LEGO® has just announced the newest building in their Architecture series, the iconic Sydney Opera House designed by Danish architect Jørn Utzon.

Sydney Opera House is not only a building with great beauty but it has also become known throughout the world as a symbol for not only a city, but a whole country.

The LEGO version of the Sydney Opera House seeks to capture the essence of this grand building in a small scale. Like the other models in the series it was created by Adam Reed-Tucker.

The set will be available in stores on March 1st at a suggested price of $39.99. More images after the break:

It is such a great pleasure for ArchDaily to promote David Stark Wilson’s photographic exploration Structures of Utility. We have feature Wilson’s firm WA Design on ArchDaily, but this book offer something uniquely different. Wilson traveled the back roads of California’s Central Valley and the Sierra Nevada foothills and captured the haunting beauty of utility buildings. These are buildings that would not otherwise be featured on ArchDaily, unless an architect did a remodel, but the photographs bring home the obvious point that design inspiration often lies far outside the realm of award winning and highly publicized buildings. The photographs are absolutely gripping. For a peak inside see more after the break.

A short time ago we received the book Alvar Aalto: The Mark of the Hand. Before you Aalto fans get jealous of our newly acquired treasure, we want you to know that we received several copies and will be doing a giveaway in the near future. So keep yours eyes out, here and on our facebook page. The book is a collection of conversations recorded between members of Aalto’s atelier. It is a unique view into the process of this great architect and his team. It shows the personal side of Aalto, both the bad and good. Sometimes we get lost in the artistry of his works, and it is nice to see the context in which the works were developed.

We recently came across an opportunity to work with a friend of ArchDaily to expand our Tokyo Architecture City Guide that we could not pass up. Carlo Fumarola shared with us his knowledge and photographs of Tokyo. Today, we bring you twelve buildings from his list. Check them out after the break.

Also be sure to check out the previous Tokyo City Guide with 12 additional buildings.

To check out other cities visit our world map or our Architecture City Guide page.

The following text comes from Powerhouse Company‘s book Ouvertures. We found this excerpt to be particularly engaging and they graciously gave us permission to share this short piece with you in its entirety. Enjoy!

Our exhibition Rien ne va plus researched and discussed the impact of the 2008 economic crisis on architecture. The simple question that led to this research was the question why, after bankers, architects were the first to be fired en masse as the crisis hit? How had we architects become so entangled with the money market?

We are pleased to bring attention to the book Dutch Mountains that focuses on Francine Houben from Mecanoo Architecten and her inspiring work that spans the globe. We have featured Mecanoo Architecten before and you can see them here. Houben came to architecture like many great young architects who are driven by social idealism. “Uplifting the people, contributing to quality of life—that was the great goal.” Among being named Business Woman of the Year in Netherlands in 2008, Houben still works for social idealism. Houben says about her Birmingham library, “I want to create cohesion among the ethnic diversity of the city and the traces of its industrial past.”

The Morpholio Project seeks to create a new platform for presentation, critique, and collaboration relevant to all designers, architects, artists, or members of any image driven culture, through a dedicated mobile app for iOS devices. Created by a group of five architects, and academics, the app explores to re-image the portfolio: “Although essential to design culture, the current methods of creating and sharing design portfolios and presentations still ultimately rely on fixed notions of time, media and outdated technologies of sharing.”

Landscape Urbanism is the new black in architecture and this magazine, part of a+t strategy series, has heads turning. There are a dozen projects and hundreds of ideas in this edition. A recurring them is the manipulation of time throughout a project’s life. “In public space, time becomes the first tool to work with. Meaning that the process is a timeline in which the objectives are implemented at different times intervals. Dealing with this long timeline requires a great deal of forward planning.” It is interesting to see how each project deals with aspect in similar but different ways.

This past Fall, ROMA Design Group proudly announced the completion of the Martin Luther King Jr. National Memorial in Washington D.C. In 2000, ROMA won the international design competition among nearly 1,000 entries. ROMA Design Group worked for several years to develop the design. The memorial has now been built and was officially dedicated by President Obama on October 16, 2011.

Architect: ROMA Design Group Location: Washington D.C., USA Illustrations: Christopher Grubbs Photographs: Courtesy of ROMA Design Group

As you well know already we like MARK Magazine, and this issue fails to disappoint. It has projects from many of the architects we have featured here on ArchDaily such as, StudioGreenBlue, Heri&Salli, Clavel Arquitectos, Kengo Kuma, Colboc Franzen, Studio Velocity, Takeshi Hosaka, Fuhrimann Hachler, Toyo Ito, Nieto Sobejano, L3P Architekten, and more. The notice board gives a shout out to the Keret House by Centrala, which was one of our most viewed projects this year.

If you haven’t finished all your holiday shopping, and you need something for someone who loves both architecture and London then we might have the right gift for you. We recently received Matteo Pericoli’s London Unfurled. This accordion-style book folds out to a length of 25-feet with elevations of London on both sides of the Thames. The book is accompanied with an essay on the north side of the Thames by Iain Sinclair, one on the south by Will Self, and an afterword by Matteo Pericoli.

From the Kengo Kuma Lab in the University of Tokyo, we received this video showing an architecture related exhibition on intermediate space and experimental architecture inspired by Japanese traditional patterns that we recently exhibited in Tokyo, curated by Kengo Kuma, Matteo Belfiore, and Salvator-John A. Liotta, which is part of two exhibitions and a series of symposia organized by The Italian Cultural Center of Tokyo in concomitance with the UIA International Congress of Architecture.

Some more images after the break.

Joao Pereira de Sousa, Architect & founder of BRAVDESIGN, recently shared with us an interview he did with Architect/Illustrator Philipp Schaerer.

As an ETH-trained Architect, Philipp Schaerer (1972) currently works as a freelance image designer. He is specialised in digital montage techniques and CGI (Computer Generated Imagery). After graduating from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) as an architect in 2000, Philipp Schaerer worked as an Architect, knowledge manager and image creator in the field of digital image editing for Herzog & de Meuron in Basel during six years (2000-2006). He created many well known architectural visualisations for this office and has substantially influenced the visual language of today’s established architectural visualizations. During his four years working as a research assistant at the chair of Computer Aided Architectural Design (CAAD) at the Faculty of Architecture (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich) under Prof. Dr. Ludger Hovestadt, he was able to continuously develop his knowledge in the area of digital image techniques. He gives lectures and conducts workshops at several universities in Switzerland.

This post is presented by S. Pellegrino, Fine Dining Lovers.

Restauranteurs are having a tougher time to please their customers, now turning into food aficionados. For the foodies, dining is more than just a gourmet, refined preparation. It’s all about the science of the food, where it comes from, how it is prepared, and dining becomes a full experience. In this aspect, the environment where the food is served has turned into a very important part of this experience.

In this post we are going to present to you restaurant projects that offer unique dining experiences, through innovative architecture.