lush green publicly accessible spaces that, together with a multi-storey community centre at the heart of the development, provide an attractive framework for social and recreational activities to unfold. Ground floor spaces are reserved for retail and other public functions to ensure a vibrant neighbourhood throughout the day.
The people-first approach also manifests itself in a network of pathways for pedestrians and cyclist offering a safe thoroughfare through the area. The publicly accessible functions and urban spaces create a place that reaches beyond its immediate users, rather it becomes a destination for the rest of the city to explore and enjoy equally.
Grosvenor Americas has recently been granted permission by the City of Burnaby to move forward to the consultation phase, and it is expected that the construction phase will be initiated in 2023.
The public art program for the new Shanghai Library East designed by Schmidt Hammer Lassen Architects was officially unveiled to the public, featuring works by ten artists from China and abroad. The program curated by art collaborator UAP seeks to celebrate the art of literature and promote the popularisation of art within an engaging and inspiring architectural space.
The project’s central curatorial theme ‘Mediums: The Development of Writing’ was inspired by the existing Shanghai Library’s reputation as an iconic city landmark, famous for its use of digital media to conserve ancient archives and many collections, including genealogical records. Schmidt Hammer Lassen Architects participated in UAP‘s curation of the artworks that amalgamate the contemporary and avant-garde while deeply rooted in tradition.
Artists whose works are showcased within the program of public artworks include Emily Floyd, Gu Wenda, Simon Ma , Mia Liu, Ni Youyu, Shen Fan, Plummer & Smith, Xu Bing, Yang Zhenzhong and Zheng Chongbin.
The 115,000 m² Shanghai Library East is located in Pudong District – the area of the city known for its iconic skyline, and sits immediately next to Century Park – the largest park in the city spread over 140 hectares. Shanghai Library East is the largest library in China with a single building. After opening, it can receive 4 million visitors and provide over 200 lectures and thousands of academic activities every year.
For more information regarding both the library and the art, stay tuned!
The appointment follows a competition held by the Trust in 2021 to find an architect to design its “Hospitals of the Future” project—one of 40 new hospitals that the U.K. government has committed to build by 2030 as part of its New Hospital Programme (NHP).
Patient care and well-being is at the heart of the design, and we have commenced staff and patient engagement sessions gathering inputs and ideas to support the next stage of the design development.
The building will house two unique hospitals – one for adults and one for children – including a maternity and neonatal unit. Adults, children, young people, parents, carers and clinicians from across the region will be instrumental in helping to shape how the facility might look and feel in these early designs.
Our approach to the design emphasizes special attention to the future users of the hospital – patients and visitors as well as staff. Research shows that our physical environment effects our mental and physical wellbeing. Orientation toward the outdoors maximizes exposure to daylight and good views and green communal spaces feature throughout, offering places for recreation, play and contemplation.
The new hospital is a collaboration between Schmidt Hammer Lassen, Penoyre & Prasad and Perkins&Will.
Visuals by Brick Visuals
Read more about the project here
UBC Gateway, an inclusive and highly sustainable university building, received an Award of Excellence in the 2021 Canadian Architect Awards of Excellence competition.
The awards jury commented: “There’s a lot of thought put into its sustainability strategies and material choices, from its mass timber structure to its prefabricated wall panels and terracotta cladding. The quality of its materiality, rational planning, and expression result in an endurance-oriented design befitting of a gateway.”
The Canadian Architect Awards Of Excellence is an annual national awards program recognising future projects. This year, the program received 174 professional entries, and the jurors bestowed 5 Awards of Excellence and 7 Awards of Merit.
UBC Gateway is a collaboration between Perkins&Will and Schmidt Hammer Lassen.
View UBC Gateway’s award profile here.
Read the full jury comments here.
See a full list of award winners here.
Access an online PDF version of Canadian Architect’s December 2021 magazine here.
The State Library Victoria Vision 2020 Redevelopment received the prestigious Urban Design Award from the City of Melbourne.
State Library Victoria is Australia’s oldest and largest public library and the fourth most visited library in the world. Created as “the people’s university, a place of learning and discovery,” the library takes up an entire city block and is comprised of 23 buildings that have evolved over the last 160 years.
Together with Architectus, we rethought and redeveloped the existing library spaces to unlock possibilities, create connections, and provide a framework for the library’s ongoing and future evolution. The new elements are bold yet refined and elegant, with robust detailing and natural materials that will stand the test of time. The modern aspects complement and contrast the existing spaces, adding an inspiring and poetic layer to the building’s design heritage.
Read more about the project here.
Read more about the 2021 Urban Design Award here.
We’re delighted to announce that our Shanghai studio has been selected for the 2021 China AD100—Architectural Digest’s Top 100 architecture and design firms in China!
This year’s China AD100 award have been given to The Ningbo New Library, our first completed library project in China. The project’s exemplary achievements also lead to nominations such as ‘Public Library of the Year’ by the International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA).
In recent years we have also been awarded the AD100 twice; where our Cloud Pavilion and NIO House West Lake have been selected for the award in 2017 and 2019 respectively. We are looking forward to complete Shanghai Library East in the near future, which will be our second completed library project in China.
To know more about this news, please click here.
We have been selected as one of five multidisciplinary teams for the Centrale Bibliotheek Rotterdam (CBR) design competition as announced by the municipality of Rotterdam. The Central Library Rotterdam, one of the largest and most iconic libraries in the Netherlands built in 1983 by Van den Broek en Bakema, will be renewed.
Our team Combination KCAP Architects&Planners/ Schmidt Hammer Lassen Architects/ Drees & Sommer with DGMR, IMd Raadgevende Ingenieurs and Traject, and Johanna van Doorn and Vincent Taapken looks forward to working on the library’s transformation that will have an important cultural and social impact for the city of Rotterdam.
Read more about the competition here (in Dutch).
Photo: René Castelijn
The COP26 – UN Climate Change Conference is taking place in Glasgow, UK from 31 October – 12 November 2021.
Schmidt Hammer Lassen Architects is participating as part of the Danish representation at the conference to share solutions, inspire change and build partnerships within finance, renewable energy, energy efficiency, sustainable cities, and hard-to-abate sectors.
As part of the conference Enlai Hooi, Head of Innovation will host four different talks on the topics of Adaptive Transformation, Circular Cities, Regenerative Buildings, and Urban Food Waste Systems.
Watch the talk on Adaptive Transformation here.
Watch the talk on Buildings as Waste here.
Watch the talk on Food in the City here.
Watch the talk on Regenerative Buildings here.
Watch the Nordic Council talk here.
Watch the talk on Materials here.
Get an overview of the activities and side events with the representatives at the Danish Pavilion.