The designs of the Zaha Hadid-created statuettes to be handed out at this year’s BRIT Awards have been unveiled. One of Hadid’s final commissions before her death this March, the design consists of a family of 5 interrelated trophies take the form of abstracted female figures representing diversity. One of those family members, meant to represent Britannia, the female personification of Great Britain, will be awarded to musicians for their victories in the BRIT Awards ceremony this February.

Building a highway in a city is often thought of as a solution to traffic congestion. However, the induced demand theory has shown that when drivers have more routes, they choose to continue using this medium instead of using public transport or a bicycle, and as a result, congestion doesn’t decrease.

As a result, some cities have chosen to remove spaces designated for cars and turn what was once a highway into urban parks and less congested streets. 

Here we have six examples, some have already been completed, while a few are still under construction. To the surprise of some, most of the projects are in the US, which reflects that American designers are looking into further studying European transport policies. 

Last week, RIBA announced the first two homes shortlisted for this year's House of the Year Award: Antsy Plum by Coppin Dockray and Outhouse by Loyn & Co Architects. Antsy Plum is a 1960s modernist house located in Antsy, Wiltshire, renovated to reduce carbon emissions by 80 percent; Outhouse, located in Forest of Dean, Gloucestershire, is a partly subterranean concrete structure on a sloped site.

The inaugural show at the new London Design Museum, Fear and Love, presents a collection of "reactions to a complex world." Featuring eleven specially-commissioned installations designed by the likes of OMA/AMO, Hussein Chalayan, Andrés Jaque and Metahaven, the spatial context which frames them is the work of Sam Jacob Studio.

+ 5

The first piece of the new Bauhaus Museum Dessau will be set into place this weekend as part of the “Bauhaus Building 90th Anniversary” event, one year after Barcelona architects González Hinz Zabala were selected as the winners of a fierce international competition for the commission.

González Hinz Zabala’s open concept, “Black Box” design was originally selected as a joint 1st place winner with a proposal from New York architects Young & Ayata in September of last year, and then awarded the commission for the final design in December following further fine tuning of the design.

Ateliers Jean Nouvel and Australian firm Architectus’ 70-story mixed-use tower, 383 La Trobe Street, will be the newest addition to the Melbourne skyline, after its approval by the Victoria Department of Planning.

Upon completion, the building will be Nouvel’s first project in Melbourne and second in Australia following One Central Park in Sydney, which was named the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH) Best Tall Building Worldwide in 2014.

OMA has released images of their masterplan for Feyenoord City, Rotterdam, after the plan was approved by city’s mayor and alderman. Developed for the Feyenoord football club, the project will consist of a redeveloped mixed-use district centered around a new 63,000 seat stadium for the team located along the Maas River.

+ 4

CBS has announced they will produce a television adaptation of the 2016 book, “A Burglar’s Guide to the City,” with a storyline that centers on modern-day Robin Hoods led by a talented architect. Written by futurist Geoff Manaugh of BLDG BLOG, the book serves a blueprint to the urban fabric’s various potentials for crime. Manaugh uses architecture to study structures and their weak points that could allow for a possible break-in (i.e. elevator shafts, walls of high-rise apartments, gaps in museum surveillance).

China-based firm EID Architecture has been selected as the winner of a design competition for a mixed-use development, entitled Longfor Phase IV, in Chongqing, China. Designed as an exploration of vertical urbanism on a high-density scope, the project is composed of a “single tower and associated podium integrated as an assembled massing of stacked box-like volumes.”

+ 8

Eric Parry Architects’ 1 Undershaft has been granted planning permission from the City of London Corporation’s Planning Committee, which will allow the 73-story tower to become the tallest building in the London Financial District and the second tallest building in the UK, behind only The Shard.

Videos

The Santiago Calatrava-designed St. Nicholas National Shrine at the World Trade Center has topped out, and capped with a temporary, six-foot-tall cross.

The Byzantine-styled structure was envisioned by Calatrava in 2013 as a non-denominational spiritual center to replace the original St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church, located at 155 Cedar Street, which was destroyed on 9/11.

