Press release from AIA North Carolina:

On September 26, Architects from the Asheville Section of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) will be showing off their design partnerships with local businesses in Asheville. To help aid in the recovery of Ashevilles businesses, and to look for ways to improve social distancing, AIA Asheville has been working with the City of Asheville and local businesses who have applied for the citys AVL Shares Space initiative. This initiative allows businesses to use parking spaces adjacent to their storefront for commercial activity.

Four architecture firms in the area have been assigned to work with companies to find the best solutions to meet the requirements put out but the city and to create spaces that each business can utilize to suit their needs. These designs will be built and used by the companies during the fall months.

The four projects involved are:Citizen Vinyl- 14 OHenry Ave Working with the firm McMillan Pazden Smith ArchitectureBenjamin Walls Gallery 38 Broadway Working with ARCA DesignThe Lobster Trap 35 Patton Ave Working with NOVUS ArchitectureParklet with the City of Asheville 50 S. Market St Working with MHA Works

The public is invited to view the spaces and designs on September 26 during a special Park(ing) Day Open House. During the hours between 1 pm and 4 pm, people are invited to visit these spaces and discover new ways that design can help keep shoppers and diners safe and healthy.

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Asheville architects partner with downtown businesses to create outdoor spaces - Mountain Xpress

Factory in the Forest / Design Unit Architects Snd Bhd

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Text description provided by the architects. Architectural competition winning entry for an electronics manufacturing plant. This site is conceived as a forest that penetrates, surrounds & steps over the building creating maximum contact with nature green, breeze, scent, sound, touch. A canopy supported by a forest of columns creates unity to office & courtyard while giving protection from the tropical sun. Office levels give access to roof gardens and staff are encouraged out for breaks, meetings or just contemplation.

A green courtyard separates the office & factory with views and access from both. A bridge over the courtyard links the office & production & this circulation route becomes a space for meetings, breaks & lectures. The factory has views to landscape & the sky condition through full height & clerestory glazing with glazing protected from the sun by free-standing off-form concrete fins and roof louvers. Rainwater cascades from roof spouts - heightening awareness to tropical storms, to storage tanks for landscape irrigation.

The plant receives natural diffused light across the entire factory floor reducing dependency on artificial lighting that, combined with chilled water floor slab cooling & cutting-edge air-conditioning technology reduces energy consumption to half that of a conventional plant of similar size.

Structure & materials are expressed; off-form reinforced concrete and steel structure, glazing and landscape. With this small palette of materials, the building explains to us what it is, what it is made of & how it is put together. The approach was to create a stimulating & meaningful working environment for all employees the forest to be the face of the building & company. Forests, critical for both macro & micro-climates are also vital for our psychological well-being.

Sustainability - From project onset, the client wanted an energy efficient and climatically responsive building. The cardinal sustainable design principles were energy efficiency, water efficiency, daylighting and biophilia the fundamental human need for connection to Nature.

The building is designed to shield against the hot & glaring tropical sun, while allowing diffused natural daylight to filter into the building. The office & courtyard are shaded by a louver canopy designed to provide effective solar protection during the hottest part of the day.

The factory skylight design was optimized to achieve an evenly day-lit work environment. The simulations and daylight measurements in operation show that the factory floor achieves an evenly day-lit work environment without glare throughout the year. Dimmable daylight responsive LED lighting and individual task lighting ensures that the required light levels are always obtained.

An innovative radiant floor cooling system works with embedded PEX pipes in the concrete slabs throughout the factory & office. By cooling down the slabs to about 21C, this structural element of the building doubles up as part of the cooling system. The higher chilled water temperature and the water-borne cooling transport makes the radiant floor slab cooling twice as energy efficient as conventional air-conditioning.

The rest is here:
Factory in the Forest / Design Unit Architects Snd Bhd - ArchDaily

Beijings Daxing area has been envisioned as a new gateway to the city. Located in the heart of Daxing district, the project operates as a key piece and the largest building complex within the regional development so far. The triangular tips of the floor plates become sky-garden balconies whose terraces provide a comfortable outdoor seating area. CLOU sees the outdoor workspace as a logical next step in the evolution of office culture.

Shoukai Vanke Centre is a 132,000 sqm mixed-use development which is composed of a 26,000 sqm shopping mall, a 124-meter-tall office tower as well as a hotel.

