Learn how to make cinema-like video renderings with Lumion animation tools

The disruption caused by the coronavirus may have opened doors that many have been waiting for. Preliminary studies support that we experienced a faster technological revolution during the last three months than ever before. Forced to adapt, and to ensure the liveability of urban fabrics, policymakers are reviewing data protocols and legislations, giving way to tech-powered urban health solutions. However, many of those amendments will stay post virus. The precedence gained as a legacy will offer cause for both wonder and worry for our urban future. 

The Citizens’ Brigade to Save LACMA, had organized a competition entitled “LACMA Not LackMA”, in order to collect ideas “that could contribute to an alternate design for a new Los Angeles County Museum of Art”. The selected six designs are from renowned international firms: Barkow Leibinger, Coop Himmelb(l)au, Kaya Design, Paul Murdoch Architects, Reiser + Umemoto, and TheeAe.

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The Victorian State Government has given official approval for the Southbank project, in Melbourne, with construction scheduled for next year. Set to become Australia’s tallest tower, the building is conceived by Dutch firm UNStudio and local firm Cox Architecture.

Parramatta City Council has approved the new Aquatic and Leisure Center project by Grimshaw, Andrew Burges Architects and McGregor Coxall. Located in New South Wales, Australia, the project was reviewed via a development application that outlined the project's vision since its inception in June 2018. The aquatic center will replace the Parramatta Memorial Pool and will integrate with the surrounding park setting.

ArchDaily and Strelka Mag have launched a jointly curated section that will host projects of emerging architects and offices that promote new design ideas and bring about positive transformations in their cities.

The platform welcomes projects from Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Estonia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan.

The key criteria for selecting projects will be sustainability, flexibility, and cost-efficiency.

Another year, another successful ArchDaily China Building of the Year Awards! With more than 20,000 votes gathered over the past 20 days, the results of the 2020 edition are in! Once more, the award has proved to be the largest architecture prize centered around people’s opinion. Crowdsourced, the most relevant projects of the year were nominated and selected by our readers.

This year we celebrate three projects -- highlighting a wide range of interventions, typologies, scale, material and locations, the winners are a mere reflection of the vast outreach of the profession. With new names surfacing every year, this edition, as the previous ones did, honors well-established practices and the newcomers. High-profile figures include Atelier FCJZ with its bridge museum in the Chinese countryside, Neri&Hu Design and Research Office and its sculpture art center, and Atelier Lai's Bamboo Bridge.

True to its status, ArchDaily China, the most far-reaching Chinese architectural website, is and will always be a platform for all architecture enthusiasts. Curating the best in the world, thanks to the trust of architectural firms and the devotion of our readers, ArchDaily’s realm keeps expanding exponentially. For that, we are grateful! 

As social distancing becomes the new norm in the fight against COVID-19, people are finding it harder to keep up with the six-foot rule in dense cities. Urban Planner Meli Harvey developed a map of New York that shows the width of sidewalks in the city, aiming to highlight public areas where social distancing can be maintained.

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UNStudio has just completed the remodeling works of the Hanwha headquarters building in Seoul, while the building remained fully occupied. The refurbishment operations have created a modern establishment that meets the current sustainability requirements.

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The Quzhou Sports Campus by MAD Architects is taking shape in China’s Zhejiang province. Led by the Ma Yansong, the team designed the campus as a futuristic landscape with mountains and a lake conceived as a sunken garden. The design connects to the historic city to become a surreal and tranquil landscape. The project's vision is to bring both the competition among sports stars and the physical activity of people’s daily lives together.

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In today’s world of digital architecture, one term appears more than all others: BIM. Building Information Modeling (BIM) concerns the appending and otherwise referencing of data in a digital model. Architects use BIM for a variety of reasons, but the common denominator of BIM use is having a single model which serves as a touchpoint for coordination between internal and external teams.

