Should architects and designers take control of the development, financing and investment process to both achieve breakthrough designs and to take control of their futures?

This panel of distinguished experts says yes, and they discuss the steps required to develop properties and interiors with their own designs. The main benefits of this challenging dual approach is that the designer is able to "invest" in better designed results. Program includes case studies on new building projects.

The Seoul Metropolitan Government has announced its Sejong-daero Historic Cultural Space Design Competition, which seeks creative designs for the site of the former National Tax Service Building, as well as a greater conceptual blueprint for the central Seoul area.

With a goal to double the amount of its renewable energy power sources by 2030, Japan has begun to transform abandoned golf courses into massive solar energy plants. As Quartz reports, Kyocera, a company known for its floating solar plants, has started construction on a 23-megawatt solar plant on an old golf course in the Kyoto prefecture (scheduled to open in 2017). The company also plans to break ground on a similar, 92-megawatt plant in the Kagoshima prefecture next year. Pacifico Energy is also jumping on the trend; with the help of GE Energy Financial Services, the company is overseeing two solar plant golf course projects in the Okayama prefecture. The idea is spreading too; plans to transform gold courses into solar fields are underway in New York, Minnesota and other US states as well.

British writer and curator Justin McGuirk has joined London's Design Museum as their new chief curator. The former editor of Icon, design critic of The Guardian and director of Strelka Press was also named head of Design Curating & Writing at Design Academy Eindhoven earlier this year. As you may remember, McGuirk was awarded the Golden Lion at the 2012 Venice Biennale for an exhibition he curated with Urban Think Tank. He is also the author of Radical Cities: Across Latin America in Search of a New Architecture. 

McGuirk will be responsible for coordinating the museum's new program after its relocation to Kensington in 2016. 

The latest episode of KCRW's podcast, “Design and Architecture” (DnA), explores whether the Baugruppen, a co-housing model in Berlin, could work in Los Angeles. Produced by Frances Anderton and Caroline Chamberlain, the episode looks at how LA residents and Berliners have approached the same problem of affordable living space. The Baugruppen (“building groups”) are communities of homes where you can choose who to live with and share the development costs. After visiting R50, a Baugruppe complex by firms Heide & Von Beckerath and IFAU, co-principals Christoph Schmidt and Verena von Beckerath explained the process of collaborative design that came with building the 19 households of R50. Listen to the whole podcast here.

Sleep, an international hotel design event, is working with Snoozebox to host a competition to design a new portable hotel room. Snoozebox has produced unique, and award-winning portable hotels for major events and festivals worldwide. This competition is an opportunity for designers to lend their ideas, and make a mark in the international hotel design industry. The winning team will work with Snoozebox and contractors to fully realize their idea in time for an exhibition at Sleep in November.

In many western countries, the demographic pyramid is beginning to look inverted, as elderly populations grow and increasingly few children are born at the other end of the scale. How, asks Metropolis Magazine, does society provide for the growing ranks of the retired and newly elderly? Elderly care scandals and and discomfort with the idea of retirement communities has led to a search for ways to care for senior citizens in their own homes. Urban planning expert Deane Simpson, however, warns against accepting the idea of what he calls "aging in place" entirely uncritically: his exploration of the way current retirement communities function goes into the social motivations behind care homes and the United States' elderly communities, and discusses the future of retirement for the emerging baby-boomer generation of retirees. Read the full story over at Metropolis Magazine here.

Gallaudet University, the world’s only university for deaf and hard of hearing students, has launched an international competition to re-design its historic Washington DC campus. Participants will be challenged to "create a new campus gateway and redefine the University’s urban edge as a vibrant, mixed-use, creative and cultural district." Design proposals are not required during the competition's first stage; teams will be shortlisted based on their "understanding of the institution and project, team composition and past experience."

An exclusive architect-led, behind the scenes talk and tour of this RIBA London Award winning family home by Edgley Design. Discover the stories behind the building, what inspired the architect and what it means to have won this prize.

Videos

The RIBA Regent Street Windows Project pairs exceptional architects with flagship retailers to create architectural installations in the windows of fashion retailers, skincare boutiques, perfumeries, restaurants and cafes along and around Regent Street, London. Now in its sixth year, the project has been developed in partnership with the Regent Street Association, and creates a vast public architecture exhibition seen by more than one million people each week. Open for three weeks in September, it ties into the city-wide London Design Festival and the internationally renowned London Fashion Week.

