As we all know, natural disasters continue to kill hundreds of thousands each year, and the vast growth of cities with unsafe and unreliable buildings and other infrastructure will only increase the cost of human life and negatively impact local economies. To address this, The Campaign for Safe Buildings, along with The Rubin Foundation and the Yale School of Architecture, is hosting a symposium November 4th and 5th to look closely at safe building initiatives around the world and many of the challenges that stand in the way of keeping natural disasters from turning into man-made catastrophes. More information on the event after the break.

The ArchDaily archives this week provided a number of buildings utilizing a variety of different materials. From a bamboo enveloped house to a mixed-use building with a facade system of aluminium carbonated drink cans these projects, also including a 350 meter free-spanning steel rib structured mall, are all worth a second look. Follow the break for these buildings and many more.

Similar to a mainstream school setting, Celebrate the Children, a school for children with autism, lines its hallways with colorful banners, photographs, and student artwork. Parents concerned with some of their children’s hypersensitivities often ask Monica Osgood, the school’s director, if there is too much stimulation. Monica responds that her students need to learn in ‘real’ world settings if they will ever have a chance to use their acquired skills outside of the classroom. This logic for replicating ‘neuro-typical’ environments, argues directly against the sensory sensitive approach, and, with reasons worth exploring. Individuals with autism often have very poor generalization skills. Therefore proponents of ‘neuro-typical’ simulated environments claim that sensory sensitive environments actually cause less, not more, universal access and integration into the larger population. Whether or not there is any truth to this claim is unknown. There are strong arguments for and against the ‘neuro-typical’ approach, but there are no definitive studies comparing the sensory sensitive approach to the ‘neuro-typical’ approach.

Norman Foster has launched proposals for the Thames Hub as “An Integrated Vision for Britain”. The self-funded collaboration between Foster + Partners, Halcrow and Volterra has produced a detailed, holistic vision for Britain’s future development of infrastructure.

The rapidly population growth and evolving global economy has put pressure on UK’s aged infrastructure. The study describes the Spine, which will combine rail, energy, communications and data throughout the entire length of the UK. The Spine is supported by the proposed Thames Hub, introducing a new river barrier and crossing, an international airport, and a shipping and rail complex.

The Thames Hub plans to maximize Britain trade links with the rest of world, stimulate job creation, and boost the economies of the Midlands and the North by providing direct connections to the cities and markets of Europe.

Continue reading for more detailed information and images.

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‘James Frazer Stirling: Notes from the Archive’ provides a rare glimpse into the works of James Stirling, renowned British architect, Pritzker Prize laureate (1981), and Yale School of Architecture professor, the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA), Montréal and the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven have co-organized this impressive exhibit on display at Stirling’s own Neue Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart until January 15th.

We recently had the opportunity to interview gmp architekten founding partner, Meinhard von Gerkan. Born in 1935 in Riga/Latvia, Gerkan completed his architectural studies in 1964 at the Carolo Wilhelmina Technical University in Braunschweig. In 1965 he co-founded with Volkwin Marg, von Gerkan, Marg and partners. They have completed together over 260 buildings, among them the Berlin-Tegel Airport (competition, 1st place 1965, built in 1970-75), the Berlin Central Station, Villa Guna, Christ Pavilion, and the Lingang New City, been recognized nationally and internationally for their designs and competition proposals.

The stadiums built by the architects von Gerkan, Marg and Partners (gmp) in Cape Town and Port Elizabeth for the 2010 World Cup in South Africa received the IOC/IAKS Award on 26 October 2011. In the context of the international Trade Fair for Amenity Areas, Sports and Pool Facilities (FSB), the International Olympic Committee and the International Association for Sports and Leisure Facilities (IAKS) selected the Cape Town stadium for first prize and the Nelson Mandela Bay stadium in Port Elizabeth for third prize in the “stadiums for competitions and events” category. The awards were received by Hubert Nienhoff, gmp partner in charge of the offices in Berlin, Frankfurt and Rio de Janeiro. More information on the projects after the break.

