New Air Traffic Control Center at the Ljubljana airport (ATCC), designed by the Sadar+Vuga studio from Ljubljana, has been officialy opened in May this year and since then awarded the ICONIC AWARD 2013 winner by the German Design Coucil, GOLDEN PENCIL 2013 for the excellent realization in the field of architecture and nominated for PIRANESI AWARD 2013.

New Air Traffic Control Center at the Ljubljana airport, comprising air control center with 24/7 amenities and office premises, is a highly demanding and complex object due to the nature of the institution it hosts. It is designed to enable safety and high operational activity as well as consistent comfort for visitors and staff 24 hours a day all year around.

The building is located in the middle of the plot, at the north there is a parking platform and at the south high vegetation of the garden. Within, the object is organized by five levels of security zones with access control at each passage. The further one moves from the rim that holds administrative and rest areas towards the centre of the object, the greater the security level of the areas. The compact design serves to enhance the operational efficiency of the object, paths are short and manageable. The clear division into a pentagonal head (control center) and two wings (offices and public program) provides easy orientation within. They are connected by a central multi-leveled area with an entrance lobby, restaurant, conference room and gym. The vertical hall is a place for meeting, informal socializing and communication.

The Center appears as a monolithic shell, opening towards outside only when necessary. Building is wrapped in belts of glazing and combined aluminium parapets and brise-soleils that regulate the intensity of heat and light transmission to the interior. The angle and the size of the brise-soleil are determined by the layout of the windows and the intensity of solar radiation related to it. The height of the parapet is determined by the interior of individual areas and the related wish for greater or lesser openings for views. The windows are made of bronze reflective glass mirroring the mountains in the surrounding. The beige and bronze colour coding of the façade visually reflects the building’s character of security and protection. The roof is rising in terraces, thus continuing the play of blinds and parapets on the facade, providing daylight to the interior areas, especially to the control room in the pentagonal core of the object.

Andreas Ruby, Quote from the jury report about the excellent realization of ATCC:

With their air traffic control centre building, Sadar+Vuga have achieved something incredible. They have managed to make a typology visible that normally does not register on the radar of our architectural culture. This structure wants you to look at it, and it looks at you: its meandering banded windows are crowned by obliquely cantilevering sunshade panels that read like eyelids. Inside, the porosity of the facade pays off in generously lit interiors, which yields another exotism – daylight in a control building. The atrium is a carefully sculpted well of light that you would expect in a cultural institution or high standard office building, and stands emblematic as an architectural strategy to overwrite the usual misery of this typology with an abundance of tectonic care and sensual consideration. This investment in design is no boutique-fetish, but acknowledges the exceptional kind of work of those who work there. Now, from the inside, you also understand the rationale for the design of windows and sunshades. The size of the window strip corresponds to the hierarchical importance of the program behind it.

Thanks to this primitive parametricism (Boštjan Vuga) the design of the building never slides off into arbitrariness and formalism, which you can better witness on site than from photographs. The building uses its form not as an end, but as a means to transform the conventions of its typology. It wants to restore cultural value and dignity to a type of building all too often treated as junk or inconsequential space. One could easily (mis)take it for a cultural or public building, but that’s exactly the effect the architects worked to generate with their design: to make us reconsider the role of such buildings for our cities and endow them with a greater mission and ambition.

Source: Sadar+Vuga.

The Centre for architecture Belgrade submitted two entries for this years Ranko Radović Awards – in cathegory of realized architecture works the project for Juvenile Detention Facility at Kruševac, and in cathegory of TV, exhibitions and multimedia the CAB integrated information system.

The exhibition of works was held at Kolarac Foundation in Belgrade, and the exibition at the Department for architecture of the Faculty of Technical Sciences of the University of Novi Sad will follow.

Preliminary and final design of new housing units at the Juvenile Detention Facility in Kruševac, Serbia, whose authors are members of the Centre for Architecture Belgrade, is nominated for the European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture – Mies van der Rohe Award 2013. The project is part of the Programme for the improvement of conditions at the Juvenile detention facility in Kruševac, financed by the European Commision.

The Juvenile Detention Facility in Kruševac is a famous institution, depicted in several movies and TV-series produced in the period of former Yugoslavia. It gained the nickname “Gray Home (Sivi dom)” from an iconic TV-series from the 1980′s, dealing with hard times of imprisoned juvenile delinquents.

