There was an Old Lady who Lived in a Shoe

 

click images for larger view

Not exactly an old, beat-up boot.  More like a top-of-line Jimmy Choo.  But what a foot!  What tendons!

Actually, this is the Reiser + Umemoto design that's just won First Prize in an international competition "for a new Port and Cruise Service Center in the city of Kaohsiung in southern Taiwan, ROC," created in collaboration with the late structural engineer Ysrael A. Seinuk.  Construction is to start in 2012, with a 2014 completion date.

We've written before of that team's O-14 Cheese Grater tower in Dubai which apparently is still "nearing completion."  (We still have a soft spot in our heart for the idea of a Lucien Lagrange-inspired knockoff for Lake Shore Drive.*)

*important note to attorneys here.

The Kaohsiung project is another striking, form-shifting project.

You can see more images here.

For me, what's most shocking is not the avant garde design but that the press release says they expect to build it for $85,000,000.  Ah, the glories of cheap labor.

Dubai's Giant Swiss Cheese Grater becomes Reality

Usually when you see some architectural firm's really pushing-the-envelope design, your first - and correct - reactions are: a. it's very nice and b. it will always remain in the unrealized perfection of the drawings.

Occasionally, however, such a design does get built. Case in point is New York-based reiser + umemoto's stunning office project O-14, which has actually just been topped out in the architectural fairyland of Dubai, and is projected to be completed next year. Like SOM's 1961 Hartford Building on Wacker Drive . . .
. . . O-14 wears its structure as an exoskeleton. Unlike the more conventional Hartford, however, 0-14's exoskeleton creates a column-free interior. It also provides solar shading, and pairs up with the glazing set a meter within to create what is the equivalent to a double-skin facade, whose chimney effect channels hot air - of which I hear there's a lot in Dubai - up through the cavity, cooling the surface of the window wall.

The exoskeleton is of self-consolidating concrete cast around a "basket weave" of reinforcing steel, with the large circular openings created by inserting cut polystyrene voids in the "basket-weave" rebar matrix. You can see an illustration of the process in photographs accompanying this fine article on Arcspace, from which we've stolen borrowed the image below.
reiser +umemoto's website also includes their interesting entry in a competition to design a new home for the Pittsburgh Children's Museum. Like everyone else in the world excepting the bunker-loving Gigi Pritzker Pucker, Mayor Daley and their minions, the architects recognize the importance of making a "building that is at once light and inviting." (Since it's designed with Flash, we can't provide a link to the project's page on their website - you just have to burrow to find it.)
In an amazing coincidence, Lucien Lagrange, working independently, completely unaware of reiser + umemoto's design for O-14 , came up with a strikingly parallel concept to counter Mies van der Rohe 860-880 Lake Shore Drive apartments when the Chicago architect assumed he would get his hands on the Athletic Club site right across the street.*
*important note to attorneys here.