Earlier this week, we had the pleasure of touring the Metropolitan Museum of Art ‘New Galleries for the Art of the Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia, and Later South Asia’ with Achva Stein on its opening day. Stein, a principal of an ASLA award-winning landscape architecture and design firm Benzinberg Stein Associates and the founding Director of the Graduate program in Landscape Architecture at the Spitzer School of Architecture at the City College of New York, was asked to join the MET’s endeavors after her noted publication, Morocco: Courtyards and Gardens, showcased her passion for and understanding of the country’s varied garden types found in regions such as Marrakech and Fez. For the new wing, Stein has created a fantastic 14th century Maghrebi-Andalusian-style courtyard that goes beyond a mere representation, and truly infuses the spirit and essence of a Moroccan court into a small interior space of the MET.

More about our trip to the MET after the break.

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In the year 2008, the American designer George Nelson (1908-1986) would have celebrated his 100th birthday. To commemorate this occasion, the Vitra Design Museum exhibited the first comprehensive retrospective of his work. Nelson was one of the most influential figures in American design during the second half of the twentieth century. With an architectural degree from Yale, he was not only active in the fields of architecture and design, but was also a widely respected writer and publicist, lecturer, curator, and a passionate photographer. His office produced numerous furnishings and interior designs that became modern classics, including the Coconut Chair (1956), the Marshmallow Sofa (1956), the Ball Clock (1947) and the Bubble Lamps (1952 onwards). This same exhibition will be opened from October 29th, 2011 at the Bellevue Arts Museum in Seattle (until February 12th, 2012. More images and exhibition description after the break.

Award-winning San Francisco-based Stanley Saitowitz/Natoma Architects are known for a practice that combines the principles of early modern architecture with the materials, techniques and sensibilities of the 21st century. Raised in a traditional Jewish family in South Africa, Saitowitz has designed private residences, institutions, public and commercial spaces, and religious architecture across the globe. Among the many commissions he has completed during his 30-year career are a number of significant Jewish spaces, including the Holocaust Memorial in Boston and the critically acclaimed Temple Beth Shalom in San Francisco’s Richmond District.

Now, Saitowitz brings ancient tradition and contemporary design together in Stanley Saitowitz: Judaica, an extraordinary display of modern Jewish ritual objects on view at the Contemporary Jewish Museum November 3, 2011 through October 16, 2012. More information on the exhibition after the break.

Studio Mode/modeLab is pleased to announce the first installment of the modeFab workshop series: Strip Morphologies II. As a continuation of the Strip Morphologies workshop held in June 2010, Strip Morphologies II is a two-day intensive design, prototyping, and fabrication workshop to be held in New York City during the weekend of November 12-13, 2011.

Yesterday Richard Meier & Partners announced the design of a new Italian residence, Villa Gardone. The home is part of a complex in Gardone Riviera that is to be designed by a number of illustrious architecture firms from Europe and the U.S and completed by 2014.

Continue reading from more information on the Villa Gardone.

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David Baker

Currently under construction, it has been announced that the Herzog & de Meuron designed first phase of the new development of Tate Modern will open in the summer of 2012. The launch will be part of the London 2012 Festival which will be the culmination of the Cultural Olympiad.

Phase 1 of the development includes the opening of the former power station’s spectacular Oil Tanks – enormous circular spaces over thirty metres across and seven metres high. These massive industrial chambers have lain unused since the power station was decommissioned. They are now being transformed into what promise to be some of the most exciting new spaces for art in the world. A further series of neighbouring galleries will provide a range of new spaces for works from the Tate Collection, including two raw concrete galleries and a unique steel-lined gallery. The Oil Tanks will also act as innovative social and learning spaces, as well as being equipped for a diverse programme of live performances and events, including a crush bar and full back of house facilities.

Nicolas Dorval-Bory & Raphaël Bétillon have recently been awarded second prize for their design of a hotel in Jurmala, Latvia. The duo may sound familiar, as last year, we featured their artificial landscape of clouds which created an experiential journey along the banks of the Garonne in Toulouse. For their latest project, Dorval-Bory and Bétillon have studied the relationship between the city and music and sound, to experiment with a gradation from the most structured musical composition to nature’s acoustic chaos by way of an architectural point of view.

