Dear ArchDaily Readers,

One of the most important pillars of our mission is to constantly improve the way that we deliver inspiration and knowledge to architects around the world. Over time, the tens of thousands of projects we have featured in-depth have grown to form a large "ArchDaily Iceberg" in which most of this invaluable architecture content accumulates below the surface. In our quest to make this information more accessible, and especially given our understanding of how we (architects) collect and organize case studies and references, we launched a modest tool in late 2010: My ArchDaily. This tool allowed you to bookmark and save your favorite projects and sort them in folders, two concepts that relate to how you use your browser and desktop.

My ArchDaily was also the authentication tool for voting in Building of the Year Award, and over the years this feature started to gain traction among our users--reaching more than 282,000 registered users as of today! But, My ArchDaily had taken a back seat to other development projects and wasn't updated until we launched our new platform a few days ago.

So now, we're happy to present the new-and-improved My ArchDaily! It was launched alongside other improvements that you may have noticed over the past few weeks. If you aren't using it already, we welcome you to start building your very own personalized architecture library and organize projects and articles using labels.

Whether you are researching specific precedents or just want to save a particularly inspiring project, My ArchDaily's seamless integration allows you to save information with one-simple click. 

Videos

Designer and architect Neri Oxman, working with the Mediated Matter group, has unveiled “Mushtari”: a 3D-printed wearable that can convert sunlight into usable products. Joining the “Wanderer” collection, Mushtari was designed as a relationship between the most primitive and most sophisticated life forms. The wearable contains 58 meters of internal fluid channels and functions as a microbial factory, using synthetic biology to convert sunlight into items for the wearer.

Videos

Chicago based architecture studio Design With Company, in collaboration with Arup, have constructed their winning proposal for the Ragdale Ring design competition, which asked entrants to redesign Howard Van Doren Shaw’s 1912 performance venue for a Chicago artists’ community. Their design lightheartedly references features of Shaw’s architecture, while creating a venue for acoustically unamplified performances.

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Images have been released of Melbourne's second annual MPavilion. Designed by British architect Amanda Levete of AL_A, the temporary structure will use the latest technology in nautical engineering to stimulate a forest-like canopy within the city’s Queen Victoria Gardens. A series of three- and five-meter wide petals made from ultra-thin translucent composite and carbon fiber will "sway" on top slender columns, mimicking the tree line to the site's east.

Tokyu Corporation has unveiled a new skyscraper planned will rise adjacent to Tokyo's Shibuya Station. A collaborative design by Japanese firms Kengo Kuma, SANAA and Nikken, the 230-meter mixed use tower will feature an unprecedented, 3,000-square-meter public sky deck that promises "views of Mt. Fuji" (on a clear day).

The Shibuya tower is planned to open in 2019, a year before the Tokyo Olympics.

Designed by Odile Decq and Benoit Cornette, the BPO Building in Montgermont, France is now being threatened by a demolition permit. Inaugurated in 1990 and having won no less than 12 awards in its lifetime - including a Golden Lion at the 1996 Venice Biennale - the building has been widely lauded for its technical innovations, including a double-glazed suspended façade and panoramic elevators. It has appeared as the focus of theses internationally, and is featured at the Cité de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine and Palais de Chaillot, illustrating its pivotal role in architectural growth. It was one of the first buildings in the 90s to demonstrate an acute response to the quality of workplaces, and stands as an example of conscious, thoughtful design.

In the latest edition of The Urbanist, Monocle 24's weekly "guide to making better cities," the team tackle the illegal city and look at how our cities are dealing with those who are bending the rules. From Portugal to Albania to Brazil, Andrew Tuck and his correspondents explore how crime and illegality have become ubiquitous in our urban environment, from informal settlements and illegal housing, street art and rough sleeping, to the more sinister impact of inner-city organised crime.

The St. Petersburg City Council has approved Rogers Partners, Ken Smith and ASD's "Pier Park" redesign, allocating funds towards demolition of the current pier and pre-construction work. The design, selected through a city-sponsored competition, will replace "an aging icon" - a 1970s inverted pyramid structure that occupies the pier's head - and focus on integrating flexible, community-oriented program throughout the site and surrounding area.

“Each of the pier’s past incarnations had its own set of programs and uses, some more ambitious than others,” commented John Curran, studio leader at ASD and lead project manager for the new pier. “The ones that succeeded appealed to both visitors and residents, and were active day and night, throughout the year. This flexibility was essential to our approach to the new design.”

As a result of a public competition, the Chilean Regional Government has commissioned Ennead Architects to collaborate with Chilean architects Cristian Sanhueza and Cristian Ostertag on the design of the Cape Horn Sub-Antarctic Center. Planned for a site within the UNESCO Cape Horn Biosphere Reserve in Puerto Williams, a town on Navarino Island in the Chilean Sub-Antarctic Province, the center will provide a home for the Biocultural Research and Conservation Program led by Dr. Ricardo Rozzi, Professor at the University of North Texas, the Universidad de Magallanes and the Institute of Ecology and Biodiversity.

The UK is in the midst of a housing crisis, the intricacies of which were detailed by Rowan Moore earlier this year. For decades the typical British housing stock has been of relatively poor quality, proliferated by developer-led consortiums and characterised by ruthless cost-efficiency for maximum profit. From this formula comes nothing but a monotony of off-the-shelf constructions which have, over time, become a national benchmark. These houses – often built of brick, boxy in form, and using as little space in the facade for openings – are commonly dark, spatially inadequate, and far below the standards that should be being aimed for. It’s like living in a well-appointed cave.

