Considering that more than a third of Dutch people use a bike as their main mode of transportation every day, it’s no surprise that the world’s largest bicycle garage is located in Utrecht. Recently completed by the firm Ector Hoogstad Architecten, the cavernous three-story bike parking facility is tucked beneath Utrecht Central Station, which is currently in the midst of a major makeover that aims to make this part of the city more sustainable, walkable and vibrant.

While various “modernizations” in the 60s and 70s made the area around Utrecht Central Station more car-friendly, the ongoing project to update the station is doing the opposite. The growing popularity of e-bikes and rising consciousness about the climate crisis are contributing to more bike riders than ever in the Netherlands, which will require new and modified public transport hubs with plenty of amenities for cyclists.

A modernist building that once connected the railway station to the adjacent shopping mall has been dismantled, allowing for a new public pedestrian street and square to be inserted along with the new bike garage, say the architects.

“The three storey bicycle parking is situated underneath the square. It has been designed with three aims in mind:  convenience, speed and safety. In order to achieve this in a facility of this scale cyclists are enabled to pedal all the way up to their parking slot. The parking lanes branch off the cycle paths, to ensure that users do not get in the way of cyclists passing through the system.”

“Room for mounting and dismounting is left alongside the cycling lanes. Modestly sloping ramps connect the parking areas on different levels The walls are colour-coded to indicate the routing, and electronic  signals indicate the position of free parking slots. Additional facilities such as a cycle repair shop, a cycle rental outlet and several floor managers meet users’ every need.”

“Stairwells and tunnels create direct connections to the elevated square, the main terminal building and the platforms. Ensuring good orientation and plenty of daylight, the stairwells are located inside atria covered by glass roofs. Large windows in the outer walls allow users views toward the platforms and the bus terminal.”

Featuring generous proportions and raw surfaces made of concrete, steel and wood, the garage feels clean and modern, with just as much care and attention given to it as you’d see in a high-profile parking garage for cars in the United States, like Miami’s 1111 Lincoln Road by Herzog de Meuron.

Check out more photos at EctorHoogstad.com.

Visions for the homes of China’s future actively transform, adapt, provide greater comfort when sharing small spaces, grow food and even prepare for extraterrestrial lifestyles. The theme of this year’s HOUSE VISION exhibition is “NEW GRAVITY,” focusing on finding solutions for practical problems in China’s living environment while combining “human wisdom with modern science and technology to explore the ideal way of living in the future.”

Designers were encouraged to think about elements like the sharing economy, artificial intelligence, energy consumption and communication while producing their full-scale prototypes. All ten models will be on display outside Beijing’s iconic “Bird’s Nest” National Stadium by architects Herzog & de Meuron through November 4th, 2018.

Founded in 2011 by Japanese graphic designer and curator Kenya Hara, HOUSE VISION is “a cultural research project that combines architects and companies to build a future home with the concept of ‘’new common sense of the future’… The project hopes to use ‘home’ as a medium to think about the future lifestyle and even the development of the world.”

Company Housing for MUJI by Go Hasegawa and Associates

How can you give multiple occupants of a single living unit more comfort and privacy without actually walling off any space for bedrooms? Japanese retailer MUJI teamed up with architect Go Hasegawa to find inspiration for a future shared housing concept within China’s history. In Shanghai, the upper floors of residential buildings are often a little too tall for single-story housing, but not tall enough to fit two levels inside. For spaces like these, the company envisions micro apartments for staff working at its Shanghai office, who are currently commuting up to three hours to get to work every day.

The shared area is open and spacious, with amenities that are hard to come by for single occupants on a budget in a big city. There’s plenty of space for storage, relaxation, cooking, dining and bathing on the ground floor. Meanwhile, private bedroom units are lofted up toward the ceiling in open-ended cantilevered boxes, allowing them to look out onto the city through the windows. Their orientation gives them privacy from each other and from the common space below.

