Last 7th of June, the city of Toronto unveiled the winning design for the new St. Lawrence Market North Building. The new design, proposed by Adamson Associates Architects and Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners, was unanimously chosen by judges as the winner of the competition held to replace the current building.
The new building will be a modern and more sustainable upgrade to the historic St. Lawrence neighborhood that respectfully integrates with the older buildings. The design is a four-storey structure that allows market shoppers to view life and activities on Front Street, Jarvis Street and on Market Lane Park from within its glass atrium, effectively creating an open indoor market that resembles a fresh, outdoor setting.
According to Treehugger, this modern and futuristic building will be an improvement over “a one story concrete shed of a market that was a perfect embodiment of Toronto at the time: cheap, expedient and ugly.”
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What can you expect from an island where there is no nature, no fresh water, no energy infrastructure, no roads and no sewers? The answer is ambitious: one man made ecosystem that will transform the island into a self-sustaining city containing 10,000 people and with zero emissions.
Located within the crescent shaped bay of Baku, Zira Island is going to take in The Seven Peaks of Azerbaijan, a master plan for a Zero Energy resort and entertainment city within the Caspian Sea. The project is an original design made by the danish architect Bjarke Ingels, from the BIG (Bjarke Ingels Group). The island is designed to be a sustainable model for urban development and an iconographic skyline recognizable from the city’s coastline. In this sense, far from becoming a visual impact to the bakunians, the new architectural landscape has derived from its natural landscape, and it’s intended to replicate, through artificial constructions, the seven most significant mountains of the country.
The mountains are conceived not only as metaphors but also engineered as entire eco-systems, a model for future sustainable urban development. The energy needed to operate the 1 million square city will be supplied entirely through renewable sources as offshore wind turbines, solar heat panels, photovoltaic cells and ocean wave energy. The development aims to be entirely independent of external resources. Fresh water will be provided through a desalination plant, and waste water and storm water will be collected and led to a waste water treatment plant, where it will be cleaned, processed and recycled for irrigation.
“Only the best ideas survive”, mentions the author when is asked for the design, making reference to the underpinning idea of the project: Darwin’s theory of evolution and natural selection applied to urbanism.
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With the world population steadily becoming more concentrated in urban areas, environmental sustainability depends largely on how we plan and construct cities. Green architecture is one important facet of this process. In the U.S., buildings account for about half of all energy consumption and GHG emissions. Constructing energy efficient and more eco-friendly residential, commercial and industrial buildings is crucial to the future of our planet.
Many of the most creative and inspiring architectural designs of our day are incorporating green features. The Edgar Street Towers, from San Francisco-based IwamotoScott Architecture, is part of a study to redesign a 41-acre area in downtown Manhattan called Greenwich South. The building would straddle Edgar Street and spiral up, connecting above the street below. Some of the sustainable design features are the fiber-optic daylighting, environmentally-modeled skin, and bio-filtration terrarium flooring providing fresh air to the structure. Read more about the project here, here, and here.
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