Tripoli Media & Cultural City, Libya

21 Feb 2008 Astudio wins Mipim Future Projects Award for Tripoli Media & Cultural City Astudio is delighted to announce that it has won the Future Projects Award at Mipim this year in the Big Urban Projects category. The project is a large mixed use Culture and Media City in the heart of Tripoli. Astudio has developed a Masterplan for the site as well as a design for an Opera House the first building to be developed as part of a grand city wide development of new buildings. The Masterplan is planned to cleverly mix three main uses on the site. Cultural buildings including the Opera, Theatres, Museum, Library and Archive buildings, Media Uses such as TV Studios, Radio Stations, Newspaper offices and Printing works, and Commercial uses such as Hotels, a School, Residential and Convention Centre. The design brings these uses together around a large park in the centre. Each use having a face onto the park. Shading devices are used to create a careful balance between shaded and exposed spaces, encouraging the use of outside spaces during the day. The design of the Opera house grows out from these shades. Creating a building that looks simply like an extension of the public realm. Designed using a series of large scale shades the form creates a dramatic presence on the street. Resembling the movement in music it also draws on historic emblems of Tripoli to reinforce its history as well as represent its future. Aart Koning says ‘ Having visited the city several times we were aware that our proposal had to blend more subtly the inside and outside spaces, harsh changes in environment from air conditioned spaces to outside heat and humidity has an enormous effect on the body. We have developed a design that makes that transition easier by using these shades. For example we are using water to run over the shades from the nearby coast to naturally cool these outside spaces. We don’t want the boundary of the building to be a hard edge like nearly all the other buildings you see.’ This competition win is significant as it comes only one year after establishing Astudio as a new practice. Using sophisticated tools Astudio are designing a series of high profile projects. Richard Hyams says ‘this win is incredible for us, it just goes to prove that smaller practices can compete and win on the world stage – we are delighted’.