Infinite Living Pavilion by Crossboundaries

Theoretical inhabitants of the Infinite Living Pavilion by Beijing-based firm Crossboundaries could use yet-to-be invented technologies to infinitely shape their living space. Instead of being stuck in a static grid like most residential interior layouts, ‘Infinite Living’ offers seven zones in which to “recharge, refill, refresh, update, standby, energize and entertain” using a variety of interior partitions, pop-out elements and transforming furnishings. Smart floor, ceiling and wall elements slide, rotate and retract to create pockets for certain activities or open up the entire volume. Produced in collaboration with electronics company TCL, the house uses televisions as virtual reality interfaces to expand “all the functions of the modern mobile device and integrating them with the spatial dimension of everyday life [sic].”

Urban Cabin by MINI LIVING and Dayong Sun

“Big Life, Small Footprint” is MINI LIVING’s motto, so naturally its contribution to HOUSE VISION is compact, innovative and playful. Within a surface area of just 15 square meters, the cabin explores how to create a sense of community in a small space while also maintaining maximum quality of life. Taking inspiration from China’s historic hutongs, which are residences arranged around courtyards and alleyways, the cabin features folding windows and tables that open or close the interiors to the outdoors, while protrusions on the roof channel daylight into the space. The golden mirrors give the oddly-shaped home a sunny disposition.

Living Garden by MAD Architects

MAD Architects seek to ground us by reconnecting our daily lives to the outdoors. Their ‘Living Garden’ does away with enclosed interior spaces entirely, with floating, organically shaped roof dipping down toward the ground on one side to create a shelter. The roof is covered in translucent waterproof glass to protect the space from rain, and integrates enough solar panels to power the daily needs of a family of three. While this proposal is probably a little too open to be realistic as it is, it emphasizes some of the coolest aspects of tropical en-plein-air architecture commonly found in places like Singapore.

400 Boxes by BLUE Architecture Studio

Any building can remain infinitely reconfigurable when its interiors aren’t defined by doorways and walls, preserving its utility for a wide variety of occupants far into the future. BLUE Architecture Studio inserts wooden boxes into a large open space to add furniture, planters, bedrooms and other private areas, closets and more. If your needs change – say, you decide your kitchen could be a little bigger and you aren’t really using your second bedroom – you simply swap out some of the volumes for new ones, or expand the ones you have. No need to renovate or move. Plus, the volumes act like room dividers.

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Apparently, Miami is hellbent on being home to all of the world’s coolest parking garages. It’s already famous for 1111 Lincoln Road, a landmark gem by Swiss firm Herzog de Meuron that hosts fashion shows, music videos, orchestral performances and interactive art installations in addition to parked vehicles. Arquitectonica’s Ballet Valet garage is world-renowned for its lush greenery. Then there’s the City View Garage in Miami’s Design District, which boasts four different designs on each of its four facades.

Now, a facility that looked a little too wacky to be real in its initial renderings is complete, and it’s really something else.

Just two blocks away from the City View Garage, the new Museum Garage is open after two years of planning and construction. Five architecture and design firms designed five radically different facades for the structure: Nicolas Buffe, Clavel Aquitectos, J. Mayer H., WORKac and Keenan/Riley. Standing seven stories tall and capable of holding 800 cars, the surrealist garage is a colorful mashup of shapes and styles.

Architect Terence Riley ‘curated’ the facade designs for DACRA and LVMH, and says he describes the impact of the garage as “a bucket of cold water.” It’s shocking, but also refreshing, especially in steamy South Florida. A sense of a cohesive whole wasn’t really a priority – each of the five designers worked on their individual segments without seeing what others were creating.

Riley says he drew inspiration from an old Surrealist parlor game called Exquisite Corpse, in which one artist draws a head on a piece of paper, folds it to hide what they’ve drawn and passes it to the next artist to draw another segment of the body. Nobody sees it as a whole until the final part is complete.

The garage is located on the corner of NE 1st Avenue and NE 41st Street. In addition to offering public parking at a reasonable rate of $3 for 4 hours, the facility includes mixed-use spaces on the ground level. Fittingly, it faces the new Institute of Contemporary Art Miami.

Captions via the Miami Design District

Based in Basel, Switzerland, the architecture firm Herzog & de Meuron is known for dramatic, monumental Modernist structures free of frivolity, expanding over the years from simple geometric silhouettes to more complex and dynamic shapes. Each of their buildings is almost like an oversized sculpture, some rising high above street level or cantilevering at striking angles while others, like their recent Berggruen campus, lie low and flat. These 10 projects represent some of the firm’s most iconic and memorable works.

