Skyscrapers

Elenberg Fraser love Auckland. We have long admired the city and its exports in culture and business and the arts. Almost 20 years ago we published the works of the great Rewi Thompson in Transition magazine, it is powerful work that we have absorbed and never forgotten. So our response to the Federal Street site is a personal and complex one. In contemporary architecture, landscape is often reduced to view lines and decoration. But we have sought to evacuate the ground plane and to reinstate the traditional forests of the New Zealand Taraire. We see this as a gift to the city, a visceral tactile forest experience with waterfalls and rocks and moss and layered dense vegetation – a real, living forest experience for residents and visi... More

As one of the tallest buildings in Stockholm, Victoria Tower stands out among its neighbours and acts as an icon of the surround area. Situated between Stockholm proper and the city airport, the tower serves a nearby office park with conference and office facilities, as well as providing a 229 room hotel. The tessellated façade of the building is clad entirely in colored glass, though in actuality two-thirds of the walls are fully insulated. This allows the tower to appear as a colorful prism in its geometry and materiality while meeting the needs for energy conservation. The tower has a parallelogram-shaped plan for floors 2–21, which is comprised of the hotel rooms, while the upper floors are rectangular, delineating the office spaces and... More

The New Museum of Contemporary art is an urban infill in Downtown Manhattan. Given such a dense urban setting, stacking museum spaces might easily have led to an introverted mass, but by shifting the volumes in relation to each other we opened the building up and the museum started to interact with its surroundings. This shifting allows for skylights, terraces, and variation, all while maximizing wall space and keeping within the zoned building envelope. As the relation between core and envelope vary, different lighting conditions and proportions arise. More

London Bridge Tower, which is also known as the Shard, is a 72 storey mixed use tower located besides London Bridge Station on the south bank of the river Thames. The station, which combines train, bus and underground lines is one of the busiest in London with 200,000 users per day. The project is a response to the Mayor’s policy of promoting high density development at key transport nodes. The form of the tower was determined by its prominence on the London skyline. Unlike other cities such as New York or Hong Kong, the Shard is not part of an existing cluster of high rise buildings. References included the masts of ships docked in the nearby Pool of London and Monet’s paintings of the Houses of Parliament. The slender pyramidal f... More

The Marina Bay District has garnered plenty of attention for its glittering new attractions, but the Central Business District is now getting a facelift of its own. SAA has unveiled One Raffles Place Tower 2 – a sustainable LED-lighted skyscraper poised to infuse vibrancy into the downtown core with full glass windows. This landmark offers panoramic views of Singapore and multiple green features that enhance the quality of the working environment. Guided by SAA's philosophy, the home-grown architectural firm designed the 38-storey office tower with an urbanistic approach, giving much attention to its surrounding urban form. With its crystalline exterior, the new skyscraper not only creates a strong presence but further catalyses the tran... More

Won in an international competition and designed by Sir Terry Farrell, the 442m Kingkey 100 Finance Tower is Shenzhen’s tallest tower, as well as the world’s 9th tallest mixed use building in 2011. It is also the tallest tower to be built by a British architect. The 98 storey tower comprises over 210,000m2 of accommodation and is part of the master plan design for a 417,000m2 mixed use development. There is one floor of retail at basement level that connects directly to a new metro station; there is 173,000m2 of Grade A office space over 70 floors and 20 floors, covering 35,000m2, of “Six Star” business hotel complete with state-of-the-art conference and business facilities. A variety of fine dining options are contained within the sky... More

Located close to the border between Spain and France, the new office tower is the last building of the Zaisa transportation hub in Irun, and houses Zaisa’s headquarters and rental office space. The tower is inserted in front of a building that has a crescent like facade, and on top of a previously existing underground parking. When the parking was built, some pillars were raised from the ground level waiting for a future development. The first volume of the tower is an elliptical base that groups the pillars that come from the parking. On top of this ellipse, eight stories of offices are located. Both volumes have a different structure that is connected by a W which also points the building's entrance . Zaisa´s headquarters are located at t... More

