Siemens’s Lean Efficiency

With its pale geometric fins, suspended spiral staircases, and long facades, Siemens’s new Middle East headquarters in Masdar City is an ode to the architecture of efficiency. It is also a sign that Masdar, billed as the world’s first carbon neutral city in 2006, might finally be becoming more than just a visionary idea.
Originally conceived by Foster + Partners to stand on a podium above a network of driverless cars, Masdar had to revise its plans after the financial crash of 2008. Post recession, the city has dropped its zero carbon and waste taglines, and is a leaner and more pragmatic beast. Siemens’s building, designed by U.K. architects Sheppard Robson, is the first LEED Platinum–certified office building in the emirate. An eloquent expression of Masdar’s pared-down but pioneering ambitions, the structure offers an impressive 46 percent in energy savings (as per the Ashrae benchmark), a 50 percent reduction in water demand, and a 65 percent reduction in energy demand—all for the cost of a high-quality office building in Abu Dhabi. (...)

Museum Of The History Of Polish Jews

Winning the first Finlandia Prize is the latest achievement for the Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw, designed by Finnish firm Lahdelma & Mahlamäki Architects. The Finlandia Prize for Architecture is awarded to a design or renovation of an outstanding new building or complex completed within the past three years. The prize also recognizes Finnish architects and firms for a project built within Finland or abroad.

After Lahdelma & Mahlamäki won the international competition in 2005, the museum -- which is located in a World War II-era ghetto -- was completed in 2013 and then recently opened its main exhibition on October 29, 2014. (...)

Bustler

We Want World Wonders

Óbidos Technological Park Main Building By Jorge Mealha

How does one create a main piazza in the absence of a surrounding urban fabric that typically encloses a Piazza? The design team around architect Jorge Mealha drew from its traditional Portuguese typologies and conceived the Óbidos Technological Park Main Building in the countryside north of Lisbon as contemporary interpretation of a Terreiro.

While just recently completed, the project has already garnered a respectable nomination for the European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture – Mies van der Rohe Award 2015. (...)

10 Frank Lloyd Wright Buildings Nominated For UNESCO Distinction

From the Statute of Liberty to the ruins of the Chaco Culture, the United Staes has fewer than two dozen landmarks designated as UNESCO World Heritage sites. Now, ten of Frank Lloyd Wright’s buildings—built from 1906 to 1969—are the first modern works of American architecture to be considered for a global list, which already includes Walter Gropius’s early Modernist Fagus Factory, Josef Hoffmann’s secessionist Stoclet House, and a host of cultural landmarks from Angkor Wat to Stonehenge. The UNESCO designation neither outlines nor provides any specific protections or provisions for the preservation of the buildings, but would formally elevate them to an international standing. The nomination was forwarded by the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy, a Chicago-based nonprofit dedicated to preserving Wright’s built legacy. The next steps are site visits by the World Heritage Committee throughout 2015 and possible inclusion by summer 2016.

The ten buildings are located in seven states: California (Marin County Civic Center, Hollyhock House), Arizona (Taliesen West), Oklahoma (Price Tower), Wisconsin (Taliesen, Jacobs House), Illinois (Unity Temple, Robie House), Pennsylvania (Falling Water), and New York (Guggenheim Museum). An earlier 1991 nomination of two Wright works—Taliesen and Taliesen West—was rebuffed by the UNESCO Committee in favor a comprehensive list of works nominated from Wright’s entire oeuvre. Beginning in 2004, a group of Wright scholars embarked on the slow process of distilling the list, documenting each work and justifying it