Berggruen Institute, Los Angeles, California

The firm conceived this new campus for the Berggruen Institute overlooking Los Angeles as a “landscape vision,” building on only a small area of the 447-acre site to keep 90% of it open and natural. Built along a mountain ridge in the Santa Monica mountains, the campus includes an elevated ‘frame’ surrounding a large courtyard garden and spherical lecture hall. It will act as a private educational forum for scholars and leaders in various fields working to “provide critical analysis and new ideas that will shape political, economic and social institutions.”

56 Leonard Street Skyscraper, New York City

Construction of Herzog & de Meuron’s latest New York City skyscraper is complete, and the firm has released a stunning time lapse of the building process. This structure is envisioned as a stack of individual houses arranged in a Jenga-like formation, giving it a pixelated appearance. This arrangement also creates a series of terraces and projecting balconies on every level.

Elbphilharmonie, Hamburg, Germany

At $900 million, the price tag for Herzog & de Meuron’s Elbphilharmonie building in Hamburg is undeniably astronomical, but many in the city – and the international architecture community – say it’s worthwhile. Positioned on top of a 19th-century warehouse, the new structure glitters in a series of buoyant waves, echoing the water of the adjacent Elbe River. The 26-floor, 700,000-square-foot complex features a sweeping 269-foot escalator, performance halls, a main auditorium and a rooftop terrace.

1111 Lincoln Road, Miami, Florida

Helping to popularize a trend of high-design parking garages, 1111 Lincoln Road is a stunning, angular concrete structure positioned in one of Miami’s most active pedestrian areas, overlooking the city’s iconic Art Deco architecture. “Jacques Herzog stated that this building will reinterpret the essence of Tropical Modernism, and it somehow reminds me of the modern movement in Brazil, with raw structures providing shade, while containing smaller enclosing sub-elements,” the architects explain. “The slabs stand over a set of irregular columns, giving a sense of a precarious equilibrium. These columns also cast different shadows, giving more character to the facade.”

M.H. De Young Museum, San Francisco, California

Reviving an 1895 museum that was destroyed by the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, the M.H. De Young Museum in San Francisco dramatically departs from the visuals of its predecessor, keeping only historic elements like sphinxes and original palm trees and taking on a monumental silhouette. Its inverted pyramid-shaped tower twists atop its ground-level roof, making it a landmark from a distance. Materials like stone, copper and wood help merge it with its park-like environment.

Tenerife Espacio de las Artes, Spain

For the TEA cultural center in Spain, Herzog and de Meuron wanted to interfuse and interflow various activities and spaces within the center, cutting a new public path diagonally through the complex connected to the top of the General Serrador Bridge. The triangular space at the center is a new public plaza open and accessible to everyone in the city, featuring a cafe and restaurant along with the capability to become an open-air cinema. “The spatial interplay between inside and outside integrates rather than separates the very diverse urban landscapes which are so fascinating in Santa Cruz. The new cultural centre is therefore not only a place of encounter for people but also a place of intersection for the landscape of the contemporary city, the old city with its skyline along the Barranco and the archaic topography of the Barranco itself.”

Beijing ‘Bird’s Nest’ Olympic Stadium, China

Completed in 2008, the national stadium in Beijing sits in the center of the Olympic complex, and like many Olympic structures once the Games are over, it has reportedly fallen into disuse and disrepair. In its prime, it was one of the most complex stadiums ever built, and it was especially impressive at night, when illuminated from within. Taking inspiration from Chinese ceramics, it integrates criss-crossing steel beams to hide the supports for the retractible roof, which was later removed from the design. Still, those beams remain its most striking and notable feature.

Feltrinelli Porta Volta

A long, gabled volume with a gridded exterior stretches down a Milan street, hosting a research center and offices for Fondazione Giangiacamo Feltrinelli. Situated within the city’s Ports Volta district, the elongated building is all white and glass, with glazing continuing right up its 5-story facade onto its roof. A strip of greenery stretches from the boulevard to its rear entrance. “The new buildings are inspired by the simplicity and generous scale of historic Milanese architecture such as the Ospedale Maggiore, the Rotunda della Besana the Lazzaretto and Sfrozesco Castle,” says Herzog & de Meuron.

