Construction has started on the redesign of an energy storage tower by LAVA (Laboratory for Visionary Architects) for Stadtwerke Heidelberg (SWH) in Heidelberg, Germany. The updated facade of the 56-meter cylindrical tower and design of an adjacent park are part of an initiative to create a sculptural landmark and symbol of sustainable energy for the city.

LAVA introduces a multi-layered facade that features 11,000 diamond shaped stainless-steel plates attached to a steel cable network that can rotate 45 degrees in the wind. According to the architects, a number of plates correlate to the number of households that will be beneficiaries of the energy. The geometries of the facade are inspired by forms found in nature.

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The Graham Foundation has announced the list of recipients of their annual Grants to Organizations program, established to “advance new scholarship, fuel creative experimentation and critical dialogue, and expand opportunities for public engagement with architecture and its role in contemporary society.”

For 2017, over $400,000 USD has been awarded to 41 projects from around the world within 5 categories: Exhibitions, Film/Video/New Media, Publications, Public Programs and Other Fellowships. In its 61 year history, the Graham Foundation has given more than 4,300 grants to individuals and institutions.

“This year marks an extraordinary group of projects from organizations around the world working to advance architectural thinking, push the boundaries of the field, and expand into previously underrepresented areas,” said Graham Foundation director Sarah Herda on the 2017 grantees.

Continue reading for the full list of recipients, with descriptions provided by the Graham Foundation.

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Held annually, the CEMEX Building Award honors the best architecture and construction both in Mexico and abroad. Yesterday the cement company announced the finalist projects located in Mexico, and in categories ranging from social housing to infrastructure. Each project will be evaluated by a jury convened by CEMEX; the qualities to be evaluated include integrated sustainability, architectural design, structure and innovation in the construction process.

Below see the full list of finalist projects located in Mexico. 

Architect and theorist Yona Friedman has brought his playful “People’s Architecture” installations to Rome’s MAXXI Museum, Paris’s Les Halles and Denmark where they were recently assembled in a workshop at the Danish Association for Architects. Built using plastic hula hoops, each installation is assembled spontaneously, creating new variations of space with each turn. Says Friedman: “Architecture for people proposes a variant of the original “Ville Spatial.” It is based on a structure easy to modify, a structure not necessarily raised over ground level, keeping that option open if wanted.”

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The Brick Industry Association (BIA) has announced the winners of the 2017 Brick in Architecture Awards, given to “the country’s most visionary projects incorporating fired-clay brick.” This year, 35 projects from 19 states were selected as winners, with a best in-class project awarded across eight categories: Commercial, Educational (Higher Education), Educational (K-12), Renovation / Restoration, Municipal/Government, Residential (Multifamily), Residential (Single Family) and Paving & Landscape.

“The winners demonstrate brick’s aesthetic flexibility, and its integral role in any sustainable, low maintenance and durable building strategy,” said Ray Leonhard, BIA’s president and CEO.

See the Best and Class winners below.

After last week’s check in on Heatherwick Studio’s 1000 Trees project in Shanghai by #donotsettle, the firm itself has released additional images and a video of its construction progress.

The 300,000-square-meter development is located 20 minutes from downtown Shanghai next to the M50 arts district, taking the form of two “tree-covered mountains.” As the name suggests, the design will feature concrete structural columns that widen at the top to create large planters for 1000 trees. The video captures the building in its half-completed status, showing how it will interacts with its surroundings and the adjacent Wusong (Suzhou) River.

Ready for a mind trip? Take a look at the work of German street artist 1010. For more than a decade, 1010 has been painting colorful cave-like illusions that make flat surfaces appear as if they have been breached by holes go on forever. To create his works, the artist first makes papercut models by layering stacks of paper in specific color palettes, then translates the depth into paint. He has used this technique in surprising places across the globe including both interior and exterior walls and even on an abandoned highway in Paris.

Check out some of 1010’s latest work below.

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Zaha Hadid Architects have released new photos showcasing the ongoing construction progress of Leeza SOHO, a mixed-use office tower in Beijing's Lize Financial Business District. This twisting, contorted structural skeleton, which weaves together two separate sections of the tower and visually fuses them, will house the world's tallest atrium, rising the full height of the building.

