The Horbury Hunt Award recognises excellence and innovation in built projects. Also recognising the collaboration of a project team to deliver architectural outcomes. The Award rewards innovation and craftsmanship in brickwork and recognises the contribution of all parties in that process. The Horbury Hunt Awards includes commercial as well as residential and landscape built projects.

The City of Edmonton and the Edmonton Eskimo Football Club selected MacLennan Jaunkalns Miller Architects, with local partners HIP Architects, as the prime consultant for the development of the $96 million Multi-Use Recreation Complex and Field House attached to the south end of Edmonton’s Commonwealth Stadium. MJMA was invited and selected from a shortlist of 12 Sport and Community Architects from across Canada for this highly visible project.

MJMA is working with the multiple client groups, various stakeholders, and the appointed construction manager Clark Builders to deliver a phased and fast tracked facility to be open for the 2010 Grey Cup, with the remaining recreation complex to open Spring 2012. More images and architects’ description after the break.

Richard Meier & Partners is pleased to announce the anticipated reopening of the Richard Meier Model Museum in Long Island City on Friday, May 13, 2011. Offering a rare glimpse into the process behind his distinguished 40-year career as an architect, Mr. Meier is once again unveiling his vast breadth of works to the public for its fifth consecutive season.

Further information after the break.

Five projects from 2009, including the winner of the 2009 Building of the Year, Public Facilities category, for our seventh round up. Check them all after the break.

National Tourist Route Trollstigen / Reiulf Ramstad Architects The project will enhance the experience of the Trollstigen plateau’s location and nature. Thoughtfulness regarding features and materials will underscore the site’s temper and character, and well-adapted, functional facilities will augment the visitor’s experience. The architecture is to be characterised by clear and precise transitions between planned zones and the natural landscape (read more…)

Hangzhou urban planning bureau has announced MVRDV winner of the international design competition for the China Comic and Animation Museum (CCAM) in Hangzhou, China. MVRDV won with a design referring to the speech balloon: a series of eight balloon shaped volumes create an internally complex museum experience of in total 30.000m2. Part of the project is also a series of parks on islands, a public plaza and a 13.000m2 expo centre. Construction start is envisioned for 2012, the total budget is 92 million Euro.

More images and architect’s description after the break.

As one of the country’s most sought after architectural accolades, the Houses Awards celebrate Australia’s best residential projects in seven categories, which will culminate in the announcement of the 2011 Australian House of the Year. The Australian House of the Year Award winner stands to win a $5,000 cash prize, while winners of individual categories will each receive $1,000. Winners will be announced on July 15th. More images and information after the break.

In search of the origins of architecture, Laugier presented a primitive hut using the three basic elements of architecture – the post, the lintel and the gable. Semper’s pursuit of the origin resulted in a primitive dwelling that was comprised of four basic qualities – earthwork, hearth, framework/roof, and enclosing membrane. While Laugier’s list of basic elements stemmed from the obsession with disciplinary origins, Semper‘s meditations were a vehicle to essentialize that which was previously seen as superfluous, namely the building enclosure. Semper wanted to put ornament to work. Butterfly House is an exercise in re-working three ubiquitous elements – window, door and roof – until they exceed their functional value and lead the way to new architectural effects. Butterfly House builds upon Laugier’s primitive hut as a model of fitness, updated to reflect a post-bubble economic climate rather than mythical origins, as well as Semper’s interest in the productive capacity of the apparently unnecessary. Our conceptual hut uses a limited quantity of elements to solicit rich qualities and characteristics and uncovers a zone of enchantment between the essential and the excessive.

Architect: davidclovers Location: Wayne County, Pennsylvania, USA Project Area: 1,000 sqf Expected Completion: Fall 2011

Back in August, we featured Henning Larsen Architects’ winning proposal in an invited competition to design the Batumi Aquarium in Georgia. Today, we are happy to announce that the Danish architects received the “Architecture of the Year” award by the 2011 International Design Awards in Los Angeles. Congratulations!

Storefront for Art and Architecture, the New Museum, and New York City’s Department of Transportation (NYCDOT), are pleased to announce that a team of emerging New York City-based designers from the studios Family and PlayLab have been selected as the winners of Storefront’s StreetFest international competition to re-envision temporary outdoor structures. The StreetFest competition asked for designs that envisioned street tents not only as shelters but also as active elements within the collective construction and understanding of the city.

More on the results of this competition after the break.

AIA New York celebrated their 30th year of the annual design awards program which recognizes projects located in New York City or design by architects practicing in New York City. Three projects received “Best in Show”: the Hypar Pavilion Lawn and Restaurant by Diller Scofidio + Renfro in collaboration with FXFOWLE, Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects’ David Rubenstein Atrium, and another collaboration by Diller Scofidio + Renfro with FXFOWLE and Beyer Blinder Belle’s Public Spaces.

A special exhibition featuring all of the winning projects will be on view through June 25th at the NYC Center for Architecture. The complete list of AIA New York 2011 Design Award Winners following the break.

Looking back at the Easter Pilgrimage 2011 at Ruta del Peregrino, the most important event of the year, we are pleased to announce the final step of the second construction phase (you can check the complete project over here).

This year, for the first time, the pilgrims were able to use the finished viewpoint by HHF Architects, offering a new way to experience the site.

The sanctuary by Tatiana Bilbao and the viewpoint by Christ&Gantenbein are under construction; their presence will mark the completion of the entire Ruta within a few months.

All images by Iwan Baan and you can check his website for the full coverage.

