Croatian design team, AVP_arhitekti, has submitted to ArchDaily their latest project, Marine Research Center Bali. Their proposal seeks to align the center with the elemental characteristics of Bali itself. Follow after the jump for additional images and a thorough description from the architects.

Back in August we featured some photographs of Frank Gehry‘s Beekman Tower in New York. Now, there’s a video of this fantastic skyscraper, which starts with Gehry sketching the building’s shape. You can see the video right here. More information can be found at Curbed. See some screenshots of the video after the break.

The German magazine AIT invited 100 selected architecture and interior design offices across Europe to redesign the ‘ONO’ chair produced by the Dietiker company. The newly designed chairs will be exhibited in the context of a road show in the AIT-Architektur Salons Hamburg, Munich, North Rhine-Westphalia, and Stuttgart. The main auction of the chairs will talk place in spring 2010. The revenues generated through this auction will support the Langa Township in Cape Town, South Africa. Hofman Dujardin shared with us their entry into the competition, their OYES chair, as an urban charity for city. More images and architect’s description after the break.

Back in 1993, professors Dennis K. Ruth and the late Samuel Mockbee created Auburn University’s design-build program with the intention of bringing architecture to some of Alabama’s poorest areas. Rural Studio quickly gained international attention as the students responded to the needs of the less fortunate with innovative and thoughtful designs. The students participating in the studio not only benefit from the hands-on experiences of physically constructing their ideas, but also from fulfilling our profession’s social responsibility by providing a person’s most basic need, shelter.

With the passing of Mockbee, Andrew Freear became director of the studio and began to shift the program from the design and construction of small homes to larger community projects.  Currently, the studio is in their fourth year of an ongoing project which, when finished, will be the largest public park in Hale County.  The project, which began with building baseball fields, basketball courts, etc., quickly showed the potential for becoming a fully realized master plan.  And now, the Lions Club, the City of Greensboro, Hale County, and the Greensboro Baseball Association formed a joint committee to manage and care for the future of Lions Park.

More about Lions Park after the break.

Since December 14 we’ve featured some great interviews in ArchDaily! So we decided we to put them all together in our fifth interviews Round Up. Check them all after the break.

AD Interviews: Hani Rashid, Asymptote Architecture We visited Asymptote’s new offices in Brooklyn to interview Hani Rashid. Hani co-founded the firm back in 1989 with Lise Anne Couture, becoming pioneers of the digital revolution. One of their first projects, the NYSE Advanced Trading Floor (2001), explored the relation between virtual and physical worlds starting the debate on the new digital tools in architecture (read more…)

This week, we present the first of a special series called “Post-Occupancy” in which we feature the experience of the owner-dweller in different types of architectural spaces. Our goal is to present architecture by letting the users narrate for themselves what it means to them, how they experience it, how it has transformed them. We pose the questions. What do owners want? What do they need? How do they experience their homes after they’ve lived in them for a while?

Often, architectural discourse begins and ends with the designer. Here, the owners come first. They provide the answers in their own words, without the dialect of the discipline mediating what they say.

In this first installment, the goal was to examine the experience of domestic space from the point of view of a globe-trotting intellectual couple. James Massengale and Tracey Sands are both scholars. And as is the way of many academics, they have more than one residence: one in the United States and one abroad, located in the region of their studies. In this case, that is Scandinavia. And this is what they had to say.

More after the break.

The joint ventures of Frits van Dongen, Patrick Koschuch and Jason Lee of CIE and Alexander Sverdlov of SVESMI produced two winning projects and an honorable mention from the open international competition for A101 Block City in Moscow, Russia. The 13,000 hectare area south is Moscow is to be developed by the Masshtab company, led by Maxwan Architects of Rotterdam for the urban planning concept of the A101project.

The Block City is a masterplan for the area to be built up. It envisions the introduction of standard sizes for urban blocks that can be interchangeable with flexibilities in their typologies and phasing at various stages of the project’s completion. The first phase of the project to be realized is 157 hectares with 12 million sqm of housing of the Block City area. The following proposals are winners for the design of the urban block.

More on the winning projects after the break.

