We’ve seen some stunning pavilions at the Shanghai Expo 2010 event: the Saudi’s desert oasis, the U.K.’s bizarre yet thrilling Seed Cathedral (see video footage of it after the jump) and, sadly, the most bland and boring pavilion of them all, the U.S. one which has been labelled by some ‘The Shopping Mall’.
Cruel, but true.
Still, one man’s mall is another’s Taj Mahal and you can now voice your opinion via the Expo 2010 Awards, being run by Exhibitor magazine.
There’s very few things – except maybe crude oil and coal – that can’t have the word ‘green’ shoved in front of it these days, in order to make it more eco-friendly. Many, sadly, are inaccurate and others are fads.
But when it comes to buildings, green building has become the new wave of construction. And right now, Norway is king of green building for the second year running, according to – take a deep breath now – the 2009 Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) Global Zero Carbon Capacity Index. Phew.
The HOK design team certainly like to think so. This is how the winning team envision the revamp of one of the San Francisco’s most treasured historical buildings, the Mint, built in 1874 and survivor of the devastating 1906 earthquake and fire.
It’s now looking at a future as a new museum and visitor centre for the city.
As you can see, maintaining the character of the original is paramount and the covered courtyard is a clever approach to opening up the inner space to the outside, while showing off the original stonework – much of which will have to rescued from ‘modernisation’ over the years.
Overlooking the site of the London 2012 Olympics, the new View Tube café is not what you’d normally expect from your local coffee shop. In fact, there are probably very few coffee shops built from old shipping containers and, if there are, they probably don’t look quite as cool as this one. We like cargotecture for a number of reasons and you can find a number of excellent and innovative examples in our previous blog ‘Thinking Outside The Container’.
This is ‘cargotecture’ at its best and it’s the 40th structure built from old shipping containers at London’s Container City. Read the rest of this entry »
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