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Since the first Hello Wood Project Village debuted in 2015, architecture, art and design students from all over the world have gathered together each summer in Hungary to imagine and build structures using innovative wood construction techniques. With each passing year, the village has grown more complex, with new students using the decisions of their predecessors to inform and evolve subsequent designs.

The 2017 edition has brought this exercise to its logical summit – exploring how the settlement could actually be inhabited by its builders. In doing so, participants created a village center consisting of 7 new structures containing spaces for sleeping, bathing, cooking, eating, viewing lectures and celebrating. New infrastructure including a village well and future solar panels also contribute to the village’s accountability and help to shape the relationships between the village’s structures.

“As architects, we all have an idea of what the ideal village is like, but what makes this programme interesting is that, once we are confronted with the actual needs of a community, constraints of the terrain, or the opinion of your neighbour, you need to be open to adapt,” said Johanna Muszbek, curator of Project Village.

See the 7 projects with descriptions from the designers, after the break.

New York Yimby has uncovered a new rendering of the FXFOWLE-designed 3 Hudson Boulevard showing an updated design featuring a 300-foot spire that would make the building the tallest in the Hudson Yards complex, and one of the tallest in the city.

Reports indicate that the building, formerly known as the Girasole, would rise a total of 1,350 feet, placing it just below 432 Park Avenue’s 1,397 foot peak. Approximately 1,050 feet of the building’s height would be occupiable, with 1.8 million square feet of office space spread across 66 total floors.

Updated renderings have been revealed for renowned architect Helmut Jahn’s 1000M, an upcoming 832-foot skyscraper that will take the place of a currently vacant lot on Chicago’s historic Michigan Avenue. Accommodating 323 luxury residences and over 40,000 square feet of amenities, the building will be clad in a green and blue glass curtainwall, with horizontal metal spandrels running across and dividing it. The roof terrace is covered by a hovering metallic mesh crown, which is shown in the new renderings.

Architecture platform Rethinking the Future (RTF) has announced the winners for their annual “Rethinking the Future Awards,” collecting over 500 entries from 30 countries. Established in 2012 in New Delhi, India, RTF aims to create a “new window on international trends in architecture and design” by considering “radical solutions for the present day problems facing the domain.”

“Each of these projects represents the best of architecture and design across the globe, where innovation and creativity are intersecting,” says RTF on the 18 winning entries covering projects ranging from residential to cultural architecture. The competition was open to both students and professionals and drew a diverse collection of built and unbuilt works.

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Life as an architect can sometimes be trying. These stickers, designed by Jeremy Nguyen for The New Yorker, are designed to pep you up in your work day with a motivational boost, or a celebratory pat-on-the-back. Did you behave well during a Skype call? There's a sticker for that. Did you finish that presentation before 1am? There's a sticker for that, too. There's even a little badge of honor for which you can self-decorate once you've sent that final, final... final draft to your Project Manager for review.

Videos

Pritzker Prize-winning architect Tadao Ando has designed a monumental lavender-covered temple enveloping a giant statue of Buddha at the Makomanai Takino Cemetery in the northern Japanese city of Sapporo.

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Videos

After starting and stopping for nearly 20 years, a 17-story Deconstructivist tower by Eric Owen Moss Architects seems to finally be underway in Los Angeles’ Culver City neighborhood after construction permits were approved earlier this year. Originally known as the Glass Tower, the project has been revived as (W)rapper, a nod to the structure’s enveloping steel exoskeleton.

A new flythrough video of the project shows the inside and out of the 230-foot tower, including its double-height and mezzanine office levels, as well as a spacious rooftop terrace. In total, the building will offer 160,000 square feet of office space and two levels of underground parking. Located adjacent to the Expo Line’s LA Cienega/Jefferson station, the project was originally envisioned as a multi-tower development in the late 90s, before being reduced to its current form.

Put away the Neufert manual and pixelated Internet searches, because scaling people just got a whole lot easier. The Chicago-based design consultancy IA Collaborative has launched a Kickstarter campaign for the reissue of Humanscale – a set of ergonomic design templates that contain over 60,000 measurements adjusted to humans of all ages, sizes and, yes, even situations.