The office tower has a triangular shape which creates a strong presence at the main intersection yet appears elegant and slim from other points. The triangular shape is the result of a series of pragmatic decisions which include maximising views towards the newly built park and integrating double-height sky-garden balconies into the tips of the floorplates. The terraces provide comfortable outdoor seating areas with spectacular views over the adjacent park.

The sky gardens balconies in the office towers across two floors provide a comfortable outdoor seating area with spectacular views over the adjacent park. While the design of the rooftop garden employs bright colours, lively forms, and landscape by BAM to engage visitors and promote opportunities for physical activities and playfulness.

The commercial complex will offer primarily F&B retail which provides the opportunity to create unconventional dining experiences. Utilising this program, CLOU created a network of large terraces that are strategically placed and act as an extension of the shopfront. Elevated escalators and walkways connect to the adjacent terraces and weave the development into the 3D urban pedestrian network. This creates a central space that offers a view of overlapping planes and interlacing lines. The terraces have the flexibility for varying functions ranging from temporary booths, open bars, seating for dining, or even casual relaxation zones.

Photo credit: Amey Kandalgaonkar BAM

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Check out the Shoukai Vanke Centre Beijing by CLOU architects - DESIGNME

Renderings from Studio St Architects reveal a new 19-story tower located at 347 West 34th Street on the eastern edge of Hudson Yards, Manhattan. Described as a SynaCondo, the buildings typology will incorporate a portion of the existing West Side Jewish Center with a condominium volume above.

The synagogues existing sanctuary is located on the second floor of the building. In its current condition, the sanctuary is not serviced by an elevator and does not offer any exterior views. Current proposals will reorient the religious component to occupy two basement levels of the building, as well as the first and second above-grade floors.

Beginning at the lowest level, referred to as LL2, the project team has proposed a 2,600-square-foot social hall and associated back-of-house areas for patrons of the synagogue. An additional 1,200 square feet will serve as a flexible multi-purpose room for future occupants. LL1 above will support a 2,000-square-foot sanctuary with two freeform skylights to promote the flow of natural light into the space. Additional areas include 1,425 square feet of classroom space and the sanctuary library.

Interior renderings of the SynaCondo Sanctuary Ryan McLaughlin; Studio St Architects

The ground floor will include separate lobby space for both the synagogue and the condominium, a 760-square-foot chapel, a dedicated entryway to the rear Sukkah Garden for exclusive use by the synagogue, and an curved wood stairway that connects to the lower level.

The second level will house an additional 1,450 square feet of classroom area, 670 square feet of office space, a 600-square-foot library lounge, 300 square feet of administrative space, and views of the Sukkah Garden.

Exterior rendering of the SynaCondo ground floor entry Ryan McLaughlin; Studio St Architects

Interior renderings of the SynaCondo lobby Ryan McLaughlin; Studio St Architects

The condominiums will include a mix of one- and two-bedroom apartments. The most premium residences will include a tenth-floor terrace apartment and two duplex penthouse units offering four bedrooms. The penthouses will be located between the 16th and 19th floors.

The exterior at the lower level is comprised of floor-to-ceiling glass and composite wood materials that are meant to emulate a glowing surface. The faade transitions into a more typical glass and metal faade outside the residential component.

It is not immediately clear when the project will be completed.

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Synagogue-Condominium 'SynaCondo' Revealed for 347 West 34th Street in Hudson Yards - New York YIMBY

Moscow Metro stations often look like veritable palaces for commuters. And so it is fitting that many are decorated with simply incredible light fittings!

On the inside, the entrance hall of Kurskaya station looks like a temple of classical antiquity that includes a high vaulted ceiling, giant marble columns and stucco molding. The architects envisioned the entrance as a kind of "Temple of Victory" that is illuminated by huge round chandeliers with Soviet red stars.

Novokuznetskaya station, opened during the war in 1943, is a reminder of troops defending their country both on the front line and on the home front. Most people first notice the magnificent mosaics and reliefs with patriotic scenes, but the lighting at the station is no less spectacular.

Novokuznetskaya's central hall is illuminated by huge fixed torchres, and singular chandeliers hang above the platforms. If you are not in a rush to catch your train, take an extra moment to look at the hammer and sickle motifs.

This station is one of the busiest in Moscow, and people from all over the country converge here since there are three major railway stations above. Komsomolskayas architects conceived of it as a "gate" to the city. The station was meant to create a favorable first impression of the Soviet capital, so no effort was spared in its decoration. As a result, Komsomolskaya station, with its gilding and abundance of mosaics and marble, outshines many actual palaces. The giant candelabra-type chandeliers are the central feature of its vaulted ceiling.

