Utopias

The Seven Peaks of Azerbaijan is a master plan for a Zero Energy city with housing, culture and leisure facilities on Zira Island situated within the Caspian Sea. Located within the crescent shaped bay of Azerbaijan’s capital Baku,  Zira Island is designed to be a sustainable model for urban development, and an iconographic skyline recognizable from the city’s coastline. Each of the Seven Peaks house a neighborhood derived from the geometry of a famous mountain in Azerbaijan. Individually each…

If the industrial production society era had an aesthetics based on simplicity, repetition or the assembly of additive systems, for our era we would like to propose an architecture that is not concerned with its apparent figure, is characterised by a certain incorporeal. An architecture of energy in which the visible form is simply the materialization of environments through mere energy dissipation. A building is no longer more than the material form adopted by a particular energy configuration: a…

Along with shopping malls, petrol stations and branches of McDonalds, the old Chinatown renders all cities boring and alike. It is nothing more than restaurant streets and fake traditional buildings, representing a kitsch image of contemporary China with no real life inside. It is a historical theme park that poisons the urban space. There must be a shock therapy to remedy this situation. Superstar: A Mobile China Town is MAD's response to the redundant and increasingly out-of-date nature of…

Stack City is a speculative project that exploits the future as a domain for experimentation with urban form. It is primarily concerned with the convergence of technology, infrastructure, and urban space in our future, post-oil cities, and seeks to define new, sustainable ways of life that might emerge from this condition. This exploration is carried out by projecting forward the development logics emerging in the new cities of the United Arab Emirates and increasingly prevalent elsewhere. However, the project…

The project starts from the reflection about human being life cycle, and the need of questioning the subject housing/shelter in a global way. This house has been developed to serve a various number of users; the possibility of building the house based on a family structure, contemplating its natural evolution, and exploring the self-construction. Inhabitable space quality, eco(nomic) and resistant materials, solar orientation justification, natural air circulation, rain water collect; all these premises are priority themes for each climate…

The first project as a result of the Masdar Initiative is a new six million square meter sustainable development that uses the traditional planning principals of a walled city, together with existing technologies, to achieve a carbon neutral and zero waste community. Masterplanned by Foster + Partners, the initiative has been driven by the Abu Dhabi Future Energy Company, and will be a centre for the development of new ideas for energy production. Masdar responds to the urban identity…

Little DK is a test tube in which to demonstrate that sustainability is not a question of science fiction but rather applied science. By following the natural propensity of each program we have organized the entire 100.000m2 block so that each program claims its optimum position in the whole. The optimum location has been determined by solar orientation, urban adjacencies, proximity to symbiotic neighbours and requirements for access, scale, sunlight, views etc.

The Australian suburb was born out of our dependance on the car. With Peak Oil rapidly approaching the epoch of the automobile with soon come to an end and with it so will the Australian outer suburb. Where will suburbanites live when there is no other means of circulation to their homes? What will we do with our abandoned and decaying suburbs? And most importantly, what will we do with the 50% of Australians that are over-weight due to…

“The mirror has no memory, and cannot retain an image unless it is applied to its surface. And, unlike the photographic negative it is incapable of multiplying the image reflected in its surface – unless that surface is fragmented and its integrity destroyed.” - Robert Hopper The CASA NÃO CASA is a solar house, invisible in the landscape It’s a house that blurs in the landscape and at the same time a Solar house. All the façade turns to…

Seoul Commune 2026 investigates the viability of an alternative and sustainable community structure in the overpopulated metropolises of the near future. The imagined community is integrated within the ever-accelerating developments of the digital environment and ongoing rapid social change. Seoul Commune 2026 presents a concrete architectural and urban proposal that entirely reconfigures, and consequently develops the existing “towers in the park” form. Seoul Commune 2026 unites towers and the park in a balanced way. It forms a complex network…