Global Design New York University: SPOTLIGHT: WORK Architecture Company (WORKac)

Tuesday, January 28, 2014

SPOTLIGHT: WORK Architecture Company (WORKac) | SHENZHEN INTERCHANGE

WORKac was founded by Dan Wood and Amale Andraos and is based in New York City. WORKac conflates several design disciplines, operating at the edge of each. In this outer-lying area, they re-invent the nexuses between architecture and "everything else." Their work is progressive and fresh, shaping the future of sustainable urbanism.

WORKac has been a part of many innovative projects; one that stands out, is their design of the Shenzhen Interchange. This is a massive skyscraper placed in a circulatory core of Southern China. WORKac wanted to celebrate the tower's position. Their approach was to "trace the diagonal line of the Metro Line #1 up through the building." In this way, "the subway can also be easily accessed directly through the main elevators of the tower, which also provides direct and convenient access for hotel guests and office workers to travel directly from the secure tower metro lobby to the upper floors."

This design also features sustainable practices: "green pockets are chiseled into the building, creating a natural counterpoint to the hard edges of the tower and providing a striking visual confirmation of the building’s commitment to the new ecological urbanism." Additionally, the building uses a cyclical hydrological system and roof-mounted solar panels.

It is a brilliantly designed structure.

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WORKac is one of the innovative design firms featured in our forthcoming BOOK!

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http://work.ac/ ||| http://work.ac/interchange/

"Shenzhen Interchange." WORKac. WORK Architecture Company, 2011. Web. 23 Jan. 2014.

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MISSION

Global warming effects pose new challenges to the architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design communities. The immediate response has been a turn toward a host of energy-saving technologies. What has rarely been addressed, however, is the problem of scale. How can the designer make sure that global solutions do not come at the expense of local traditions, cultures, and environments? By placing human rational, emotional, technological, and social needs at the center of our environmental concerns, we propose a new GLOBAL [Global Local Open Border Architecture and Landscape] design initiative.

We seek a Global yet still Local design that can Open the sociopolitical Borders that all too often separate Architecture from its Landscape. The overreaching aim is to develop a language of design that can create proximity between individual responsibility and the current global environmental crisis. We see environmental problems as a crisis of human alienation from the natural world, and our initiative will explore ways in which design can reformat the unfortunate separation. In our plea for proximity between the individual and the global we will explore, in the words of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, a design that is "as close to the beyond as to things near" when we evoke "our power to imagine ourselves elsewhere."