The life of problematic kids growing up in this reform school did not change much over time. One of the principal reasons is that the whole detention facility was very old and in poor condition, with inadequate security capacities. Deteriorated and overcrowded spaces for lectures, work and sleeping, poor hygiene and mixing of different age groups all proved to be inadequate for the XXI century.

The European Commission provided funding for new buildings, that would essentially improve the overall conditions at the facility. Eight new housing units, an infirmary and an isolation building were designed and built, with accompanying infrastructure.

New housing units have rooms with two and three beds and a bathroom for every room. At the ground floor level of each unit, there is a large space for dining and other activities. The conditions in these units do not differ much from standard student homes.

Two smaller buildings (infirmary and isolation) are specific, with higher security measures and appropriate finishing, installations and equipment.

The biggest architectural challenge  was to reconcile the impression of austerity that architecture should leave on its users and the need for them to identify with the space where they spend most of their time. This was accomplished by using a simple architectural language based on archetype forms.

Visual concept of the facade is the repetition of a small number of strictly defined elements. The way these elements are distributed on the facades reflects the dynamic character of young people who spend their time in this facility.

The whole complex achieves a harmonic relationship with its surrounding, primarily because brick is the dominant material. This relationship with the natural surrounding is additionally emphasized in the way the disposition of buildings makes the most of the natural potentials on site.

Buildings were completed in September 2012. The design and supervision of works was carried out by SAFEGE. Authors of the architectural design are Goran Petrović and Vanja Petrović (Centre for Architecture Belgrade). Project manager was Jaša Preger.

Photo: Miroslava Andrić

Singapore’s Gardens by the Bay has won the top prize, World Building of the Year, at the World Architecture Festival that was also held in Singapore this year.

Officially the prize went to Wilkinson Eyre Architects from London, but jury represented by such names as: Ben Van Berkel, Moshe Safdie, Jϋrgen Mayer H, Yvonne Farrell, insisted that the whole design team should have recognition (Grant Associates, Atelier One i Atelier Ten) for this magnificent team effort.

Located in Marina Bay, Gardens by the Bay is a key project in delivering the Singapore Government’s vision of transforming Singapore into a ‘City in a Garden’. At a total of 101 hectares, the Gardens by the Bay project comprises three distinct waterfront gardens.

At the heart of Bay South Garden is the Cooled Conservatory Complex which is the focal point of the Gardens. The two main Conservatories cover an area in excess of 20,000sq m and are among the largest climate-controlled glasshouses in the world. They provide a spectacular, all-weather attraction and comprise a cool dry conservatory (the ‘Flower Dome’) and a cool moist conservatory (the ‘Cloud Forest’). Each has its own distinct character, but both explore the horticulture of those environments most likely to be affected by climate change.

The Flower Dome tells the story of plants and people in the Mediterranean climate zone, aims to bring alive the experience of seasonal change for visitors more used to Singapore’s eternally tropical climate and lush green vegetation. Even the landform of the conservatories draws inspiration from Mediterranean landscapes and evokes the language of dry, sun-baked hillsides punctuated with rocky terraces and stony outcrops, and the intimate bond between land, geology, vegetation and cultivation.

The Cloud Forest highlights the relationship between plants and the planet, showing how the warming of the cool tropical cloud forests will threaten biodiversity. With a smaller footprint but greater height than Flower Dome, it has at its heart a planted ‘Mountain’ from which a 35m high waterfall drops. Visitors can experience the forest at different levels, but most interesting is a Cloud Walk between tree crowns.

Gardens by the Bay are open for visitors from June 2012 and during August 1.000.000th visitor is registered.

Photo: © Gardens by the Bay

Grafton Architects from Dublin, Ireland, received the Silver Lion award at this year’s Venice architecture Biennale, for their impressive presentation of the project for a university campus in Lima, Peru. The Silver Lion is awarded to emerging architects who raise expectations, and it is the first time a practice from Ireland won this prestigious award.

Presenting their architecture as a “new geography”, the Dublin-based office uses this exhibition to explore characteristic historical examples of architecture merging with the landscape, as well as the work of Brazilian architect Paolo Mendes da Rocha, in order to better approach their first project in South America – a university campus in Lima, Peru.

