MAGA STRUCTURE

On the ground floor, the double height atrium will be restored and a new grand staircase
introduced. A new Tea Lounge area will span the atrium and include a “Gallery” space some 23
metres in length, behind which there will be a new wine bar.
The restaurant, with private dining, will be located at the north west end of the building where a fully glazed extension overlooking the hotel’s private garden will provide a burst of natural light and green views, in contrast to the mainly “closed” public areas with their timber panelling, deep hues and working Pierre-Yves Rochon is responsible for the interior design concept schemes for both the public and guestroom floors with ReardonSmith handling the design development.
 At the first floor level, the north-west extension will provide an executive meeting room with 180 degree views towards Park Lane; there will be a series of other large meeting rooms equipped with state-of-the-art technology, and the ballroom is being totally refurbished to a high acoustic standard.  The eight floors of guestrooms above are all being re-configured to achieve a wide range of bedrooms and suites, including 53 rooms providing a large wet room rather than a bathroom with tub. There will be 20 Conservatory Suites and Guestrooms with four of the suites overlooking Hyde Park, each with a garden terrace. The roof of the northwest extension will provide a terrace for what will be the Four Seasons London’s new Executive Suite. The rooftop extension will create space for an ultra luxurious spa with separate areas for men and women and with a fitness suite and lounge alongside. Designed by Eric Parry Associates, the spa accommodated on the 10th floor of the Four Seasons London, will offer fabulous views across the city.The existing Portland stone building envelope is to be extensively refurbished and cleaned.

There will be all new lift cores, plant and new state-of-the-art back-of-house facilities. “Four Seasons as a brand is, of course, a benchmark for luxury hotels and the Park Lane hotel is particularly special because it was the first new build hotel for the group, announcing its global expansion beyond the Canadian base and helping to establish the blueprint for service, architecture and design that went on to become so valued across the world,” says James.Twomey, the ReardonSmith project director. “When the hotel re-opens, it will once again be one of the finest examples of a truly world-class hotel – with very chic and unique interiors and a building infrastructure to support impeccable service.”

Architects: Massimiliano & Doriana Fuksas
Location: Pescara, Italy
Client: De Cecco Spa

Structure: Studio Ing. Toniolo, Sirmione (BS)
Total area: 6,300 sqm
Budget: 20M Euro
Photographs: Moreno Maggi

The dynamic three-dimensional structure of the rounded building punches the straightforward structure of the “holed” lower volume, linking the two bodies in a whole element.


Natural light is brought to the office levels through the floor openings. The random position of these apertures creates diagonal views through levels.

The water plane at the sixth level recalls the river Pescara where the city takes its name, creating a perfect place to meet and rest.
These complex establishes itself as icon of early twenty first century architecture.

Three further gallery spaces are created as separate blocks within the building’s form. The Link Gallery features a fully glazed wall offering views across a reeded pond and its polished concrete floor, cast concrete walls and louvered concrete ceiling contrast dramatically with the luminescent white box interior of the Main Gallery. The Digital Gallery is a black box gallery designed to accommodate video art and installation. Dramatic arts are showcased in the George Bernard Shaw Theatre, located in the South West corner of the building.




Tags : modern architecture design

Dorobanti Tower is modern architecture and building project by Zaha Hadid Architects. The Dorobanti Tower is located in the centre of Bucharest, to the west of Piaza Romana, and approximately 6km south of the international airport. The brief called for a 100,000 square metre mixed-use development at the junction of Calea Dorobanti and St. Mihail Eminescu. The project comprises 34,000 square metres of a 5-star hotel (including restaurants and a convention centre) and 35,000 square metres of luxury apartments. Additionally, the scheme offers lower level retail areas of 4,600 square metres and it delivers a generous allocation of public realm. This public area will be unlike anything else in Bucharest, representing a major attraction within the dense urban character of the City, offering an important new meeting space and urban plaza.




Concrete filled steel profiles follow in sinus waves from the ground level to the top of the tower, creating a distinctive identity and complementing the tower design. The concrete filling will give additional strength to the structure and it will provide fire protection to the steel profiles. The facade structure adjusts to the building programme and to the structural forces. At the bottom, the façade grid has denser amplitudes according to the structural requirements for a tower of this height, providing the required load bearing capacity and stiffness to the structure. At the technical and recreation levels, the structure condenses creating almost solid knots. Additionally, the secondary structure supports the main steel frames. It also gives the 200m tower a human scale as the grid of the secondary frame structure reflects the floor heights. Furthermore, the secondary structure could be utilized to support additional glass panels as a shading device.

Technological Detail and Environmental Protection



1. Solar Energy System



The Shanghai Corporate Pavilion features a 1600m2 solar heat-collecting tube on the roof. These solar tube can collect solar energy to produce hot water up to 95°C. Ultra-low temperature power generation techology, a novel way to generate electricity through solar power. The power generated using this technology can be used for both the exposition and for every day.



2. Recycled Plastic materials
Shanghai produces nearly 30 million of waste CDs every year, and only 25% of them are reclaimed and recycled. If these CDs were reclaimed and washed, they could be used to produce polycarbonate granules and manufacture more polycarbonate plastic products. The external facade materials of the Shanghai Corporate Pavilion will use polycarbonate transparent plastic tubes to create its dreamlike appearance. After the Expo, also plastic tubes can be easily recycled to reduce social wastage.