Architects: Aedes Studio / Plamen Bratkov Location: Sofia, Bulgaria Project Year: 2010-2011 Photographs: Aedes Studio

New Harmony Grotto, by METALAB Architecture + Fabrication, is a reinterpretation of avant garde architect Frederick Kielser’s Grotto for Meditation. With the growing genre of architecture generated by biomorphic design and biomimetic processes, a reevaluation of Kiesler’s work is ever more timely. During the mid-20th century he became increasingly occupied with the relationship of structure and natural form in architecture. The Cave of the New Being (also known as the Grotto for Meditation), proposed in the 1960s for New Harmony, Indiana, represented the designer’s pièce de résistance, embodying all of the intellectual currents of his era, from surrealism to biotechnics, yet it was never realized.

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Architects: METALAB Architecture + Fabrication Location: University of Houston Campus, Houston, Texas, USA Partner/Principals: Andrew Vrana and Joe Meppelink Original Client and Patron: Jane Blaffer Owen Studio Critics: Andrew VranaVisiting Assistant Professor and Joe Meppelink, Adjunct Assistant Professor, University of Houston College of Architecture Visiting Critic: Ben Nicholson, Associate Professor, School of Art Institute Chicago Fifth year Design Studio Digital Fabrication Seminar Student Team Leaders: Juan Deleon, Rosalia Covarrubias, Lee Kelly, Minh Nguyen, Justin Garret and Michael Gonzales CNC Fabrication: Ambox, Ltd. (laser cut stainless steel) Historic Documentation and Design: 2008 Fabrication and Installation: 2010 Structural FEA Analysis: Steve Boak, Buro Happold Engineers Photographs: Andrew Vrana

Swanke Hayden Connell Architects (SHCA) has unveiled images of the new acute care building that will be constructed on the King Edward VII Memorial Hospital site in Bermuda. The project has reached Financial Close. More images and complete press release after the break.

Just a reminder that the registration deadline for the eVolo 2011 Skyscraper Competition is approaching. Register by January 11, 2011, here, to participate in eVolo’s forum for the discussion, development, and promotion of innovative concepts for vertical density. eVolo is pleased to invite students, architects, engineers, and designers from around the globe to take part in the 2011 Skyscraper Competition.

More after the break.

Truly sustainable construction projects do not solely focus on environmental performance, but also incorporate aspects of innovation, economic feasibility, architectural quality and above all social impact. These so-called five target issues serve as the basis for the adjudication process of the Holcim Awards competition for sustainable construction projects and visions. Naturally, each project has its own focus, but to be successful in the competition they have to perform well in all five target issues.

Our first Flickr Round Up of the year! Remember we will be featuring our selection from our Flickr Pool once a week now. As always, remember you can submit your own photo here, and don’t forget to follow us through Twitter and our Facebook Fan Page to find many more features.

The photo above was taken by George Rex in London, England. Check the other four after the break.

Straight on the heels of being named the Best Architectural Monograph of 2010 by the DAM Museum, Taschen republishes YES IS MORE as the World’s 1st Architectural Monograph in an eBook edition tailored to the Apple iPad.

Moderated by Joseph Grima (Domus), all are invited to the free Critical Futures event starting at 6:30pm on January 13th, which will focus on a debate on the future of architecture criticism followed by complimentary drinks and further discussion after the talk. Participants include Charles Holland (author, Fantastic Journal), Peter Kelly (Blueprint), Kieran Long (architecture critic, Evening Standard), Geoff Manaugh (author, BLDGBLOG), and Beatrice Galilee (writer, curator, DomusWeb, The Gopher Hole). The event is located at The Gopher Hole, 350-354 Old Street, London, EC1V 9NQ. More event description after the break.

If you are a regular ArchDaily reader you know that we have been providing ongoing coverage of Eli Broad’s Broad Museum in Los Angeles. Nearly 120,000 sqf and $130 million dollars, invitations were given to six top architects to submit designs for the new museum. Rem Koolhaas, Herzog and de Meuron, Christian de Portzamparc, Ryue Nishizawa and Kazuyo Sejima, Diller Scofidio + Renfro and Foreign Office Architects competed and in August we informed you that Diller Scofidio + Renfro garnered the commission.