Melvin and Bren Simon Director and CEO Maxwell Anderson holds a conversation with 100 Acres Project Manager Dave Hunt and Architect Marlon Blackwell about the Indianapolis Museum of Art Visitors Pavilion. This Director’s Journal from Art Babble discusses the structure, site, geothermal, and the program of the pavilion.

Almost 47,000 photos of the most amazing architecture photography from our readers in our Flickr Pool! As always, remember you can submit your own photo here, and don’t forget to follow us through Twitter and our Facebook Fan Page to find many more features.

The photo above was taken by aspheric.org in Abu Dhabi, UAE. Check the other four after the break.

In 1933, the eminent, genre-bending Japanese novelist, Junichiro Tanizaki, composed a landmark essay on aesthetics entitled, In Praise of Shadows. It is more stream of consciousness than formal essay, part epic poem, part cultural theory. It revealed something different about the obvious; something deeper about the overlooked qualities of space and light. It led us by the hand back into the value of darkness.

Wendy Heldmann’s paintings also explore the obvious and seemingly unimportant, leading us into the abandoned, post-production, end-of-term architecture studio. This world is heaped with the artifacts of architectural exploration: scraps of paper, foamcore, laser-cut acrylic sheets, cardboard coffee containers, plastic bottles still partially filled with colorful liquids, dusty respirators, demolished models, battered, smudged monitors, chairs overturned onto tool trolleys, the spidery arms of darkened desk lamps. All of this becomes worth looking over again.

More after the break.

The Cielo Resort by De Bartolo + Rimanic Design Studio is designed to provide the ultimate exclusive & luxurious resort experience on the Baja California coastline in Mexico. It is built into a cliff edge to provide views of the Pacific Ocean and Isla Coronado.

For more on this project read on after the break.

The Open Call encourages the research on cutting-edge architecture, innovative technologies and solutions, as well as on the relationship between architectural space and the other artistic areas presented at the Festival, Electronic Sound and Music, Audiovisual Mapping, Interactive and Digital Art.

The IPOST Headquarters Building by Daniele Durante_studiobv36 begins with a strong relation with the urbanization of the area, and its adjacency to a highly density block including Telecom building in Rome, Italy. These relations have pushed the project idea towards a dialogue with the urban scale, making the building like a “perspective block”, with a strong plastic impact.

Read on for more after the break.

We received this tragic news from reader, Johan Nordstedt, concerning Stockholm’s School of Architecture at the Royal Institute of Technology. Early Wednesday morning, the roof of the lecture hall situated on Östermalmsgatan quickly filled with smoke. From 7.10 in the morning until 7.30 in the evening, fire fighters worked to contain the flames and prevent the building from collapse. More than 80 fire fighters were on call to put out the flames, yet due to the building’s old construction, the fire spread quickly.

Get your architecturally inclined taste buds ready for this! Coolhaus – a creative gourmet ice cream sandwich line served from a vintage mail truck – is currently roaming the streets of Manhattan. After beginning in LA and moving to Austin, the truck is now on the East Coast satisfying architecture lovers with their delicious all-natural creations such as the Mies Vanilla Rohe (Vanilla ice cream + Chocolate Chip Cookie) and the Frank Berry (Strawberry ice cream + Snickerdoodle cookie). The brain child of two women who share a love of architecture and of course, ice cream, this funky business is a triple entendre and a play on three factors: the Bauhaus as an influential modernist design movement of the 1920′s and 30′s, Rem Koolhaas who challenged the mantra “Form follows function”, and “Cool house” – an ice cream sandwich deconstructed into a cookie roof and floor slab with ice cream walls.

MIT’s Festival for Art Science and Technology will culminate this weekend May 7th and 8th with FAST Light, a series of innovative site specific installations around the MIT campus and along the Charles River. Installations by MIT Department of Architecture Head, Nader Tehrani (founder and principal of Office dA and of the newly formed NADAAA), Professor Sheila Kennedy (Principal of Kennedy & Violich Architecture), and Professor Meejin Yoon (Principal of Höweler + Yoon Architecture and MY Studio) are among the final river front projects that will light up the night along the river this Saturday and Sunday in front of Killian Court at MIT.

More information, photographs, and videos following the break

Running through May 17th at the Northwest Labs, the much anticipated Harvard University Graduate School of Design exhibition, The Divine Comedy, features major works including Ai Weiwei’s ‘Untitled’. The Divine Comedy exhibition is an “exploration of the emerging domain of experimental spatial practice where the concerns of art, design, and activism are powerfully converging today.”

BIG, Martha Schwartz Landscape, Buro Happold, Speirs & Major, Lutzenberger & Lutzenberger, and Global Cultural Asset Management are today announced as the winning team of the international design competition for a new 27.000 m2 cultural complex in Albania, consisting of a Mosque, an Islamic Centre, and a Museum of Religious Harmony.

More images and complete press release after the break.

The Rio 2016 Olympic and Para-Olympic games, together with other large events scheduled for upcoming years, such as the 2014 World Cup and the 2011 Military Games, generate enormous opportunities for the development of Rio de Janeiro. The Rio 2016 Olympic and Para-Olympic Games represent a celebration of sports and will be a source of transformation for the city, promoting an environmental, architectural, cultural and sustainable economy legacy, benefiting the urban environment and the quality of life of citizens.

Israel’s government, with the agreement of the Russian government has proposed erecting a monument to mark the Red Army’s victory over Nazi Germany. Taking on the design challenge, TheHeder Partnership draws your eyes to the horizon as you are overcome with openness and freedom and the spirit of the moment of victory. More images and architects’ description after the break.