UPDATE: Foster + Partners Norton Museum of Art expansion will official break ground tomorrow, February 6, following the Norton's annual Gala celebrating its 75th anniversary. The project, which will transform the museum's West Wing, increase gallery space by 35 percent and add a new auditorium, great hall and education space to the building, is expected to complete in 2018. A new sculpture garden and additional green space will also be integrated into the new scheme. 

Foster + Partners has unveiled plans that would double the gallery space at the historic Norton Museum of Art in Florida's West Palm Beach. By constructing three “bold” new pavilions beneath a single “shimmering” roof, Foster promises to restore the museum’s original elegance, strengthening its role within the surrounding community and provide the framework for future growth.

AMO has released the 16th edition of Prada Real Fantasies - a conceptual reinterpretation of the 2016 Spring/Summer Prada collection.

"AMO graphically reinterprets the Indefinite Hangar as a synthetic sunset fixed within a 3 dimensional blank space. The abstract hangar is populated with geometric objects and furniture. Characters move through a neutral scene between the undefined and distilled fragments of daily life. The horizon and scale constantly shifts, manipulating the frame and disrupting a linear sequence: an artificial landscape where fiction and collection collide," says the OMA research studio.

Zaha Hadid, Coop Himmelb(l)au, and OMA are some of 15 major practices that have been shortlisted in the second (and final) stage of a competition to design the new Museum of Ethnography in Budapest. The building will be one of four new museums being built in Hungary's 200-year-old Városliget (City Park) as part of the Liget Budapest project, which includes SANAA's Ludwig Museum and Sou Fujimoto’s House of Hungarian Music.

"For the first time since the foundation of the Museum of Ethnography that is, for over 140 years now, it has become possible to permanently place the museum in a building worthy for the collection, to be built specifically for this function. In addition, the construction of the new building of the Museum of Ethnography will solve another more than half a century problem: by relocating the institution, the Kúria (former Ministry of Justice) building, recently housing the museum, can regain its original function," says Liget Budapest.

The 15 finalists include: 

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Schmidt Hammer Lassen Architects and Gottlieb Paludan Architects have won an international competition to design the world's largest waste-to-energy plant on the outskirts of Shenzhen, China. The new "Shenzhen East Waste-to-Energy Plan will be capable of incinerating 5000 tonnes of waste per day - "one third of the waste generated by Shenzhen's 20 million inhabitants every year," according to the team. In addition to incinerating waste and generating power, the plant will serve as a place to teach residents about its purpose.

Eight practices from the US, Canada and Mexico have been selected to receive The Architectural League of New York’s 34th annual Emerging Voices award - one of the most coveted awards in North American architecture. Each recipient was selected for being a “distinct design voice” with the “potential to influence" disciplines of architecture, landscape architecture, and urbanism.

“The 2016 ‘Voices,’ each responding to distinct geographic sites and typologies, all compellingly address the relationship between architecture and place by resourcefully synthesizing programmatic invention with computational production and the craft of building,” said Program Director Anne Rieselbach. 

Amsterdam-based SeARCH has won a competition in collaboration with Atelier Phileas and LA architectures to design a housing block in the new Paris Rive Gauche district. With each practice focused on one building, the project resulted in the combining of three interconnected high-rises united by a "green ribbon," "cut skyline" and a common expression of function projected onto the facades. Together, they offer 55 family apartments, 180 student flats, 75 middle income apartments, offices, a commercial area and underground public parking.

Stuttgart experimental architect Achim Menges has been commissioned to kickstart the V&A's first ever Engineering Season with a site specific, nature-inspired installation fabricated by robots. Complemented by Ove Arup's first major retrospective, Engineering the World: Ove Arup and the Philosophy of Total Design, the Elytra Filament Pavilion will be Menges' first public commission in the UK. He will work with Moritz Dörstelmann, structural engineer Jan Knippers and climate engineer Thomas Auer to complete the project.

"Elytra Filament Pavilion will explore the impact of emerging robotic technologies on architectural design, engineering and making," says the V&A. "Inspired by a lightweight construction principle found in nature, the fibrous structures of the forewing shells of flying beetles known as elytra, the Pavilion will be an undulating canopy of tightly-woven carbon fibre cells created using a novel robotic production process."