The director of this year’s Biennale, David Chipperfield, who chose the topic “Common Ground”, placed the Grafton Architects exhibition as central in the main Giardini pavilion. The jury president, Dutch architect Wiel Arets,  said that this exhibition showcases on various levels the conceptual and spatial qualities and potentials of the way Grafton Architects explore and present the urban landscape.

In one part of the exhibition Shelley McNamara and Yvonne Farrell, founders of Grafton Architects, explore the surprising similarities between the Skellig Michael convent in Ireland and the Peruvian city of Machu Picchu. Despite the fact that these two places are separated by a huge physical distance and were created in disparate times, there is a common line that connects them. In both examples the intimate man-made spaces are in perfect harmony with their impressive natural surrounding and, as expressed by the exhibition authors, they tell the same tale.

The exhibition topic is transfered from the past into the present day, and the comparison of distant (yet very near) worlds is repeated in the second part, through the dialogue McNamara and Farrell started with the Brazilian architect Paulo Mendes da Rocha for the purpose of this Biennale.

Grafton Architects recently won a competition for a university campus in Lima, Peru, when they realized that the analysis of da Rocha’s works will improve their knowledge of building tradition and the cultural context of the local site and climate. The analysis features the Serra Duorada stadium designed by the Pritzker Award winner da Rocha in 1973. Using da Rocha’s idea of architecture as a “new geography” and the idea of the university as a “knowledge arena”, Grafton Architects manage to transform infrastructure into an urban landscape. By not treating the architecture as an isolated building, they show a new quality of the inevitable transformations of urban landscape – its complete remodeling.

Probably the biggest importance of this exhibition is the fact that it unequivocally demonstrates how openness to influences is the beginning and pre-requisite to quality architecture. In this sense, Grafton Architects present an excellent answer to the Biennale topic “Common Ground”.

Photo: Miloš Mirosavić

Students of the Belgrade Faculty of Architecture Sanja Ivkov and Anđela Đorović won a Special Award competing against 6 teams from 6 countries (Bulgaria, Ukraine, Georgia, Russia, Turkey and Serbia) at the 5th Intenational student competition organized by the Faculty of Architecture of the Free University in Varna, Bulgaria, that took place from 16th to 19th May 2012.

The topic of this year’s competition was Plein air in Architecture – Island Protection and Recreation Zone Golden Sands with the Ideas Proposal of a complex of recreational facilities on newly formed islands in Varna, on the Black Sea. Sanja and Anđela presented a project titled Wavelands in which they developed a parametric approach based on glitch art. The Author of audio-visual effects is electrical engineer Stefan Malešević, and the mentor was Aleksandar Videnović.

Here’s what the authors wrote about the project:

Concept

The design concept is derived from the geometric approach and contemporary trends in visual expression and presentation [glitch art] that correspond with the existing built environment, topography and oscillations of sea waves.

* GLITCH ART is a contemporary tendency of expression in the field of sound and images. Sound and picture are the result of digital and analog experiment with the basic factors (pixel -> Image | frequency -> sound).

Technology is a generator of its development, while glitch generates its own growth, modulations and variations in order to be implemented in the area as a trigger of the dynamics and ambient through time. This way of understanding and perception was used as a visual, structural and ambiental experiment.

Objectives

This project aims to create enriched, sustainable and environmentally important areas. The proposed action with its reaction – result is transformed into an idea that is gradually implemented in the tissue of the island, and then to the wider built environment. This new areas are accessible, comfortable, attractive in its structure and ambient, with green areas that have a positive impact on the environment at the micro and macro level. Ambient diversity encourages the activation of all senses and enhances the experience and perception of environment and activities. Space is opened to its future users and the wider environment. This solution represents a method that can be applied to any surface, object, block, and the entire city. The result is universally applicable and variable.

