The municipality of Rødovre, an independent municipality of Copenhagen, Denmark, announced yesterday MVRDV and co-architect ADEPT winner of the design competition of the Rødovre Skyscraper. The 116 meter tall tower accommodates apartments, a hotel, retail and offices. A public park and a plaza are also part of the privately funded scheme.

The new skyscraper with a total surface of 21,688 sq meters will be located at Roskildevej, a major artery East of the centre of Copenhagen. The skyscraper is shaped to reflect Copenhagen’s historical spire and present day high-rise blending in the skyline of the city, it further combines the two distinctive typologies of Rødovre, the single family home and the skyscraper in a vertical village. Consideration of these local characteristics leads to Copenhagen’s first contemporary high-rise.

Responding to unstable markets the design is based on a flexible grid, allowing alteration of the program by re-designating units. These ‘pixels’ are each 60m2 square and arranged around the central core of the building, which for flexibility consists of three bundled cores allowing separate access to the different program segments.

On the lower floors the volume is slim to create space for the surrounding public plaza with retail and restaurants; the lower part of the high rise consists of offices, the middle part leans north in order to create a variety of sky gardens that are terraced along the south side. This creates a stacked neighbourhood, a Sky Village. From this south orientation the apartments are benefitting. The top of the building will be occupied by a hotel enjoying the view towards Copenhagen city centre. The constellation of the pixels allows flexibility in function; the building can be transformed by market forces, however at this moment it is foreseen to include 970 sq m retail, 15,800 sq m offices, 3,650 sq m housing and 2,000 sq m hotel and a basement of 13,600 sq m containing parking and storage.

Flexibility for adaptation is one of the best sustainable characteristics of a building. Besides this the Sky Village will also integrate the latest technologies according to the progressive Danish environmental standards. Furthermore the plans include a greywater circuit, the use of 40% recycled concrete in the foundation and a variety of energy producing devices on the façade.

Viktor & Rolf have never been ones to follow the conventional rules of design. Last year they redefined classical style and reinterpreted the iconic object of champagne on behalf of Piper-Heidsieck bringing an upside down twist to their Rosé Sauvage champagne bottle to create a really striking and sophisticated objet d’art.

The Rosé Sauvage bottle becomes a phial. The inverted flute of champagne becomes a goblet. The base of the bottle, now at the top, which reproduces the proportions of the legendary champagne cork and its wire cage and foil, is enhanced with a pink and black gold ribbon stamped with the Piper logo. The secret? A tightly-fitting sleeve slipped over the preformed plastic shell that encases the bottle, all of which enhanced by classic labels in pure champagne tradition.

And while their imaginations are limitless, the bottle certainly is not. It’s priced at 65 euros ($90) and has been available since November 2007 from an exclusive selection of retail outlets, including Colette in Paris. Piper-Heidsieck « upside-down » has recently been awarded at the Monaco Luxe Pack fair !

German designer Andreas Ostwald has created the Cara pendant lamp for lighting manufacturer ANTA. The lamp features a cluster of white/silver printed circuit boards equipped with LEDs.

70 LEDs are attached to pentagonal pieces of silvery polycarbonate to create a mobile that changes continually. It faintly gives the appearance of a constellation of stars hanging from the ceiling ! Visit the ANTA website - here

This chandelier, made of molded thermoplastic “pebbles” with a polished chrome finish, can make any room look like it has fragments of a T-1000 liquid Terminator dangling from the ceiling. Designed by Ross Lovegrove this year for Artemide, this lamp is called “Mercury, obviously named for the cool blog-like organic shapes that resemble mercury.

During the day the piece acts as a sculptural object reflecting the dynamics of natural light and the movement of people around them. When it lights up, the pebbles reflect light in a chaos of distorted color. I love it, but at $2,700, I wouldn’t be able to afford the electricity to turn it on!

John pomp has redefined contemporary design through the art of glass blowing. for the past decade, he has been living and working in new york city, and has established himself as one of the leaders in modern design.

Master of fine glass, lighting, and sculpture, he utilized all three of his specialties to create this giant aquarium of light.You can see more of the Infinity Chandelier (above) here on YouTube.

John Pomp runs a public access, educational, glassblowing facility in Brooklyn, New York called One Sixty Glass. He has also designed an exclusive line of glass for Tiffany & Co. and donna karan’s new york flagship store and designed glass for an installation at jcrew’s rockefeller center store in new york city . Images and other works can be seen at johnpomp.com

Grand Terminal 3 at Dubai International Airport opened on October 14. Built at a cost of $4.5 billion, it is also the largest terminal in the world.

Catering to passengers for Gulf countries and the US, movement around the airport’s six floors, most of them underground, has been facilitated by 157 lifts, 97 escalators, 82 moving walkways and 27 truck lifts and eight Sky Trains that can handle 47 people each. For a project of this scale, the car park itself is equivalent to 33 football fields, while the departures area at Level 3 is more than 51 hectares in size, the size of 94 football fields !

A sales assistant in the Dubai duty free shop in the arrivals area, said: “It’s a very beautiful terminal compared to the other ones – very spacious and more like a temple than an airport terminal.”

With just six departure flights and nine arrivals at T3, the 1.5 million sqm glass and chrome building was hardly bustling on day one but T3 is opening in phases and will eventually handle 17,000 passengers at any given time. Emirates Airline will move its entire daily schedule of 250 flights over to the new terminal by December.