The chandeliers at Marksistskaya station are cleverly twisted into spiral shapes. The station's architect, Nina Alyoshina, recalls that for a long time she could not find the right glass for her design. Eventually, she found what she needed at a factory in the Moscow Region. It turned out to be optical glass for army tanks. Initially, the glass was 4 cm thick, but for the chandeliers it had to be specially made half as thick. She then decorated it with metal strips, and the result is stunning!

This station, which opened in 1950, was meant to remind Muscovites of those who died in World War II. The entrance hall is designed in the form of a triumphal arch, and the chandeliers are shaped like torches, illuminating the way towards a brighter future.

Novoslobodskaya station was the last project of the famous Soviet Metro architect, Alexey Dushkin. He regarded lighting as one of the most important elements of a subway stations construction.

Novoslobodskaya is decorated with bright stained-glass windows illuminated by a number of round chandeliers. In this way, the architect sought to present whimsical fairy tale motifs.

The spacious entrance hall of Dobryninskaya station is illuminated by the chandeliers shaped like saucers with red Soviet stars.

The escalators are flanked by torchresthe largest in the Moscow Metro.

Until the 1960s, this station was named Botanichesky Sad after the nearby botanical garden of Moscow State University (MGU), and Soviet agriculture was a key theme in its decoration. Plant motifs can be seen not just in the marble reliefs and columns, but also in the chandeliers and light fittings.

The station, which is decorated with murals depicting friendship between the Russian and Ukrainian nations, is regarded as one of the most beautiful in Moscow. Thanks to the stations enormous gilded chandeliers, the platform and entrance are particularly bright and well illuminated.

The light fittings in this station are shaped like flower buds! Slavyansky Bulvar station is whimsically decorated with fairytale plant motifs, and the lighting was made part of the decorative scheme. The light fittings seem to literally grow out of the benches and handrails.

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10 most remarkable chandeliers in the Moscow Metro (PHOTOS) - Russia Beyond

Photography: Mark Gutierrez of VHT

Photography: Mark Gutierrez of VHT

Photography: Mark Gutierrez of VHT

Photography: Mark Gutierrez of VHT

Local architect Richard Marker designed this glasshouse, which has wraparound views of the woods from all four bedrooms.

Its situated on a tree-covered spot in Downers Grove, which is around half an hours drive from Chicago. Marker created the property listed with Berkshire Hathaway Home Services as his own home, installing glass walls that bring the outdoors into every room.

Photography: Mark Gutierrez of VHT

For anyone who wants to further immerse themselves in the views, theres also a solarium and adjacent hot tub.

The Illinois propertys interiors offset the homes glass and steel construction, with white oak flooring and wooden ceilings introducing warmth throughout. As well as the open-plan living space, theres a steel spiral staircase that leads down to a basement currently in use as an extra entertainment room and bar.

Photography: Mark Gutierrez of VHT

Photography: Mark Gutierrez of VHT

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Live like an architect at this Mies-inspired glass and steel home in Illinois - The Spaces

For 39 years,Washingtonianhas joined with the DC chapter of the American Institute of Architects to recognize outstanding new work from the areas best residential architects. To ensure that the process is unbiased, none of the jurorsarchitects from around the countryare local. Of this years 79 submissions, seven homes were honored as general winners.

Firm: David Jameson Architect

With an exterior dominated by aluminum windows and austere concrete walls, this three-bedroom guest house (yes, its really only the guest house) on a 600-acre equestrian estate cuts a striking contrast with its lush surroundings. The upper story is enclosed on all sides in glass, offering 360-degree views of the Blue Ridge Mountains and the pastoral landscape.

Firm:Robert M. Gurney

From the front, this newly built house in Bethesdas Mohican Hills appears to be a relatively simple two-level structure. But in back, things get dramatic: The home drops down another two stories, anchored into a steeply sloping, wooded site with concrete walls at both ends. Darkshou sugi bansiding and decks on all four floors add to the modern-treehouse effect. Inside, the spaces are bright and open, with seasonal views of the Potomac River through wall-size windows.