Flansburgh Architects, a Boston-based firm that specializes in educational architecture, implemented a Big BIM workflow for the design of a new school for the town of Holbrook, Massachusetts. Kent Kovacs, AIA, Vice President and principal-in-charge and Brian Hores, AIA, BIM Manager shared how this process benefited the project.

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This article was originally published on The Architect's Newspaper as "Architects apply the latest in fabrication, design, and visualization to age-old timber."

Every so often, the field of architecture is presented with what is hailed as the next “miracle building material.” Concrete enabled the expansion of the Roman Empire, steel densified cities to previously unthinkable heights, and plastic reconstituted the architectural interior and the building economy along with it.

But it would be reasonable to question why and how, in the 21st century, timber was accorded a miracle status on the tail-end of a timeline several millennia-long. Though its rough-hewn surface and the puzzle-like assembly it engenders might seem antithetical to the current global demand for exponential building development, it is timber’s durability, renewability, and capacity for sequestering carbon—rather than release it—that inspires the building industry to heavily invest in its future.

One of Sweden’s most esteemed living architects, Gert Wingårdh (born 26 April 1951) brought Swedish architecture out of the tradition of the International Style and into contemporary times with his playful design spirit and love of eye-catching materials. With his use of bright colors and geometric motifs, his recent buildings have been described as "Maximalist" or "Modern Baroque."

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Known for his sensuous materiality and attention to place, 2009 Pritzker Laureate Peter Zumthor (born April 26, 1943) is one the most revered architects of the 21st century. Shooting to fame on the back of The Therme Vals and Kunsthaus Bregenz, completed just a year apart in 1996 and 1997, his work privileges the experiential qualities of individual buildings over the technological, cultural and theoretical focus often favored by his contemporaries.

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In a visually over-stimulating environment, architecture projects compete for attention through eye-catching visuals and intriguing graphical representations of their concepts. Visualization skills rank high in the architectural profession, but they also demand significant time and effort to develop. Arch-Vizz is a website dedicated to both students and professionals who aim to improve their visualization skills and broaden their perspective on architectural representation.

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Chinese-American architect Ieoh Ming Pei (April 26, 1917-May 16, 2019), is arguably the greatest living member of the modernist generation of architects. When he received his Pritzker Prize in 1983, the jury citation stated that he "has given this century some of its most beautiful interior spaces and exterior forms."

ArchDaily has created a list of best articles that address all the tips and recommendations you need to know about materials, construction, design, education, work (and life).

As the global health crisis continues, architects and designers are putting their expertise, technical capabilities and research skills in the service of the fight against the coronavirus. Metropolis Magazine has gathered together a list of several companies and their different initiatives for helping out in this novel situation. From 3d-printing personal protection equipment for medical staff, to designing modular intensive care units, and researching steps for converting buildings into hospitals, the creative community is bringing its own contribution to the efforts of tackling the pandemic.

Winner of the 1942 Acadamy Award for Best Special Effects, William Pereira (April 25, 1909 – November 13, 1985) also designed some of America's most iconic examples of futurist architecture, with his heavy stripped down functionalism becoming the symbol of many US institutions and cities. Working with his more prolific film-maker brother Hal Pereira, William Pereira's talent as an art director translated into a long and prestigious career creating striking and idiosyncratic buildings across the West Coast of America.

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The opening of the 20th Serpentine Pavilion, designed by South African Studio Counterspace, has been postponed to summer 2021. "Counterspace, directed by Sumayya Vally, Sarah de Villiers and Amina Kaskar, will collaborate with the Serpentine on a series of off-site and online research projects throughout 2020, which will culminate with the opening of the Pavilion in Summer 2021," the Serpentine Galleries announced.

The incorporation of new technologies into architectural designs has been expanding design possibilities over the last few years. Automation in construction processes can be used both in large scale city strategies, and smaller-scale demands like in the construction of residences. One of the more recent ways that technology has been integrated into the design of workplaces is through the incorporation of artificial intelligence, which uses data that can “teach” the machines how to work in several levels of autonomy.