In its inaugural year, Archtober, is a month long festival focused on architecture exhibitions and activities in New York City. After holding eight years of successful architecture weeks typically held in October, that included openhousenewyork (OHNY), and exhibition at the Center for Architecture, AIA NY’s Heritage Ball, and last year Architecture & Design Film Festival’s first NYC event, New York City has created a month long celebration of exciting events for the general public, visitors and architecture aficionados to enjoy.

The MVRDV and COBE scheme for the transformation of a former concrete factory into a multifunctional creative hub was chosen as the winner of an international design competition. The masterplan proposes an informal transformation of the 45.000m2 site into a dense neighborhood, incl. 8.000m2 existing factory halls, organized around a plaza for events. Three new volumes will be added on top of the halls: The 11.000m2 ROCKmagneten consists of The Danish Rock Museum, The Roskilde Festival Folkschool incl. student housing, and the headquarters of the famous Roskilde Rock Festival. They share program in a public creative communal house. The museum with a total of 3.000m2 will be completed as the first phase in 2014. More images and architects’ description after the break.

In an elimination that began with 14 participants in the starting line-up, CuraVita won the competition for their design of a new 133,730 m2 hospital just outside Herning, Denmark known as the New Hospital in the West. With this honoring selection, they have taken a big step toward the construction of their professionally ambitious and attractive hospital to ensure a hospital of international standard. More images and architects’ description after the break.

From the beginning of September until mid-December, BOFFO Building Fashion will feature five amazing collaborative expressions of fashion and architecture just south of Canal Street in Tribeca. BOFFO, a non-profit arts and culture organization based in New York, has organized these temporary gallery exhibitions as a way to introduce art and design to the public realm while creating opportunities for artists and designers to explore a subject matter that educates and informs the public. The first installation of Nicola Formichetti and Gage/Clemenceau Architects manifests Formichetti’s futuristic eye for fashion into a faceted, almost robotic, entity for showing his collection.

More about the exhibit after the break.

Jeju is an island formed by volcanic activities and celebration of its distinctive geological features was one of the main objectives of the brief. The design started from answering the brief which explicitly requested that the scheme to symbolise the volcanic landscape of Jeju consists of caves and mounds. poly.m.ur viewed these two geological feature in terms of their morphological forma-tions – one as constructive space (volcanic mounds) and the other one as subtractive space (volcanic caves), and were repre-sented in the formation of the massing of our scheme.

For the second year in a row, Zaha Hadid was announced as the winner of the prestigious RIBA Stirling Prize. Often labeled as the UK’s most important architecture award, Hadid will be awarded £20,000 for her design of the Evelyn Grace Academy in London. Recognizing the ‘architects of the building that has made the greatest contribution to the evolution of architecture in the past year’, to be considered the project must be built in Britain or the architects head office must be in the UK.

This exclusive video of OMA’s Maggie’s Centre by BD online features OMA partner Ellen van Loon discussing the design for the cancer care center. Led by OMA Partners Rem Koolhaas and Ellen van Loon with Associate-in-charge Richard Hollington the Maggie Gartnaval center located in Glasgow opened today.

“In the more recent past, it is the architecture of minimalism that has provided the most explicit and significant contribution to the reciprocal relationship between fashion and architecture. In many ways the abstraction and literal emptiness of minimalism has been the ideal setting for the valorization of fashion–a technique not dissimilar in its impact to the exotic settings of nineteenth-century department stores, both ultimately leading to the construction of desire…We are now at a period when the luxury retail store has become a crucial forum for architecture. A previously off-limits relationship has now found mutually beneficial common ground. Through the realization of numerous projects, the Architecture Department at Louis Vuitton has been involved in establishing this new territory, and continues to pursue the exploration of architecture in a continually changing present.”–Mohsen Mostafavi

Autodesk recently released their Project Vasari 2.1, an easy-to-use, expressive design tool for creating building concepts. Vasari goes further, with integrated analysis for energy and carbon, providing design insight where the most important design decisions are made. And, when it’s time to move the design to production, simply bring your Project Vasari design data into the Autodesk Revit platform for BIM, ensuring clear execution of design intent.

Project Vasari is focused on conceptual building design using both geometric and parametric modeling. It supports performance-based design via integrated energy modeling and analysis features. This new technology preview is now available as a free download and trial on Autodesk Labs. More videos and information on the software after the break.

Today marks the opening of Maggie’s Gartnaval, a new center for the charity located on the ground of Gartnaval Royal Infirmary in Glasgow, Scotland. Designed by OMA, the center aims to provide emotional and psychological support to those affected by cancer in the greater Glasgow area.

Rem Koolhaas commented, “We were touched to be asked to design a Maggie’s Centre, and invigorated by the opportunity to work on a completely different scale, with different ambitions, and in a different environment. Maggie’s is so unique and urgent among the projects we are working on.”

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This past week, the Dutch Society for the Preservation of Natural Heritage received a new observation tower during the mini-symposium ‘Experience Nature with innovative concrete’ in Peize. A multidisciplinary case study team comprised of UNStudio, ABT, BAM Utiliteitsbouw and Haitsma Beton were experimenting with the characteristics of ultra high performance concrete – a super dense mixture of fine grain structure which contains steel fibers – to manifest their findings in a functional, operative design. The observation tower will rest in the forested reserves of De Onlanden in Groningen and will extend 5 meters above the tree line to offer amazing views of the landscape.