Sixty years ago Arne Jacobsen designed the Series 7 chair - the "Sevener." Unlike many other Jacobsen designs, the chair was not designed for a specific use, leaving it to interpretation. In light of the chair's 60th anniversary, Fritz Hansen commissioned "seven cool architects" - BIG, Zaha Hadid, Jean Nouvel, Snøhetta and three others - to recreate the chair. The results, after the break.

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British football club Tottenham Hotspur has released plans for a new stadium designed by Populous. Planned to be built in the London borough of Haringey, the "visually dramatic" 61,000-seat proposal is designed to host both English and American football. If approved, it will feature a state-of-the-art retractable pitch and a 17,000 capacity single tier end stand that will be the UK's largest.

Beyond the field, the new stadium will feature a permanent visitors center and arrivals hub with an interactive museum to celebrate club history and local heritage, a cinema, the club megastore, ticket office and café. At the top of the stadium will be a "Sky Walk" showcasing vistas of London. 

New London Architecture (NLA) has named the winners of this years New London Awards, celebrating the best projects and architects shaping London today. Taking home top honors, Zaha Hadid was crowned "New Londoner of the Year" for her influential work, both in the UK and abroad. The jury commended Hadid for "her role as a champion of design to both the government and the general public alike," citing her success with the London Aquatic Center and the Serpentine Sackler Gallery.

Out of the 51 projects awarded, Pringle Richards Sharratt's Black Cultural Archives (BCA) in Brixton was named London's best new building. The Grade II listed structure, which had been on the English Heritage's Heritage at Risk Register since 1992, was restored as a new home for BCA’s extensive archives, serving as an exemplar for preservation and reuse.

Reactive materials hold huge potential for architects and engineers in the near future, offering forms of interactive and customizable construction that could, if used properly, seriously alter the way in which people interact with their built environment. The massive expansion in the capabilities of touch screens and other glass based technologies have opened up user interfaces to levels where interactive cityscapes are becoming reachable - but creating materials which are themselves reactive is a much less-explored solution. Water Reaction, a project by Royal College of Art student Chao Chen, is an attempt at exactly that: creating a material that reacts to external conditions with no human input required.

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On Saturday, July 4, designer Prada and AMO—a research studio subset of OMA architecture—hosted The Miu Miu Club, a pop-up event, featuring dinner, a fashion show, and several musical performances in Paris, France.

Inside of the 1937 art deco Palais d-Iena, Paris’ current CESE government offices, the one-night event was held in the Hypostyle, using a scaffolding ring to create a “room within a room.” Strip lighting, metal grids, PVC sheets, and arrangements of luxurious furniture were also used to enhance the space.

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Alice Theodorou, a graduating masters student from London's Royal College of Art, has developed a project which attempts to combat the challenges that London is set to face over the next 10,000 years. Her scheme factors in projections for population growth and then decline, rising sea levels, stricter energy targets, material depletion, future space exploration and, most interestingly, language obsolescence.

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The Musée du Louvre and the Nord-Pas de Calais region has selected Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners (RSHP) to build a new conservation and storage facility for the Louvre in Liévin, northern France (Nord-Pas-de-Calais). Built primarily for study and research, the 20,000-square-meter "landscape building" will feature a series of vaulted light-filled conservation studios and storage spaces topped with a lush green roof.

“The consortium of architects, headed by Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners, has succeeded in taking the specific needs of properly preserving and accessing the Louvre’s collections, and turning them into a first-class architectural creation," said Jean-Luc Martinez, President-Director of the Musée du Louvre.

Now through September 7, you can take a "swim" in a massive "BEACH" that has taken over the National Building Museum's Great Hall. Spanning 10,000-square-feet, the BEACH was created in partnership with Brooklyn-based Snarkitecture to offer the people of Washington D.C. a one-of-a-kind installation as part of the NBM's "Summer Block Party."

The "ocean" is essentially a ball-pit comprised of nearly one million recyclable translucent plastic balls. It is contained within a mirrored, all-white enclosure flanked by a 50-foot-wide "shoreline" that offers visitors the option to wade the  "water" or sit back and relax. 

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"Form ever follows function." "Less is more." Architects have long been providing us with inspirational quips and reflections on our profession. And now, thanks to our friends at Princeton Architectural Press, you can win a set a notebooks that feature the compelling words of Le Corbusier, R. Buckminster Fuller, and Cesar Pelli. The gold-stamped, gridded notebooks are a companion to Laura Dushkes' best-selling book The Architect Says.

Read on to find out how you can win a set of The Architect Says Notebooks!

A competition proposal by Alexander Culler and Danny Travis, placed second in Blank Space's recent Fairy Tales competition, is now the subject of a Kickstarter campaign asking whether there is "a way to use architectural drawing to tell a story that was easy enough for everyone to understand?" The team behind the Beautifully Banal comic-zine are now seeking to transform their competition entry into a full-scale publication in order to "combine the intricacies of architectural drawing types with a form of story telling that allows those outside of the field to gain a new appreciation for the buildings and structures that occupy the world."