Artist Janet Echelman has unveiled her latest site-specific work of public art, with the activation of the first phase of “Pulse” in Philadelphia’s Dilworth Park. Pulse seeks to reshape urban space “with a monumental, fluidly moving sculpture that responds to environmental forces including wind, water, and sunlight.

Inspired by the square’s history as a water and transportation hub, Echelman’s work traces the paths and trolley lines of the subway beneath, with four-foot-tall curtains of colorful atomized mist traveling across the park’s fountain surface in response to passing trains underneath.

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Though the Las Vegas Strip may be garish to some, with its borderline intrusive décor and “pseudo-historical” architecture, some professional architects, most notably Robert Venturi and Denise Scott-Brown, have become captivated by the “ornamental-symbolic elements” the buildings present. The two architects developed the curious design distinction between a “duck” and a “decorated shed”, depending on the building’s decorative form. In his essay for 99% Invisible, Lessons from Sin City: The Architecture of “Ducks” versus “Decorated Sheds”, Kurt Kohlstedt explores how the architects implemented their knowledge of ornamentation in their own works and began an architectural debate still ongoing today.

Bio-Architecture Formosana (BAF) together with Carlo Ratti Associatti have won the international competition for the Southern branch of the Taiwan National Library and Repository in Tainan, Taiwan. With the concept of "Library as a Town", the team created a proposal for a new public building that will accommodate a library, book museum and a joint archives center. Selected among nine competitors, the winning design will be placed in the southern part of Taiwan in the XinYing District. The proposal is made to investigate the role of the library in the future.

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Studio JCW have created a proposal to revitalize the medians of Park Avenue in New York City. Founded by Chanon Wangkachonkait and Jaehong Chung, Studio JCW argues that Park Avenue’s medians have been a fixture on the boulevard for more than a century. Their Big Shelf proposal would create elevated public spaces within a grid structure for expanded programming. The design was made to echo the structural facades of surrounding skyscrapers and building grids.

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Sir David Adjaye has been selected as design architect for the new Princeton University Art Museum. Working in collaboration with executive architect Cooper Robertson, Adjaye will engage with the design of a “cultural gateway” located on the museum’s current site at the center of Princeton’s campus.

The new museum will present “dramatically enlarged space” to exhibit and showcase the institution’s extensive collections, as well as classrooms and office space for 100 staff.

As part of the London Design Festival 2018, the Zaha Hadid Gallery is presenting the new RE/Form carpet collection designed by Zaha Hadid Architects for Royal Thai. Consisting of 22 designs across four themes, the pieces showcase fluid patterns heavily reminiscent of Hadid’s architectural works.

The four themes consist of striated lines, ribbonlike projections, pixelated landscapes, and organic cellular shapes. Each pattern captures “Hadid’s signature use of interweaving, layering and play with light and shadow.”

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The Walt Disney Concert Hall is set to be transformed through digital art projections by media artist Refik Anadol and Google Arts & Culture. Created for the Los Angeles Philharmonic's centennial, the light show will be made through deep neural network connections projected as light. Designed for WDCH Dreams, the digital projections draw together the L.A.Philharmonic orchestra’s digital archives and translate them into data points.

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Videos

Opening its doors last fall, Princeton University's Lewis Arts Complex by Steven Holl Architects and BNIM created a new campus gateway and state-of-the-art facilities for the arts. Expanding performance, rehearsal and teaching spaces, the complex has now been featured in a video directed by Spirit of Space. The footage shows how the building was designed to shape campus space while maximizing porosity and movement. Welcoming its second year of students, the complex is made to take the arts at Princeton to even greater heights.

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BIG’s “unzipped wall,” which served as the 2016 Serpentine Pavilion in London, has been opened to the public in Toronto under the new title “Unzipped.” Having been transported to the city and rebuilt in collaboration with Westbank, new photographs by Derek Shapton show the completed pavilion standing as a temporary place of showcase and events in downtown Toronto.

“Unzipped” is the first Serpentine Pavilion to embark on a multi-city tour of this kind, before ultimately landing in a permanent home on the Vancouver waterfront.

Following the Grenfell Tower fire in June 2017, which claimed 72 lives, the RIBA has launched a consultation for a new “Plan of Work for Fire Safety.”

Having consistently called for changes to building regulations in the wake of the tragedy, the organization has produced the document in response to Dame Judith Hackitt’s Independent Review of Building Regulations and Fire Safety, and her call for “greater transparency, accountability, and collaboration” from the industry.

Every city has a story. Throughout history, many natural and man-made changes have altered the way cities were originally laid out. For some, the urban form developed as a result of political disputes, religious separations, or class divides. For others, a more mixed approach has allowed for uniquely mixed cultural atmospheres. And while development of cities is typically slow, occasionally cities experience dramatic and immediate changes to the urban fabric - the results of natural disaster, military conflict, or industrial catastrophe.

What happens next - if anything - can reveal a great deal about not just the city itself, but the local culture. Do cities rebuild exactly as they were? Or do they use disaster as an opportunity to reinvent themselves? The following is a roundup of cities that have moved past catastrophe to be reborn from the ashes.

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Videos

Lanmar Services’ CTO Larry Kleinkemper, AIA, creates 3D laser scans and BIM project files for some of the world’s leading architecture firms and their high-profile projects. Because of these massive data sets, Lanmar demands the best CAD computer workstations available. In this must-see video, Kleinkemper compares two workstations recommended by their respective manufacturers as optimal Autodesk Revit solutions.