Firm:Robert M. Gurney

The nearly 5,000-square-foot 30th-floor condo in Rosslyns Waterview complex looks across the Potomac to the monuments, the Capitol, the White House, and up to Washington National Cathedral. So a main priority of renovating it was to amplify those views. The architects maximized ceiling heightscreating an origami-like composition to accommodate hidden infrastructureto keep the wall of windows as unobstructed as possible. While the floor plan is mostly open, exposed concrete pillars and wood volumes define spaces without closing them in.

Firm:McInturff Architects

Sometimes an awkward lot can inspire even better design. The long, narrow form of this house was dictated by its tight corner siteof which it occupies every inch that it legally can. The home is designed to connect to the outdoors primarily from one side, which looks onto a garden and 75-foot lap pool. Floor-to-ceiling windows and terraces run nearly the entire length.

Firm:Wak Tok Architects

Some 20 years after buying their modest 1912 rowhouse, the homeowners decided to renovate it rather than move from the neighborhood theyd come to love. The houses back wall was taken down and replaced with a three-level addition containing a new kitchen, master suite, guest room, and roof deck. The higher ceiling in the new kitchen allows more natural light to filter into the older part of the homewhere period details were meticulously revived.

Firm:Studio Twenty Seven Architecture

To accommodate the homeowners need for more spacewithout compromising the midcentury-modern aesthetic that attracted them to their house in the first placethe architects designed two new pavilions to add to the original structure. One includes a master suite and home office. The other serves as a kids living area that can double as a guest room; it also has a deck. Both fit seamlessly with the older house, looking as though they could have been there all along.

Firm:Jones & Boer Architects

On four acres at the tip of a peninsula, this seven-bedroom waterfront home is proof that luxury doesnt have to be fussy. Designed in a U shape that gives every room a view of San Domingo Creek, the interior is painted pure white, with no trim, allowing the surrounding vistas to draw focus. Glass passageways connecting different sections of the house, slender columns, and clean-lined shiplap siding give an otherwise traditional exterior a fresh, modern feel.

Firm: McInturff Architects

McInturff Architects has remodeled this Georgetown townhouseperched on a bluff overlooking the Potomaca total of three times for three separate owners. The firms latest redesign is oriented around a modern, airy staircase that enlarged and replaced the original tight, winding stairs.

Firm: GriD Architects

On a farm in the West Virginia mountains that also includes a cabin and barn, this rustic-modern sauna was constructed of concrete, steel, and wood.

Five buildings were recognized in this category.

Firm: StudioMB

A 1917 church in Columbia Heights was transformed into eight co-living units that maintain much of the structures historic character.

Firm: Studio Twenty Seven Architecture

Situated between the Wharf and Navy Yard, the Aya serves as short-term housing for as many as 50 families experiencing homelessness.

Firm: Kube Architecture

A Hill East alley that was previously considered unbuildable now contains seven brightly hued, light-filled rowhouses with walkable green roofs.

Firm: Selldorf Architects and Core Architecture & Design

Whitman-Walker Healths former Elizabeth Taylor Medical Center on 14th Street is now a vibrant mixed-use development with stylish apartments, retail, a cultural center, and offices, including some of Whitman-Walkers.

Firm: Shalom Baranes Associates

For this new luxury apartment community, the architects took inspiration from the brutalist-modern aesthetic of nearby Lake Anne Village Center, designed by Robert Simon in the 1960s.

This article appears in theSeptember 2020issue ofWashingtonian.

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Senior Editor

Marisa M. Kashino joined Washingtonian in 2009 as a staff writer, and became a senior editor in 2014. She oversees the magazines real estate and home design coverage, and also writes long-form feature stories. She was a 2020 Livingston Award finalist for her two-part investigation into a possible wrongful conviction stemming from a murder in rural Virginia. Kashino lives in Northeast DC.

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Look Inside the Seven Coolest Houses in Washington - Washingtonian

ICONIC AWARDS 2020: Kengo Kuma and Associates Named 'Architects of the Year' by the German Design Council

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The ICONIC AWARDS 2020: Innovative Architecture, organized by the German Design Council, honor the best architecture and design solutions internationally. This years winners have now been announced and can set themselves clearly apart from their competitors thanks to their title. The special awards, were presented to Kengo Kuma and Associates (Architects of the Year) and Alberto Caiola Studio (Interior Designers of the Year). The Architects Client of the Year honor went to Adidas AG.

Alongside the special awards, the jury also honours the best work in the categories of Architecture, Interior, Product, Communication and Concept as well as the general category of Innovative Material. A comprehensive summary of all winners can be found at: http://www.iconic-world.com/directory/filtered/award-iaia/year-2020.