More about the hotel design after the break.

It didn’t start out this way for me.

When I was younger, I had an idea of what “Architecture” is – Architecture with a capital A. I held that idea in front of me throughout my career to serve as a guide, as I worked on my craft. To me, Great Architects were those that refined their concepts and details and forms with each new project. Occasionally, jumping forward with an innovation, but, usually building a career one client at a time, one building at a time. In school I spent hours in the library flipping through a 25 volume photographic archive of everything left in Le Corbusier’s flat files after he passed away. The volumes contained: every sketch, every construction detail, and every project. His whole life was there in light awkward drawings in pencil on translucent paper; all his failures, his incomplete thoughts, his grand gestures, his moments of pure clarity. I was amazed at the craft developed throughout a career; the gentle arc of a man’s life.

Vitra Design Museum recently presented the exhibition, titled Antibodies, which included the works of Fernando & Humberto Campana from 1989-2009. The Brazilian brothers have worked together as furniture designers in Sao Paulo since 1989. Humberto came to the partnership as a self-taught artist with a degree in law while Fernando had been trained as an architect. The first joint work of this unequal pair – brutalistic, surrealistic furniture sculptures – caused a sensation in the Sao Paulo art scene right from the start. Over the past twenty years, they have established themselves among the most well-known and successful designers of our times, implementing their distinctive and individual language of objects in a tremendously wide-ranging oeuvre of furniture, lighting and installations that has been recognized in numerous publications and exhibitions. More images and information after the break.

As a temporary installation at Park Slope, Brooklyn for the Jewish Sukkah holiday, the design by BanG studio for this new sukkah, titled, “In the Field” reflects both the symbolic nature of the design as a pastoral escape to a transitional and temporary space in line with the holiday’s spirit and the in situ design principal where all aspects of the specific development of the form were resolved in the actual assembly. More images and project description after the break.

d3 and Transportation Alternatives are pleased to announce the winners of the “Close The Gap” design competition, which invited architects, landscape architects, urban designers, engineers and students worldwide to envision the completion of the East River Greenway. Submissions from pla.net Architects and the design team of James and Madeline Stokoe were selected by the jurors for their outstanding work. The competition called for proposals that fundamentally transform how people move through Manhattan by filling in a 22-block gap along the East River. More information on the competition awards after the break.

Bates Masi + Architects of Sag Harbor, New York is pleased to announce the receipt of three AIA Long Island Awards and three AIA Peconic Daniel J. Rowen Memorial Architectural Design Awards. The AIA Long Island Awards were presented on October 19th at Oheka Castle, in Huntington, NY. The AIA Peconic Awards were presented on October 22 at an Award Symposium located at the Southampton Cultural Center in Southampton, NY. More information on the awards after the break.

Mark Gilbert discusses redesigning and rebuilding the city of Jacmel, Haiti with Alexander Britell from Caribbean Journal. The architect and his colleagues at trans_city used New Orleans typologies and their concept of rapid-response housing to provide an economical reconstruction proposal that will provide long-term stability to the people of Jacmel.

Shinkenchiku brings you an exclusive inside tour of the contemporary House NA, designed by Sou Fujimoto Architects. Thin, steel poles delicately support the transparent “pile of boxes” at varying heights. In an interview conducted by F.W. Monocle, Sou Fujimoto explains, “In one way the house is like a single space, but each room is also a tiny space of its own. The clients said they wanted to live like nomads within the house – they didn’t have specific plans for each room. The house looks radical but for the clients it seemed quite natural.”

On October 2nd Zaha Hadid Architects launched their much anticipated (to us architecture nerds anyways) iPhone and iPad App, made available through Apple and iTunes. This new App will allow users to browse through ZHA current portfolio of design and architecture. In a future update to the App there will be exclusive access and insight into some of the award winning buildings in the form of interactive guides (coming soon) to be used when visiting Zaha Hadid’s buildings.