The Viennese architecture office Querkraft has been selected to design the Austrian Pavilion for Expo 2020 Dubai. The design combines traditional building materials with modern techniques to present Austria as a center of innovation. Former Federal Minister Beatrix Karl was appointed honorary commissioner for the world expo and will represent Austria externally. The Expo in Dubai will be the first world exhibition in an Arab country in the 170-­year Expo history. The Austrian Pavilion will center on questions of how resources can be used more thoughtfully and respectfully in the future.

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Henning Larsen have created a new proposal for The Springs, an urban oasis designed for Shanghai. Inspired by shan shui, a traditional form of Chinese landscape painting, the project is developed for Tishman-Speyer to evoke the mountain landscapes found throughout rural China. The project will mirror the mountain landscape with tall, terraced towers around a green public square. Made to create workspaces for creative industries, the three buildings will provide wide provide flexible workspace and common areas in the city center.

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The 2018 London Design Festival is now underway, having returned for its 16th year. Running from 15th to 23rd September, and spread across the city, the Festival features works such as Snøhetta’s rotating book pavilion and a series of installations at the V&A celebrating the venue’s 10th year as the Festival’s official hub.

Below, we have compiled a list of collaborations to look out for throughout the week, including investigations into issues such as climate change and plastic pollution, and artistic themes such as Cubism and classical music.

Earlier this month, we published the results of DesignIntelligence’s annual ranking of U.S. architecture schools, listing the top Undergraduate and Graduate schools for 2019. Using feedback from architecture and interior design professionals, the full analysis delves deeper than a generic “Most Admired Architecture Schools” list, and instead breaks the rankings down into twelve categories, focusing on technology, design theory, and more.

Free and open to the public, the full list on DesignIntelligence’s website offers comprehensive top-10 listings at both Undergraduate and Graduate level across the twelve categories, attained from surveys from approximately 6000 professionals, 360 academics, and 5500 students. Below, we have summarized the findings in a top-5 format, with the full listings ready to be explored on the official website here.

This article was originally published by Metropolis Magazine as "The Sordid Saga of Eileen Gray’s Iconic E-1027 House."

It’s fair to say Eileen Gray’s E-1027 French villa hasn’t lived a charmed life: It has survived desecration by Le Corbusier, target practice by the Nazis, a stint as drug den and orgy destination, and near dereliction. However, of late, the infamous house’s future is looking more optimistic: Cap Moderne, a non-profit dedicated to rehabbing and opening the building as a cultural destination, recently launched a crowdfunding campaign to continue the building’s restoration. Over the last few years, the conservationists’ work had focused on the recreation of the building’s Eileen Gray–designed furniture. The latest efforts focus on a particular dining alcove. How that alcove—and the entire house—lost its furniture and fell into disrepair is a long story, with many twists and turns.

Architecture is all about context, either as a way to find harmony with it's surroundings or as a reaction against them. But what happens when you take context out of the picture entirely?

Designer Anton Reponnen, in his Misplaced photo series, has taken 11 of New York's most iconic landmarks, ranging from the Empire State Building to Renzo Piano's Whitney, and transplanted them in deserts, tundras, and plains. With the buildings placed in a "wrong" condition, viewers are challenged to evaluate the architecture in a different way. In Reponnen's eyes (and in the stories that accompany the images), each structure is as alive as we are, and their new location is mystery with motives to uncover.

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In the quest for carbon neutrality, the City of Helsinki in Finland announced its action plans to minimize greenhouse gas emissions substantially by 2035. The city’s fully owned energy company, Helen Ltd, a producer of district heating, power, and district cooling, aims to augment this policy by converting its largely coal and natural gas energy production processes to climate-neutral energy production, thereby eliminating carbon dioxide emissions fully by 2050.

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Wine production is an industry that combines robust economic activity with an extensive cultural legacy. Although there are several programs related to the wine sector, we commonly find spaces dedicated to the process of fermenting grapes into wine. However, there are a variety of duties grouped around wine production that play an important role in boosting the industry, such as tasting rooms, education centers, sales rooms, or broadcast. Below, a selection of 27 inspiring projects of wine architecture.

‘Hololightkeeper,’ a conceptual model that is distinct in its use of holographic technologies, pays homage to an architectural structure that has quickly been transformed into a historic relic. The lighthouse, once a navigational aid to guide sailors towards land and warn traveling ships of dangerous conditions, has been replaced in its function by modern technologies. In this respect, Studio NAB’s ‘Hololightkeeper’ attempts to resurrect a building typology by dematerializing the lighthouse structure-type, while maintaining its historic symbolism.

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Neelam Cinema is one of three theaters built in Chandigarh, a modernist city master-planned by Le Corbusier. Built shortly after India gained independence in the early 1950s, the cinema is located in the bustling industrial area of Sector 17. Designed by architect Aditya Prakash under the guidance of Le Corbusier and his cousin Pierre Jeanneret, the modernist structure stands to this day in its original form and continues to screen Bollywood films. However, without UNESCO World Heritage protection, the future of the cinema remains uncertain. Below, British photographer Edmund Sumner discusses his experience of shooting the 960-seat cinema, the heart of the city, and an icon of Chandigarh.

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Art Omi is a non-profit organization located in Ghent, New York that works to create a space for the artistic community. This organization is focused on providing architects a space to experiment and come into contact with other perspectives. Art Omi was born from the absence of residency programs for architects in the United States; a space designed by architects for architects.

The Art Omi architecture program is structured on four pillars: an architectural field of sixty acres where participants can deploy and experience pavilions and facilities designed by architects; the second is a curated series of indoor exhibitions at the Benenson Center; the third is an annual event outside the campus, in Manhattan, that seeks to link theory and practice; and finally, the most recent addition which is the residency program.