Today, the design for the Broad Museum has been released. Situated adjacent to Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall and Arata Isozaki’s Museum of Contemporary Art, the museum has become a key part of the Grand Avenue redevelopment project that has been losing steam.

Some time ago we visited New York City based Weiss/Manfredi Architecture/Landscape/Urbanism, to interview founding principals Marion Wesis and Michael Manfredi. The multidisciplinary firm has distinguished themselves with their holistic design approach, successfully integrating the disciplines of architecture, art, infrastructure, and landscape design.

Envisioned as a new urban model for sculpture parks, this project is located on Seattle’s last undeveloped waterfront property – an industrial brownfield site sliced by train tracks and an arterial road. The design connects three separate sites with an uninterrupted Z-shaped “green” platform, descending forty feet from the city to the water, capitalizing on views of the skyline and Elliott Bay, and rising over existing infrastructure to reconnect the urban core to the revitalized waterfront.

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Architects: Weiss/Manfredi Architecture/Landscape/Urbanism Location: Seattle, Washington, USA Project Team: Marion Weiss and Michael A. Manfredi (Design Partners), Christopher Ballentine (Project Manager), Todd Hoehn and Yehre Suh (Project Architects), Patrick Armacost, Michael Blasberg, Emily Clanahan, Lauren Crahan, Beatrice Eleazar, Kian Goh, Hamilton Hadden, Mike Harshman, Mustapha Jundi, Justin Kwok, John Peek, and Akari Takebayashi Structural and Civil Engineering Consultant: Magnusson Klemencic Associates Mechanical and Electrical Engineering Consultant: ABACUS Engineered Systems Lighting Design Consultant: Brandston Partnership Inc. General Contractor: Sellen Construction Geotechnical Engineering Consultant: Hart Crowser Environmental Consultant: Aspect Consulting Aquatic Engineering Consultant: Anchor Environmental Graphics Consultant: Pentagram Security and AV/IT Consultant: ARUP Catering & Food Service Consultant: Bon Appetit Kitchen Consultant: JLR Design Retail Consultant: Doyle + Associates Project Management: Barrientos LLC Architectural Site Representation: Owens Richards Architects Client: Seattle Art Museum Project Year: 2001-2007 Photographs: Benjamin Benschneider, Bruce Moore, Paul Warchol

Stadia experts stadiumconcept shared with us their New Bursa Stadium, designed for the Turkey Bid UEFA Euro 2016. More images and architect’s description after the break.

Yesterday, we received an overwhelming number of reader responses to David’s post regarding how much architects make per hour. To follow up, we found a list, via @casinclair on Twitter, of the top jobs for 2011. The list places an architect at spot 108, just under a vending machine repairer (107), a cashier (105) and an insurance agent (103). On the survey’s measure of stress, how’s this: a surgeon (spot 101) received a score of 30.580 for stress, while an architect received a score of 39.930! Yet, we were surprised to see that an architectural drafter places at spot 66 on the list (with a stress measure of 17.410). By the way, in case you were wondering, the list rated a software engineer as the best job for 2011 (stress measure=10.400), followed by a mathematician and an actuary.

Most spaces for the performing arts (drama, music theatre, dance, concerts and other forms) are housed in specialized buildings, built for the purpose.

This prototype system, Homeostatic Facade, is the latest in green building design. The line maze like facade consists of material that flexes and bends as an artificial muscle fighting solar heat gain by changing shape on its own. No computer programing or physical adjustments required. The system regulates a buildings climate by auto responding to environmental conditions and has an advantage over other systems because of its low power consumption and localized control.

Check out the video of the moving Homeostatic Facade following the break.

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The Architectural Association (AA) visiting school Mittelmeerland, a program of AA’s School of Architecture, is seeking architecture students and young professionals to participate in the 10-day architectural research workshop in Dubrovnik, Croatia from January 31st – February 10th. Mittelmeerland will investigate the future of the Mediterranean as a territory and sustainable waterfronts.

The deadline for application is January 10th 2011.

More information after the break.

During the AIA Convention we had the opportunity to talk with Peter Bohlin (FAIA), founding principal of Bohlin Cywinski Jackson and one of the most renowned architects in the US.