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In the past decade or so, smartphones and social media apps have revolutionized our culture's relationship to images. From Instagram to Facebook to Pinterest to Youtube, photographs and videos are now so ubiquitous that they have become literally disposable, with apps such as Snapchat trading on their promise to delete your images after a certain period of time. But while smartphones are a very visible driver of this change, what is often forgotten are the huge developments in image-editing software that have supported this revolution—from the HDR built into your smartphone's camera to the wide range of filters provided by Instagram.

Now, as reported by MIT News, Google and MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory may have created another cosmic leap forward: an algorithm that can provide automatic, professional-level image retouching so quickly that you can see a preview before even snapping the photograph.

A new project in central Copenhagen will see two Danish practices—Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) and Dorte Mandrup Architects—create a new urban IKEA store, a budget hotel, and housing linked together by green space. Set to open in 2019, the area—which sits adjacent to Kalvebod Brygge, close to the railway lines that pass through the city core—will be master-planned by Dorte Mandrup while two striking high-rise residential towers, dubbed "Cacti", will be designed by BIG.

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Emerging international architecture office KOSMOS has unveiled 6 projects exploring potential collective spaces in the city of Basel, Switzerland. Unveiled during Art Basel, the speculative projects were featured in the Forum Basel exhibition curated alongside Museum Director Andreas Ruby and Stéphanie Savio, and emerging Chilean practice Plan Común. Held at the Swiss Architecture Museum (S AM), the architecture exhibition was held “in reaction to the increasing commodification of urban space today” and dedicated itself to investigating new possibilities for public space in Basel. Check out the projects, with descriptions from KOSMOS, below.

Responding to a competition brief for a new archaeological museum in Nicosia, the divided capital of Cyprus, a proposal submitted by Greek architects Alkiviadis Pyliotis and Evangelos Fokialis uses the traditional elements of the line, atrium and stoa to inform the composition of the envisioned landmark. Titled "Trigonica Simplicitas," the design of the museum is intended to form a new central hub, celebrating Cypriot history and culture through the synthesis of indoor and outdoor spaces on various levels to rethink the function of a museum.

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“This place is really Instagrammable, you’ll see what I mean.”

Walking into a tiled entryway and catching a glimpse of the cocoon-shaped swings, I saw fast. Planta, located on a busy street in Downtown Toronto is an Instagram magnet. And they know it. Opened last fall, Planta’s geotagged posts grow daily, with several of the restaurants’ key spaces photographed again and again. With jungle-inspired wallpaper, graphic tiling and a solid 14k following on their own account, the plant-based eatery means business.

Instagram’s parent-company Facebook announced it made $9.1 billion in earnings this quarter on advertising, retaining its longstanding rule over digital advertising alongside with Google’s Alphabet ($26 billion). With Instagram absorbing competitor Snapchat’s story features and increasing the number of sponsored posts it shows this year (yeah, we noticed), it’s not a stretch to say that the social media giant sits at the center of food and beverage trends. But what happens to interior spaces when restaurants set out to be “Instagrammable”?

10 Design were announced as the winners of a competition to build an incubation center for start-up companies in the Jinwan Aviation District in Zhuhai, China. The Research & Development Center will accompany 10 Design’s other winning schemes for an International Commerce Center (twin tower with 127,000 square meters of office and hotel space) and Cultural Center (performance and exhibition space house in a 27,500 square meters building). The projects will be a part of Jinwan Aviation City, an ambitious development initiative to create a hub for major industry in Zhuhai, a city that is currently experiencing unprecedented growth.

Theoni Xanthi of XZA Architects has been selected as the winner in the competition to design the new archaeological museum in Cyprus. Composed of three layers corresponding to Memory, the City, and the River, Xanthi's proposal took first place in a competition that sought a new urban space to celebrate Nicosia’s history and archaeology. The project is situated in close proximity to the medieval city walls, enabling it to play a key role in altering and upgrading the existing urban and green spaces that surround it.

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Videos

A new challenger has stepped into the ring of home solar batteries, and it’s a name you may recognize: global furniture retailer IKEA.

A competitor to Tesla’s now-available Powerwall home battery and solar roof system, IKEA’s home battery will be first sold in the UK, where owners of solar-powered homes can typically only sell excess energy produced back to the national grid at a loss. The battery pack will instead allow that power to be stored for later use, helping homeowners reduce their electricity bills by as much as 70 percent.