Art director and motion designer Sergej Hein has created an animated parody on the monotony of Soviet high-rise housing in Berlin.

Grimshaw and BVN have won an international competition to redesign schools in Parramatta, a suburb in Sydney, Australia. Planned to be the state's first high-rise educational facility, the proposal combines the Arthur Phillip High School (APHS) and Parramatta Public School (PPS) into a 14-story building designed after the ‘Schools-within-Schools’ (SWIS) model - "a template which delivers learning in stages rather than via age groups."

Mexico City-based Escobedo Soliz Studio has been named the winner of MoMA and MoMA PS1's annual Young Architects Program (YAP) in New York - now in its 17th edition. Selected over four other finalists, the winning project, Weaving the Courtyard is “neither an object nor a sculpture standing in the courtyard, but a series of simple, powerful actions that generate new and different atmospheres," says the architect. It will serve as a "temporary urban landscape" for the 2016 Warm Up summer music series in MoMA PS1’s outdoor courtyard.

"Weaving the Courtyard is a site-specific architectural intervention using the courtyard’s concrete walls to generate both sky and landscape, with embankments in which platforms of soil and water suggest the appearance of a unique topography," says MoMA.

A group of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) engineering students has won the first round of a competition to design transport "pods" for Elon Musk's ultra-fast Hyperloop. Selected from more than 100 other university teams, the top teams will now have the opportunity to build their pods for a trial run on the Hyperloop Test Track (now under construction) by April 2016. If successful, the pods will be able to transport up to 30 people at speeds of 700 miles-per-hour through the Hyperloop's 12-foot diameter tube.

Protestors have prompted developer Sellar Property Group to pull plans on the Renzo Piano-designed skyscraper sited in London's Paddington area. The 72-story "skinny Shard" has been harshly criticized by locals and Historic England for "blighting views" of the capital and being out-of-place, hence its popular nickname - the "Paddington Pole."

“London’s skyline is unique, iconic and loved. It has to be managed sensitively and with proper planning,” Historic England chief executive Duncan Wilson told The Guardian. “Tall buildings can be exciting and useful, but if they are poorly designed, or in the wrong place, they can really harm our cities. We trust that the revised plans for Paddington Place will take the area’s unique character into account.”

Construction is underway on David Chipperfield Architect's Mughal Museum in Agra, India, near the Taj Mahal's eastern gate. Part of a larger Archohm-led masterplan, which includes the Taj Orientation Center and the Agra Heritage Center, the project will provide 5200-square-meters of permanent and temporary exhibition space entirely "dedicated to the history and culture of the Mughals, a dynasty that ruled over Northern India for over three centuries," says the practice.

99 Hudson Street, soon to be New Jersey's tallest tower, has officially broken ground. Designed by Perkins Eastman, the 900-foot-tall mixed-use condominium tower is said to be one of the tallest residential buildings in the US and will "dramatically remake the Jersey City skyline," according to Mayor Steven Fulop.

“99 Hudson will mark a new milestone for Jersey City’s resurgence as a truly great city in which to live and work. For decades now, people on the west side of the Hudson have marveled at Manhattan’s skyline, but today Jersey City is developing its own dynamic city, along with a world-class skyline. To play a part in this transformation is quite an honor,” said Perkins Eastman principal Ming Wu.

Wolfgang Buttress’ The Hive, the gold medal-winning UK Pavilion from Milan Expo 2015, is being relocated to London's famous botanic garden, Kew. The mesmerizing (and photogenic) "beehive" was designed to give visitors a glimpse into the life of a working bee; its 169,300 individual aluminium components, reaching 17-meters and fitted with hundreds of LED lights, created a multi-sensory experience that shed light on the importance of the pollinator.

"We are truly delighted to announce The Hive's move to Kew, both for its magnificent aesthetic appeal and for the resonance it has with our work – I can think of no better home for this remarkable marriage of architecture and science," Richard Deverell, director of the Kew, told Horticulture Week.