Focused on family housing, the highlight of contemporary Czech architecture, the exhibition presents 33 exceptional designs by 33 architectural studios offering an insight into contemporary Czech architecture and urbanism. Showing a wide range of approaches to individual housing needs including large and small houses; new projects and renovations; houses in the countryside, in dense urban centres and in suburbia; made of concrete, wood, bricks or steel; in modern, abstract, or traditional styles distinctive, subtle or introverted, the exhibition demonstrates the continuous increase in the quality of Czech architecture since the fall of Communism in 1989, capturing the developments in architecture within the context of significant political and social change.

This October, UrbanGlass in Brooklyn will host a one-day workshop with architect James Carpenter. James' work with UrbanGlass began more than two decades ago, when he worked in our studios to create unique projects in glass. The class "Light: Beyond Transparency" requires no previous knowledge about glass processes and techniques, but will include time in the studio learning about how the material is manipulated.

"Light Beyond Transparency" will take place on October 18th, 10am-5pm. This one-day workshop will focus on observation and explore a conceptual approach to manifesting these observations in the built environment. 

Since 1982, The Architectural League of New York's Emerging Voices awards have helped to launch hundreds of careers and consistently picked out the best and brightest in architecture. To highlight the release of a new anthology of the work of Emerging Voices' luminaries, Metropolis Magazine spoke with the League’s director, Rosalie Genevro, and the program director, Anne Rieselbach, about the mission of the Emerging Voices awards. The interview covers the changing criteria and contexts of the awards, adapting to a new form of voice in the information age and some of the award's most successful alumni. Read the full interview, including inside information on how the selection process works, over at Metropolis Magazine here.

In an article for DesignCurial, Shumi Bose visits OMA's new galleries in Milan and Moscow: the Fondazione Prada and the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art. Noting that "the mythologies [between OMA and Miuccia Prada] have become inextricably intertwined" over recent years, "the purpose of [the Fondazione Prada] was to produce a range of spaces for the creation, display of and engagement with art; what results is the built realisation of a particular ethos, affording the protean OMA a return to form. And it was always going to be stylish." Bose's flowing description of the building and its spaces, which she ultimately praises as "a place which will bear return," leads into an equally compelling description of Garage for which she recognises its clear "contribution [...] in supporting, indeed composing, the very narrative of Russian contemporary art."

On June 9, 2015, philanthropists finally acquired a tapestry by Le Corbusier originally intended to be hung in the Sydney Opera House. After Jørn Utzon won the commission for the building in 1958, he wrote to Le Corbusier, whom he admired, requesting a piece of “decoration, carpet and painting” for the Sydney Opera House, including drawings of his design. The two met in Paris in 1959 and the work was completed and delivered in 1960, where it was hung in Utzon’s own house. After Utzon left Australia in 1966, the tapestry was never installed in the Opera House, remaining in the Utzon house until now. Read the whole story on Architecture AU here.

Xlab is the event where technology, place and design intersect, and brings together the designers, thinkers and makers who are transforming the landscape of experience design and influencing our future through the use of technology, from connected data and wearables, to enhancing interaction with the environments we live, work, travel and play in. Xlab has grown 300% in the last two years, and now is a part of the New York Digital Signage Week, and has expanded to a 2 day conference with tours!

SEGD’s Be | Branded Environments Workshop returns on Thursday, August 20 at Woodbury University in Burbank, CA (Los Angeles). Be is SEGD’s premier event developed for designers and architects focusing on the nexus and state of brand, identity, and place showcasing the power of branded environments and experiences and how they are activating and transforming the places we live, play, work, and rest in! Optional tour of downtown LA on 8/21.

Videos

Top media, architecture and design school in Russia opens application for education programme 2015/16.

With applications closing on the 4th of September, the Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design (Moscow) opens the application to the education year 2015/16. The Strelka Institute is a non-governmental institute with a particular focus on the City, using multidisciplinary techniques from varied fields such as sociology, economics, architecture, political and cultural studies. Since 2012, Strelka has been among Domus Magazine’s top 100 European schools of Design and Architecture.