More about the tower after the break.

Over 500 people from all across the country and around the world participated in the National Ideas Competition for the Washington Monument Grounds. From a field of twenty-four semifinalists, a distinguished jury chose six top ideas. Now it is the public’s turn to choose the top two People’s Choice winners. More information on the finalists and their proposals after the break.

A wall is a binary condition: in/out, old/new, here/there. Blurry Wall, a proposal for a culture complex in Nanjing, China is a project that confuses these distinctions through conflicting bodily sensations. The intention of team members, Yaohua Wang, Scott Chung, Qing Cao, and Lennard Ong, is to tune the architecture into an instrument that channels the different urban energies flowing through it, blurring the boundaries between them. More images and project description after the break.

re:CONNECT open ideas competition invites the citizens of Vancouver, to join with local and international designers to ignite discussion and dream new possibilities for the future of the Viaducts and the City’s broader Eastern Core. The utility and necessity of the Georgia and Dunsmuir viaducts has been an issue of polarized debate since they were reconstructed in their present form in the late 1960s. As the first piece of a larger freeway system that was planned but never realized, they stand as a symbol of an era of city-building that thankfully never more-fully materialized.

The future of the viaducts should be contemplated in the context of the broader Eastern Core of our city, which includes the strategically important industrial lands of the False Creek Flats. How we connect the downtown and Eastern Core is crucial to how our city functions and its economic future. More information on the competition after the break.

The construction of the Busan Cinema Center by architecture firm COOP HIMMELB(L)AU is nearing completion. Slated to be the new home of the Busan International Film Festival, the complex will house cinemas, restaurants, a 1000 seat multifunctional theater, and numerous public spaces. More details after the break.

The Architectural League of New York recently announced its Fall 2011 Lecture Series. Jeanne Gang, recently awarded a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant, will give the annual Ulrich Franzen Lecture on Architecture and the Environment, delivered by an international figure whose work has significant implications for understanding and reconceiving the relationship between architecture and the environment. Past Franzen lectures have been delivered by Renzo Piano, Shigeru Ban, and Werner Sobek.

The League’s Current Work series annually presents prominent architects and designers, who help to shape current architectural discourse with their work and ideas. This year’s series includes Michael Van Valkenburgh, designer of the recently opened Brooklyn Bridge Park; Francine Houben of the Dutch firm Mecanoo; Jesse Reiser and Nanako Umemoto, the recent winners of the major international competition to design the Kaohsiung Port Terminal; Michael Maltzan of Los Angeles; and Bernard Khoury of Beirut. More information on the lecture series after the break.

A week-long festival celebrating forward thinking and promoting awareness of local arts and architecture, the first annual ArchiNATI, put on by the Young Architects and Interns Forum, is a huge opportunity to showcase the true beauty of the city of Cincinnati. Cincinnati has an excellent architectural history, vibrant contemporary practices, a collection of strong cultural and arts institutions, and world-class design education. While these entities are each individually excellent, we wanted to propose an event that brings them all together from October 14th to October 21st.

The aim of the sustainable residential complex, designed by Morfearch, is not only the production of new buildings able to satisfy living space requests, but the will to offer public services to the new settlement and open to the “outer” population. The project area, crossed north to south by divergent paths, generates trapezoidal spaces that become the generating principle of the different parts of the whole complex: every secondary parcel is indeed composed by different size tanks, 30 to 120cm high, open to different uses, materials, and patterns: green areas, water, paved spaces, vegetation and gardens, available for residents with a leisure, but also social, function. More images and architects’ description after the break.

Charles and Ray Eames inspired us to appreciate the world by honoring “the uncommon beauty of common things.”

Back in late 2009 Arch Group shared with us their proposal for an urban relaxation pod – SLEEPBOX. Their concept has been realized, with production of the modular 2.5×1.6m x 2.5-3m high unit high moving ahead.

The informal city is a problem that could not be solved by the twentieth-century urbanism. It is necessary to produce a set of tools that will allow us to perform with solvency and responsibility in this area. Some of the tools of traditional architecture and urbanism can be successfully applied; others are yet to be elaborated. With this in mind, Drucker Arquitetura designed the winning proposal for the Sáo Paulo competition to rebuild the city’s slum-areas.

The design of the new Jeju Cultural Heritage Centre started from an attempt to interpret the cultural value of the traditional artifacts that are to be exhibited here with contemporary view. poly.m.ur was intrigued by the fact that these artifacts are exemplary in showing the influence of regional material on the life of early settlers, and they wanted their proposal to be seen as an object which can symbolize the local characteristics shaped by the abundant availability of basalt as raw material and the indigenous techniques of tool making.

David Bainbridge, founder of the Passive Solar Institute, recently sent us his book Passive Solar Architecture. The book is a great introduction for anyone interested in passive solar architecture. The content is kept simple and straightforward. It allows any novice to become familiar with the main concepts and techniques used in the field. The authors, Bainbridge and Ken Haggard, have also provided a free-downloadable lab manual that students can use to learn concepts and techniques through a hands-on approach.