Architects of the Year special award

The jury awarded the Architects of the Year distinction to the extraordinary firm of Japanese architect Kengo Kuma, who is currently one of the most influential creators of contemporary buildings internationally with his iconic designs. Recent projects such as V&A Dundee, The Exchange and Ochanomizu are the preliminary highlights of an impressive gallery of work that amazes through the consistently high quality of its design. The skilled incorporation of light in combination with airy facade structures is remarkable, giving buildings such as V&A Dundee and The Exchange an almost immaterial feeling. The nature and quality of the designs not only cause the beholder to pause for reflection but also, through their power, stir the beholder emotionally.

Interior Designers of the Year special award

This years Interior Designers of the Year award was given to Alberto Caiola Studio. Alberto Caiolas work removes the boundaries between classic interior design and art installation in an extremely individual way. When people visit these projects, they do more than enter a room. Rather, Caiola has the visitor discover new, frequently surreal worlds and experience and explore them with all the senses. This creates exciting installations with high show value, such as the extravagant Crash Baggage @ LaFayette retail space, as well as visually fascinating locations such as the ancient Greece-inspired rooftop club NYZ, where visitors are immersed in immaterial-appearing scenery and leave the real world behind them for the time of their stay.

Architects Client of the Year honor

The Architects Client of the Year honor, which the jury presents to a project client that supports a holistic understanding of architecture, was given to Adidas AG this year. Adidas hired BEHNISCH ARCHITEKTEN and COBE Copenhagen, two renowned architecture firms with iconic designs attracting admiration globally, for two buildings for its head office employees. They were built shortly after each other on the World of Sports campus in Herzogenaurach, Bavaria. Even though both structures have aesthetics that are strikingly different from each other, they still clearly and consistently represent the brand values of the world-famous sports product manufacturer integrity, passion, performance, and diversity externally, internally, and down to the fine details. Two remarkable projects with iconic architecture that fulfill the companys ambitions of modernity and contemporary functionality in an exceptional way. Whats more, they offer formidable proof of the visionary power and openness to the extraordinary that Adidas has as an architecture client.

Jury members

German Design Council

The German Design Council is one of the worlds leading centers of expertise in communication and knowledge transfer within design, branding, and innovation. More than 340 businesses are currently members of its Foundation. The German Design Council was founded in 1953 as an initiative of Germanys federal parliament to strengthen the German economys competence in design. Its many and varied activities all have one aim: to communicate a lasting improvement of brand value through the strategic use of design.

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ICONIC AWARDS 2020: Kengo Kuma and Associates Named 'Architects of the Year' by the German Design Council - ArchDaily

At age 6, the architect Mariam Kamara moved with her family from Niamey, the capital of Niger, deep into the countrys vast Saharan interior, not far from the 15th-century city of Agadez, where the narrow streets of the historic center are lined with centuries-old houses built from rust-red adobe. During their five years in the desert, Kamara and her father, a mining engineer, traveled frequently into the nearby mountains, where they visited caves rich with neolithic paintings and polished stone, remnants of a time when the area was green and populated by nomads. This open archaeological site really gave me a sense of what my region is about, says Kamara, 41, who splits her time between Providence, R.I., where her husband is a professor of computer science at Brown University, and Niamey, where her firm, Atelier Masomi, has operated since 2014. Its not the story were fed about Africa being this place with no history.

Since completing her Master of Architecture at the University of Washington (and a thesis project on gender and public space) in 2013, Kamara has built her practice on layers of narrative. Her buildings read as missives from the people who inhabit them: about their history, the ways they move through space, and their needs and aspirations, all gleaned through careful observation and conversation. Constructing clear geometric forms almost entirely from three locally produced materials cement, recycled metal and unfired earth Kamara shapes space from the inside out, using environmental and cultural cues to generate her designs. Whether creating levitating metal disks to shade earth-brick market stalls in the village of Dandaji or a clean-lined office building for an innovation incubator in the capital, she uses a combination of traditional and contemporary technologies to address her clients desires. No matter where you are, architecture is a process of discovery, she says. Its not just space-making; its about discussion and how you turn desire into form.