3. Water/mist System



For the Shanghai Corporate pavilion, rainwater will be collected and recycled. After such treatment as sedimentation, filtration and storage, rainwater can be used for daily purposes at the pavilion and for the “mist” in particular. The mist can lower the temperature, purify the air and create a comfortable climate in pavilion. The spray can also be used to form various patterns under ceiling of entrance hall and make the overall appearance of the Shanghai Corporate Pavilion fresh and elegant

Designed by the Renzo Piano Workshop (in collaboration with FX Fowle Architects), the facade for the New York Times Building is a combination of glass curtain wall and elegant ceramic tubes.
Photo credit - Michel Denancé
By resisting easy temptations Renzo Piano has accomplished something rare: unstrained
When Renzo Piano won the invited competition to design a new building for the New York Times Company, the air was full of invective. Frank Gehry had been the front-runner—indeed some said the project had been promised to him before a mysterious conflict led him to withdraw—and the selection of his Italian rival was seen as a safe choice: the Times at its most stolid. No one doubted that the building would be decent—has Piano ever designed a bad one?—but hopes for a masterpiece were kept well in check.



That was exactly six years ago. And now after significant delay—attributable to financing woes and post?September 11 nerves—Piano’s 52-story tower is topped out and its distinctive exterior substantially complete. It rises over a difficult stretch of Eighth Avenue with all the taut propriety of the newspaper that will make a home in it. Bravo, Renzo.



Still, after all this time some doubting, mumpish pro-Gehry chatter remains. Was the nation’s paper of record too timid to build the design offered up by the reigning genius of American architecture, then in the full flush of his post-Bilbao stardom? Remember that Gehry tower-that-might-have-been. And if you can’t, call to mind his more recent New York work: “Miss Brooklyn” (the signature focal point for his mammoth Atlantic Yards project) or the mixed-use skyscraper planned for Beekman Street, in downtown Manhattan. With the exception of some pinstripes and the presence of an enormous Gothic-type NYT logo at its crown, the design he produced for the Times was much the same: a conventional skyscraper with a funny skin. Herbert Muschamp, who advised the selection committee, wrote that he liked the concept Piano developed with what was then Fox & Fowle—he declared it rational and classic, his second choice in a field that included Norman Foster and Cesar Pelli—but he was madly in love with the Gehry. The Times went with rational, and Piano has delivered a classic with grace, in a graceless corner of the city.



Lying just outside the particular zone of the Times Square business improvement district—where the public face of buildings must, by code as well as convention, speak loudly of the fun to be had within—that stretch of Eighth Avenue has come into the new century with all the pregentrified grit so much of Manhattan boasted in the last. Though there are a few new luxury residential towers stitched in among the ramps to the Lincoln Tunnel a few blocks west, and the new Penn Station in the old post office will likely lead to a general spruce-up of the area just to the south, very little of New York’s new spirit can be seen in the immediate vicinity of the Times tower, around the corner and a block south of the nonstop faux carnival of 42nd Street.



Piano’s building faces off against the brutish Port Authority bus terminal, directly opposite. The upper garage levels of that infamous street-spanning megastructure are distinguished by steel-beam crossbracing, a series of giant Xs marching up the avenue. As if in sympathy—and to resist the wind—the new tower uses the same motif on every floor of its side-street facades, elegantly rendered in steel cables that anchor into the main columns on alternate floors. Along with the much touted and elegantly realized ceramic-tube sun-breaks that rise to screen the full height of the building (diminishing in density at regular intervals to allow views out), the wind bracing gives the newspaper’s new home exactly the right airs to suit the earnest but forward- looking Times: it is businesslike without being boring, stable but not too staid.



The building also brings a quiet dignity to its lowly surroundings without importing to them the pixel-thin effects of Times Square. This is no place for that sort of gaiety, however easy it might be to reproduce, and Piano and his patrons were wise to buck local convention and find another way. People forget that the “Times” in Times Square is the New York Times. The paper preceded the square as we know it—and as it exists now, legislated into 24/7 celebration of itself. That history certainly gives the Times the right, if not the responsibility, to dig deeper than the glib for architectural expression. And in Piano it found one of the few architects working today who could pull it off.



Gehry’s much bemoaned design would have taken the easier course. His building was itself a sign, a tower seemingly enfolded in newsprint, with that cheeky Times logo on high to ram the point home. The architect might have proposed it for any site—so all-consuming and evolution averse is his personal vision—but here, a short hot-dog toss from the faux bawdy of 42nd Street, it would have looked a lot like the path of least resistance. While retaining all the familiar tics of his style, Gehry tried to say “New York Times” in the new language of the New Times Square: in signs and symbols, loudly but only on the surface. In contrast, the Piano design employs the very stuff of architecture—the same steel that makes the building stand, the glass that shields it—to create a whole that says, with appropriate rigor, the New York Times resides here, if you please.

Capital Gate, the iconic leaning building in Abu Dhabi, reached halfway point. The building, designed by international architects RMJM, will lean 18 degrees westward, 14 degrees more than the Leaning Tower of Pisa.




To make this possible, the central core of the building slants in the opposite direction to the lean of the structure, and it straightening as it grows. It sits on top of a 7-foot-deep concrete base with a dense mesh of reinforced steel. The steel exoskeleton known as the diagrid sits above an extensive distribution of 490 piles that have been drilled 100 feet underground to accommodate the gravitational, wind and seismic pressures caused by the lean of the building.
A gigantic internal atrium, including a tea lounge and swimming pool suspended 263 feet above the ground, has been constructed on the 17th and 18th floors, the halfway point of the 35-story, 525-foot tall tower.




Capital Gate will house Abu Dhabi’s first Hyatt hotel – Hyatt at Capital Centre, a presidential-style luxury, 5-star hotel and will provide 200 hotel rooms for Abu Dhabi and will serve ADNEC’s (Abu Dhabi National Exhibitions Company) visitors and exhibitors as well as international business and leisure travelers.