VitraHaus

Another instant Herzog & de Meuron classic utilizing gabled typologies is VitraHaus, commissioned by home design company Vitra to present their home collection on their campus in Weil am Rhein, between the border of Switzerland and Germany. 12 ‘houses’ are stacked together into a five-story structure, with five houses at the base and seven more stacked on top of them. Some are cantilevered up to 49 feet, and all of them feature glazed ends to show off Vitra’s interiors.

The Tanks at the Tate Modern, London

‘The Tanks’ are a series of underground gallery and performance spaces beneath the Tate Modern Museum in London, converted from former oil storage spaces by Herzog and de Meuron. In a previous life, the space the gallery occupies was a power station. The architecture firm transformed the raw industrial spaces without disguising their origins, giving them a vague dystopian feel.

Often mysterious, somber and a little otherworldly, subterranean spaces add a sense of depth (no pun intended) to the art installations and performances held within them. Abandoned subway platforms, tunnels beneath old psychiatric hospitals, cisterns, ice wells, bunkers and even manholes invite us to descend beneath the surface of the earth to experience art on another level.

The Water at The Cisterns by Hiroshi Sambuichi

Damp and dreary yet monumental, with the proportions of a cathedral, this former underground water reservoir in Copenhagen was once an unknown beauty beneath the city, but now functions as ’The Cisterns,’ an unusual art venue. Japanese architect Hiroshi Sambuichi delicately transforms the space while paying respect to all of these qualities with ‘The Water,’ a subterranean landscape installation taking viewers on “a journey through an underground sea of light and darkness.” Natural light, moss and an icy glass cube play with the humidity and moisture levels of the space, making it feel a bit like a secret underground forest.

JFK Figurine Hidden in a Desert Bunker

You’re hiking through the unforgiving plains of the California desert when you come upon a mysterious black hatch. Against your better judgment, you open it and climb down the ladder into a huge metal pipe that appears to be part of some kind of bunker. Inside, what you find is more bizarre than pretty much anything you could have imagined: a statue of John F. Kennedy perched on a stool, casually crossing his legs. Artist Will Boone based his sculpture on a figure from a hobby kit, scaling it up to life-size. To him, the installation “speaks not just to all those things that have been driven underground since the extinguished optimism of the sixties but to those same fears – nuclear attack and the invasion of the other – that have been so vividly resurrected in recent times.”

Secret Sculptural Installations Beneath Paris

An artist who wishes to remain anonymous descended into the many subterranean spaces beneath Paris to illegally install secret art installations, each one often requiring many hours of investigative preparation both to access the space, avoid getting caught and keep the art undisturbed for as long as possible, though he’s gone to jail once or twice. The installations themselves often feel like reverent tributes to the people who occupy liminal spaces in society, evoking camps where homeless people and refugees often live.

Repurposed Oil Tanks at the Tate Modern in London

Repurposed by the firm Herzog & de Meuron, the enormous underground oil tanks of a former power station now act as a dramatic backdrop for performances, interactive art and video installations at London’s Tate Modern. “No longer generating electricity, the Tanks generate ideas, creative energy and new possibilities for artists and audiences,” says the museum. “These raw, industrial, subterranean spaces, each measuring over thirty meters across and seven meters high are the world’s first museum galleries permanently dedicated to exhibiting live art, performance, installation and film.” [Middle photo by Ray Tung/Rex Features.]

D.C.’s Dupont Underground Arts Space

The 75,000-square-foot east platform of Washington D.C.’s subterranean trolley station Dupont Underground is now a visual art and performance space hosting revolving exhibitions as well as performances, permanent murals and other programming. Lying beneath the city’s Dupont Circle about a mile from the White House, this underground space was closed off in 1962 when the city’s streetcar system shut down, and remained empty until the new arts space opened in 2015. Among the installations it has hosted is ‘Whimsical Invasion’ by Hyuntek Yoon and Youngeun Kwun, consisting of over 650,000 plastic balls in nylon netting.

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Underground Art 11 Subterranean Galleries Installations Delve Deep