Kamara began her first major project, 2016s Niamey 2000 apartment complex (designed with Yasaman Esmaili, Elizabeth Golden and Philip Strter), by interrogating the spatial problems of her own Western-style childhood home in the colonial city of Niamey. Like many middle-class houses built after independence in 1960, the concrete structure amplified the brutal heat. Compound walls created privacy but interfered with the practice of faada, gatherings that occur in the space between house and street. I remember this tension between the way the house was built and how we actually lived, Kamara says, this sensation that we were always working around and against its layout.

She thought back on the adobe houses shed seen throughout the Nigerien countryside, with shaded vestibules and heat-absorbing earthen material that kept the interiors cool, and decided to do something similar. Typically associated with rural poverty, earth masonry was a provocative choice for a middle-class, urban project, but Kamara was committed to using the material not only as an environmentally friendly, cost-saving solution, but also as a means of reframing the conversation around an indigenous technology as not merely contextual a word she resents but irreducibly logical. Combining earth with trace amounts of cement, she built four interlocking structures that pushed up against the edge of the plot, eliminating the need for a perimeter wall and trading exposed Western-style lawns for shaded interior courtyards. A low bench built into the facade reintroduced space that facilitated faada, while small square apertures placed high along the exterior walls provided light and ventilation. Kamara was struck by how similar the final building looked to traditional adobe houses in the 18th-century city of Zinder: Spatial logic had brought her to the same formal conclusions as master builders centuries before.

Her next project, the Hikma Religious and Secular Complex in Dandaji, began with an urgent call to rescue a 30-year-old adobe mosque whose mud-and-thatch domes, abstract bas-reliefs and squat minarets idiomatic elements in the regional style had fallen into disrepair.

After several long sessions with local stakeholders, Kamara and her collaborator, Esmaili, working with a team that included several of the original masons, elaborated a design that would convert the old building into a library while erecting a new mosque alongside it, with a ribbed earthen facade opening into a spectacle of mud-brick domes lofted 30 feet up on slender whitewashed columns. Between the two buildings, garden paths create a single space, Kamara says, without contradiction, between secular knowledge and faith.

In other words, the project declines to prioritize one type of knowledge over the other. Between her past work and her plans for an ambitious new cultural center in the heart of Niamey its elliptical earth-brick towers filled with libraries, galleries and performance spaces Kamara is mounting a quietly radical revolt against the Western dictatorship over our space, which still insists that African architects should only build clinics and rural schools, never addressing higher aspirations. For Kamara, that attitude is not just constraining, its an affront to the humanity of the place she comes from and the people for whom she builds. She prefers instead to elevate lived experience, to dare to do something that would make someone dream.

Read this article:
In Niger, an Architect Looking to the Countrys Design Traditions - The New York Times

MAD architects, the firm led by ma yansong, has shared its design for a concrete library in china that is currently under construction. located on the coast of haikou, in the countrys hainan province, the wormhole library has been conceived as an oasis that allows visitors to temporarily remove themselves from the hustle and bustle of everyday life. the building serves as a multi-functional building that allows visitors to read, enjoy views of the sea, and attend open-air performances. the sensuously curved pavilion appears to be a wormhole that transcends time and space, says the design team.

all images by SAN, unless otherwise stated

the project forms part of the a larger plan to rejuvenate haikous coastline with new public spaces. a series of pavilions by both domestic and international architects is under planning and MADs library will be the first one to be completed. the monolithic design is cast from white concrete, which ensures that the librarys interior ground, walls, and ceiling read as a continuous surface. to ensure accuracy and seamlessness across the curved surfaces, the building is being cast using both a CNC and 3D printed model. meanwhile, all mechanical, electrical, and plumbing elements have been hidden within the concrete cavity.

the interior is composed of two parts: a 690-square-meter (7,430-square-foot) reading space that can store approximately 10,000 books, a caf, and a terrace; and a 300-square-meter (3,230-square-foot) public rest area that is equipped with a bicycle parking system, public bathrooms, and shower areas. carefully positioned apertures allow the architecture to breathe, while letting natural light flood the interior. elsewhere, the grey spaces of the exterior corridors provide shaded spots for passersby to stop and rest.

curved sliding doors and retractable glass curtain walls not only provide views of the sea, but also enhance overall airflow and ventilation. in response to local weather conditions, the roof on the sunny side is cantilevered to achieve comfortable temperatures, realizing a sustainable and energy-saving building. the wormhole library is now under construction and is scheduled to complete in 2021. see other projects by MAD architects on designboom here.

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MAD architects unveils plans for 'wormhole library' on the coast of hainan - Designboom