New Office Address

Our Hong Kong office has moved. We are now located in Sai Ying Pun, a strategic move to be closer to the University of Hong Kong as well:

14/F Siu On Building
243-245 Des Voeux Road West
Sai Ying Pun
Tel: +852 2857 7102
Fax: +852 2857 7609
email: office@icehk.com
website: www.icehk.com

2012 - Enter the Dragon

2011 has ended rather busy and hectic. Consequently the blog has been fairly quiet also. As our operations are running on the East Asian Calendar, we wish a Happy New Year to all our readers, friends, colleagues and clients.

We are closing on an extremely successful year with a lot of groundbreaking developments.

Foremost we have hit 30,000 readers of this blog within the first two years of posting. Thank you so much for all the support and encouragement in our work.

Additionally we won the five star AsiaPacific Property Award this year, beating other peers of the profession. Currently we are designing the latest high rise in Hanoi, working on several master plans in Vietnam, a groundbreaking high rise in Hong Kong and multiple large scale interior projects for multinational companies in China. And on top of it we diversified into product design with a revamp of COATS product displays worldwide.

We are proud to do all this with an extremely flexible, yet small task force, defining the agenda for the office in 2012: Small is successful!

Y3+1

We recently participated in the 'Open International Competition on the Development of an Architectural Concept for an International Business Center with an Intercontinental Hotel in the City of Yerevan'. The brief was extremely blur. Yet we were fascinated by the strong civic urban spaces in Yerevan and how a contemporary intervention can communicate with them.

About the Site:

Yerevan is a city of strong civic spaces such as the Yerevan Cascade, which offer striking views over the city as well as to Mount Ararat. Their bold intervention create a dialogue with the natural beauty of the surrounding and act as urban navigators.

The site of Y3+1 is in proximity to the icons of the city, located at the eastern edge of the city. With the location, it acts as an interface between city and nature, forms a gateway between the two. With it’s prominent position on a plateau above the city, it has the potential to not only act as visual symbol to the city, but also as a civic destination, which will act as an urban boulevard on top of the city, creating striking views to Mount Ararat.

About the Program:

Y3+1 is aiming to be a development, which not only acts visually but performs on spatial as well as programmatic levels, and therefor could become a major civic space in the city of Yerevan. The result should be an environment, which is urban and programmatically and spatially diverse.In order to create a maximum of urban civic space, the building will be lifted above that zone, standing on three legs, which contain only the lobbies for the tower above. The plateau is a three dimensional space with above ground pavilions, sunken courts and an underground connection to the city level. The project consists of three main structures, which are raised above the plateau: A residential building, a hotel and an office building. They connect to the ground by three legs, which contain the entrance and the main public functions of the program. The legs are connected to the urban plateau above and below ground. The towers are designed to maximize the panoramic view over the city and its environment with a major emphasis on the direction towards the Mount Ararat.

Team: Ulrich Kirchhoff, Claudia Wigger, Louise Low, Hugo Ma, Tim Mao

© 2009, ice - ideas for contemporary environments

2010

With the end of the rather unusually chilly holiday season in Hong Kong, we are awakening from our hibernation period as well. Big plans for this year: As we are moving along with our architecture practice with projects in Vietnam, China, Germany and Taiwan, we are also expanding our operation into becoming a rather universal design environment. The iceblog will be our most updated companion during this journey. So then: Happy New Year of the Tiger.

ice team: Ulrich Kirchhoff, Claudia Wigger, Louise Low, Arthur Bel, Hugo Ma, Tim Mao