Program

The diversity of contents and ambients that are formed around them represent one of the essential features of the project. Thematically organized functions within the island participate in expansion of the complex in the direction sea – land and land – sea, where they create relationships in their functioning and further development as a whole. The program structure consists of several topics with their contents distributed on the islands:

I group of islands:

1. SPORT: surf, yachting, paragliding, swimming pools…
2. LODGE: hotel, restaurants, spa, beaches…
3. FOOD: ethno village, national food, festivals, fishing…
4. ART: open-air galleries, workshops, land/water art…

II group of islands:

1. FUN: music, theme park, circus, Pirates…
2. MULTIMEDIA: projections, multimedia, digital art…
3. DIVE IN: water lounge, dive-in cinema, beach, water balloons…

Structure

The volume of the islands can be achieved by filling the land. In addition to the structure it is proposed to use different types of sea coast erosion protection and vegetation as secondary protection. Types of coast protection should be selected in accordance with the needs and possibilities of the islands, as well as activities that are performed on them. Types of sea coast erosion protection:

1. Seawall
The purpose of a seawall is to protect areas of human habitation, conservation and leisure activities from the action of tides and waves.

2. Beach nourishment
Beach nourishment describes a process by which sediment (usually sand) lost through erosion is replaced from sources outside of the eroding beach. A wider beach can reduce storm damage to coastal structures by dissipating energy across the surf zone, protecting upland structures and infrastructure from storm surges and unusually high tides. Nourishment is one of three commonly accepted methods for protecting shorelines.

3. Breakwaters
Breakwaters are structures constructed on coasts as part of coastal defense or to protect an anchorage from the effects of weather and longshore drift. They reduce the intensity of wave action in inshore waters and thereby reduce coastal erosion or provide safe harborage. Breakwaters further out in sea are considered for creating the right ‘peeling’ waves for surfing.

4. Artifical surfing reefs
Structures that create the ideal conditions for surfing.

Sustainable development

The usage of renewable resources and natural materials, green areas and recycling , with the help of technologies that reduce emissions of harmful substances and energy consumption, helps creation of an environment that is healthy for a man, with a positive effect on the climate, economic and ecological sustainable.

You can download the project in PDF here

Dve jednakovredne nagrade
Open Air-Library, Magdeburg, Germany by KARO* with Architektur+Netzwerk
Den Norske Opera & Ballet, Oslo, Norway by Snøhetta

Posebna priznanja
Urban Activators: Theater Podium & Grotekerplein, Rotterdam, Netherlands
by Atelier Kempe Thill
Paseo Marítimo de la Playa Poniente, Benidorm, Spain
by Office of Architecture in Barcelona
Passage 56/Espace Culturel Écologique, Paris, France
by atelier d’architecture autogérée
Casetas de Pescadores en el puerto, Cangas do Morrazo, Spain
by Irisarri + Piñera

Pobedničke radove odabrao je međunarodni žiri, kome je predsedavao Rafael Moneo.

Evropska nagrada za javni gradski prostor dodeljuje se svake dve godine u organizaciji šest evropskih institucija, sa ciljem da prepozna i podrži projekte urbane obnove i stane u odbranu javnih prostora u gradovima. Prvi put je dodeljena 2000. goine, a ovo je šesti ciklus.

Više o nagradi na zvaničnom sajtu. Pregled nagrađenih radova dostupan je u PDF formatu.

Na javnom urbanističkom konkursu za uređenje područja bivšeg kamenoloma u Podutiku kod Ljubljane, čiji su rezultati upravo objavljeni, tim beogradskih arhitekata osvojio je priznanje-otkup. Radi se o značajnom rezultatu, budući da je učešće i visok plasman srpskih arhitekata na slovenačkim konkursima retkost.

Avtorja:
Vanja Petrović, u.d.i.a.,
Renato Rajnar, u.d.i.a.

Projektanti sodelavci:
Goran Petrović, u.d.i.a.,
Nataša Stanojević. u.d.i.a.,
Milan Milinković, u.d.i.a.,
Katarina Živanović Kavčič, u.d.i.a.,
Darko Polić, u.d.i.a.,
Momčilo Gajić, u.d.i.a.

Konzultanti:
Rade Djukanović, u.d.i.s., Arup d.o.o.,
Tamara Mihajlović, u.d.i.g., Arup d.o.o.,
Marko Španović, u.d.i.s., Arup d.o.o.,
Primož Kavčič, u.d.i.s., PKK biro, d.o.o.

Konzultanti:
Uroš Tomašević, u.d.i.a.

Više o konkursu i nagrađenim radovima na sajtu ZAPS.