33-storey residential tower, 150 meters high, located in the Marina of Beirut, with large luxury apartments and 5 levels underground car park. Concept Design: Ricardo Bofill Taller de Arquitectura in association with Nabil Gholam Architecture & Planning Project architect: Nabil Gholam Architects Client: IKAR 1421 Floor area above ground: 53,000 m2 More

We call our cities steel concrete forests Throughout the process of urbanization, skyscrapers have been symbols of technological bravado, prime capitals and the societal projections of wealth and prosperity. This limited framework for skyscrapers often results in solutions limited by homogenous, linear structures and degenerative duplication in business districts across the globe. Forced into an unnatural state of conformity, metropolitan life is negatively affected by these unchecked, efficiency-centric development practices. Without a challenge to the status quo, our cities will continue to lack the cohesion of life as implied by the term: forest. A forest is a thriving ecosystem wherein every organism survives only in a state of symbi... More

Special events have been held in Calgary this week to mark the official opening of The Bow, a 237-metre-high headquarters tower – the city’s tallest building and Canada’s tallest tower outside Toronto. A bold new landmark on the skyline, the project is equally significant in urban, social and environmental terms: the public base of the tower is filled with shops, restaurants and cafes and extends into a generous landscaped plaza, while the office floors are punctuated by three six-storey sky gardens, which encourage natural ventilation and help to significantly reduce energy use. The Bow is the first major development on the east side of Centre Street, a major axis through downtown Calgary, and it provides a shared headquarters for Encan... More

Mode Gakuen Cocoon Tower, which contains 3 vocational schools with approximately 10,000 students, is an innovative educational facility located in Tokyo's distinctive Nishi-Shinjuku high-rise district. The building's elliptic shape, wrapped in a criss-cross web of diagonal lines, embodies the "cocoon" concept. Students are inspired to create, grow and transform while embraced within this cocoon-like, incubating form. In essence, the creative design successfully nurtures students to communicate and think creatively. In designing Mode Gakuen Cocoon Tower, Tange Associates offers a new solution for school architecture in Tokyo's tightly meshed urban environment. A new typology for educational architecture, the tower and accompanying auditorium... More

With 53 floors above ground the Twin Towers reach an overall height of 240 m. Both towers are based on rectangular floor plans, with full height conservatories recessed into the centre of each. Within the conservatories sky lobbies span the height of eight floors each, allowing for spacious lobby and entrance situations on all floors. The design of the façade is based on the structural composition of the building: The concrete core within and the grid like shell outside are load bearing. More

Construction has recommenced on what is set to become one of the most iconic buildings in London’s Square Mile, British Land and Oxford Properties’ The Leadenhall Building. Following an announcement in late December 2010 on the completion of a joint venture partnership between British Land and Oxford Properties for the 610,000 sq ft development, photos revealed today show the scheme’s contractors back on site and pressing ahead with piling works (the laying of structural support for the building). Located at 122 Leadenhall, the tapering 47 storey, 736 ft (224m) tower was designed by Rogers Stirk Harbour and Partners and is due for practical completion in mid 2014. Combining flexible office space with retail and dining facilities, t... More

Reforma 432 is Grupo Elipse’s newest residential project by rojkind arquitectos located on Mexico City’s most important avenue, Paseo de la Reforma. With a perfect location on this historical boulevard, at the corner of Sevilla Avenue, the building has privileged views over the city, including some of its most iconic landmarks such as the fountain of La Diana Cazadora and the Chapultepec Castle. R432 stands 52 stories tall and is truly exceptional in its commitment to creating a unique and contemporary lifestyle at the heart of Mexico City’s most dynamic avenue. Embracing environmental responsibility, it features important elements such as interior green areas, solar energy panels, recycling capabilities and water treatment plants. In... More