Robert Barnes

Swedish architecture firm used brightly-coloured curved glass to draw customers inside its Emporia shopping centre. It features two gaping entrances made out of brightly-coloured curved glass, one amber and one blue.

Emporia, which won the Shopping Centres category at this year’s Inside Festival, is a shopping mall located to the south of the city of Malmö in Sweden. The building features residential and office units on the levels above the shopping centre, as well as a publicly accessible roof garden on the top.

Design strategy collective Urban-Think Tank has designed and built a prototypical house as part of an initiative to improve housing conditions for slum dwellers in some of the 2700 informal settlements across South Africa

Working under the title Empower Shack, the team organised a design-and-build workshop in Khayelitsha, a township in Cape Town that is one of the largest in South Africa, and developed a design for a low-cost two-storey shack for local resident Phumezo Tsibanto and his family.

They then worked together to replace Tsibanto’s existing single-storey dwelling with the new two-storey structure, giving the family a new home with a watertight exterior and its own electricity.

Nameless Architecture, which has offices in Seoul and New York, used concrete for both the structure and exterior finish of RW Concrete Church, creating an austere building intended to embody religious values.

RW Concrete Church is located in Byeollae, a newly developed district near northeast Seoul, Korea. It evokes a feeling, not of a city already completed, but a building on a new landscape somewhere between nature and artificiality, or between creation and extinction. The church, which will be a part of the new urban fabric, is concretised through a flow of consecutive spaces based on simple shape, single physical properties and programs.

Penumbra shading system, the horizontal trick allows light to permeate deep into a building while preventing direct sunlight from coming in. To demonstrate the concept, Short created a 3D animation showing a complex system of cogs and gears that could theoretically be used to power the system. Although the concept seems highly unlikely to ever become reality, the visual impact of a mechanical wave of louvers extending out from a building is nonetheless breathtaking.

This project was designed to offer a kinetic and mechanical solution to a problem that would otherwise be nearly impossible to solve with static architectural components: providing shading across a building facade for both low evening sun and high afternoon sun conditions. Put into motion, the shades create an undulating ripple across the facade.

London architecture office Make Architects have designed a portable prefabricated kiosk with a folded aluminium shell that opens and closes like a paper fan.

Make based the design of the kiosks on the folded paper forms of Japanese origami, but chose to reproduce them in metal to create a compact and robust structure that can house street vendors.

“Origami was fundamental in developing the design; the ideas of a folding fan informed the design and folded paper models were used throughout the process, right up to the final testing of the completed design,” said project architect Sean Affleck

Two of the kiosks were installed in a public plaza at London’s Canary Wharf and acted as information and vending points for the duration of an ice sculpting festival last month.