On Thursday 17th of November, at the World Architecture Festival in Berlin, Patrik Schumacher gave a lecture offering his theory on how to address London’s Housing crisis. Given Schumacher’s well-known penchant for neoliberal economics, it was perhaps little surprise that his plan included a number of highly controversial ideas, such as the elimination of all forms of social housing and planning, and the privatization of all public space—with Schumacher highlighting Hyde Park as a particularly interesting opportunity.

Though ArchDaily was in attendance at the lecture, we chose not to cover Schumacher’s speech, at least in part because the audible boos from the crowd indicated that this was not a position that the wider architectural profession was interested in giving publicity to. However, the news was picked up by a number of other architectural publications including Dezeen; as a result, Schumacher’s speech became front page news on the London Evening Standard, prompting a response from London Mayor Sadiq Khan who said Schumacher’s ideas were “out of touch” and “just plain wrong.” These developments in turn have prompted an outcry from the architectural profession, causing Zaha Hadid Architects to write an open letter in response to the furore. Read on to see the full letter.

Update [05 January 2017]: the Architects' Journal have published a leaked internal email from Patrik Schumacher which claims that "this letter was sent out by ZHA’s head of press, Roger Howie, without the authorisation of any of the company’s directors."

Filmmakers Ila Bêka and Louise Lemoine, creators of the Living Architectures seminal collection of films on architecture, will screen The Infinite Happiness—shot entirely in Copenhagen's "8 House" designed by BIG—exclusively on ArchDaily from Friday, December 2 until Sunday, December 4.

Marking the forthcoming release of two DVD box-sets of their entire œuvre (which was acquired by New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in 2016) Bêka and Lemoine have, over the course of the Living Architectures project, developed films about and in collaboration with the likes of the Barbican in London, the Fondazione Prada, La Biennale di Venezia, Frank Gehry, Bjarke Ingels, the City of Bordeaux, the Arc en Rêve centre d’architecture, and more. Their goal in this has always been to "democratize the highbrow language of architectural criticism. [...] Free speech on the topic of architecture," Bêka has said, "is not the exclusive property of experts." Their first film, Koolhaas Houselife (2008), has come to embody this unique approach.

Watch The Infinite Happiness on ArchDaily here from December 2 1800GMT.

Mayor Bill de Blasio and the New York City Public Design Commission have announced the winners of their 2016 Awards for Excellence in Design. Established in 1983, the award has been bestowed annually to projects from the city’s five boroughs that “exemplify how innovative and thoughtful design can provide New Yorkers with the best possible public spaces and services and engender a sense of civic pride.” Both built and unbuilt projects are considered for the award. Previous winners have included Studio Gang’s Fire Rescue 2 (2015), the Louis Kahn-designed Four Freedoms Park (2014), and Steven Holl’s Hunters Point Library (2011).

+ 34

Kengo Kuma & Associates have been tapped to design a new high-rise residential complex on Kutuzovsky Prospekt in Moscow, adjacent to the new business district of Moscow City. The project will be the first urban plan in Moscow to take the form of superstructures rather than individual buildings, and will be Kuma’s first project in the Russian Capital.

Public spaces, squares, and parks in New York City are administered by the city’s Department of Parks & Recreation (NYC Parks).

In recent years, the agency has been responsible for creating new programs to help children, youth and adults be aware of the importance of caring for their urban landscape.

One of these programs is a TreesCount! which in 2015 gathered 2,300 volunteers to learn about the trees in their environment, what state they are in, what care they need, what their measurements are, and how they benefit the surrounding community, etc.

For months, they walked the streets of the five boroughs together with a group of monitors who previously trained them to recognize what trees they were studying and their characteristics. 

Mola, creator of the Mola Structural Kit, is back at it with a second interactive structural kit aimed at changing the way people study and teach structures around the world. Mola sold over 4000 of their first kit across more than 50 countries in 2014, and now you can back the newest expansion on Brazilian crowdfunding website Catarse.

+ 2

Realrich Architecture Workshop's Brava Casa 99 Percent Sumarah was inspired by an Indonesian form of meditation centered on the philosophy of life. Sumarah is defined as a "total surrender," allowing the partial ego to give way to the universal self.

+ 5