Take a peek into Estudio Barozzi Veiga's Philharmonic Hall Szczecin—which was announced today as the winner of the 2015 EU Prize for Contemporary Architecture–Mies van der Rohe Award—through the lens of Romanian photographer Laurian Ghinitoiu.

Barozzi / Veiga’s Philharmonic Hall Szczecin in Szczecin, Poland has been selected as the winner of the 2015 EU Prize for Contemporary Architecture-Mies van der Rohe Award. The design was influenced by the surrounding context and buildings, specifically by the “verticality of the city’s residential buildings, by the monumentality of the upright ornaments of its neo-Gothic churches and the heavy volumes of its Classicist buildings, by the towers that dot its entire skyline and the cranes of its port,” according to the architects. The Philharmonic Hall features large skylights and is clad with glass on the outside, providing a contrast to the surrounding buildings.

The Philharmonic Hall Szczecin was selected over four other finalist projects: Lederer Ragnarsdóttir Oei’s Ravensburg Art Museum; BIG – Bjarke Ingels Group’s Danish Maritime Museum; Archea Associati’s Antinori Winery; and O’Donnell + Tuomey’s Saw Swee Hock Student Centre. The five finalists presented their projects to the jury on May 7, and the official award ceremony was held this morning in Barcelona at Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion.

Google's ambitious plans to expand its California headquarters in Mountain View took a major blow last night when council members announced their decision to award LinkedIn three-quarters of the North Bayshore area site. With just 500,000 square-feet of area to work with, Google would only be able to construct one of its four proposed buildings.

Unveiled earlier this year, the company's futuristic "Googleplex," designed by BIG and Heatherwick Studio, gained international attention for its outlandish plans to build four Lego-like buildings beneath a cluster of translucent canopies.

As The New York Times reports, LinkedIn won the council over by promising to "preserve business diversity."

The Architectural League of New York has awarded its President's Medal to Henry N. Cobb of Pei Cobb Freed & Partners Architects. The League's highest honor, the medal was awarded to Cobb “for the truly consequential work he has created as designer, educator, thinker, writer, and leader,” says the jury citation.

"We are inspired by his decades-long passion for the art of architecture; by his analytic rigor, manifest in subtle and articulate buildings and penetrating readings of history and place; by the broad and profoundly informed humanist culture that suffuses his writings and approach to education; and by the unbounded curiosity and delight he takes in new ideas, new work, and new talent. Henry N. Cobb embodies that combination of capability and conviction—artistic, intellectual, practical, and civic—that defines the ideal architect.”

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Shigeru Ban Architects, together with the Voluntary Architects' Network (VAN), has announced plans to send emergency shelter, housing and other community facilitates to the victims of Nepal's deadly April 25th earthquake. As part of a three-phase plan, Shigeru Ban will first delivery and assemble tents with plastic partitions acquired though donation to provide immediate shelter. A few months after, the Japanese practice will collaborate with local architects and students to build temporary housing with materials found prevalent in Nepal.

Permanent housing will also be provided in the architect-led recovery plan's third phase, although little details have been released. However, you can help make it happen by donating to Shigeru Ban's efforts (here).

Watch Shigeru Ban's TED Talk on paper emergency structures, after the break. 

uncube has published an entire issue dedicated to the late Frei Otto. The architect and inventor, known best for his tensile structures, was the first ever to be awarded the Pritzker Prize posthumously. Honoring Otto with more than a "simple retrospective homage," uncube has compiled an extensive online issue of "thoughts, anecdotes and observations" that reflect Otto's legacy and the ideas that lead him to be a significant part of architectural history. View the entire uncube issue on Frei Otto, here.

A new research study conducted by the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH), entitled Tall Buildings in Numbers – Japan: A History of Tall Innovations, examines the evolution of tall buildings in Japan since the 1960s. The study highlights key innovations in Japan’s skyline through a compilation of graphic representations, including a timeline of notable highrises, a scatterplot of towers over 150 meters and annual construction rates, and a comparison of skyscraper density with regional populations.

View the interactive charts after the break.

Chilean architect Cristián Undurraga has shared a series of photos with us of Chile’s recently inaugurated pavilion at the Milan Expo 2015. Undurraga’s design for the pavilion was chosen from 21 projects submitted in a public competition held by the College of Architects and the Chilean Association of Architecture Offices (AOA) in 2013. Undurraga's pavilion follows a rich lineage of Chilean architecture created for World Expositions set by the historic iceberg created for the Seville Expo '92 and the gold medal winning Shanghai Expo pavilion from 2010.

The pavilion aims to position Chile as a “food power” (potencia alimentaria), emphasizing the quality of its food and the vast markets that Chilean exports reach. The journey through the pavilion is complemented by audiovisual devices, ending with the Table of Chile where the visitor can taste and buy Chilean food products.

The Milan Expo opened on May 1^st and will run until October 31, receiving an estimated 24 million people.

See images and visitor reactions of the Chilean pavilion after the break. 

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Unless architecture is truly your passion, Norman Foster thinks you should simply find something else to pursue. In the Louisiana Channel's latest, the prolific English architect advises the young to live "every living second of your life" doing what you love.

The world's energy infrastructure may soon undergo significant change; Tesla Motors recently unveiled the Powerwall, a compact, lithium-ion battery pack that will allow residents to autonomously consume energy by drawing from their own sun-powered reserve. For just $3,500, you can purchase an attractive, wall-mounted battery capable of storing up to 10 kilowatt-hours of energy - about a third of what the average US household uses daily. Beyond this, the company will also be offering scalable Powerpacks to businesses and utility companies that will allow limitless storage. Powerwalls will go out for delivery this summer.

Want to "smoke up" with Bjarke Ingels or fly over London in Norman Foster's private helicopter? The Van Alen Institute has launched an online auction to help raise money for its public architecture and design programs. Bid now for a chance to win "priceless" experiences with famous architects and designers that could potentially have you hot tubbing with Charles Renfro, birdwatching with Jeanne Gang, or touring Los Angeles by bike with Michael Maltzan. See all the experience being auctioned, here on Paddle8.

Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum has announced the winners of its 2015 National Design Award. Taking top honors, the late Michael Graves has been honored with the "Lifetime Achievement" award for "broadening the role of architects and raising public interest in good design as essential to the quality of everyday life."

MOS Architects was also selected to receive the "Architecture Design" award. The New York-based studio, founded by principals Hilary Sample and Michael Meredith in 2005, was lauded by the jury for their "academic research [that] occurs in parallel to the real-world constraints and contingencies of practice."

London's Victoria & Albert Museum have announced that David Bickle, formerly a partner at Hawkins\Brown, has been appointed as the new Director of Design, Exhibitions and FuturePlan. In this role Bickle will be responsible for the care and future development of the V&A’s buildings, as well as the presentation of all of the museum’s permanent collections and exhibitions. With the construction of Amanda Levete Architects' new addition on Exhibition Road underway - coupled with the V&A's plans for new exhibition spaces in Dundee, Scotland, and in East Stratford on the former site of the 2012 London Olympic Games - the museum is also in the process of helping to establishing a collection in Shenzhen.

The Kaliningrad Region Government, in collaboration with the Kaliningrad City Administration and the Non-Profit Partnership ”Urban Planning Bureau 'Heart of the City'” has launched an open international design competition for an architectural design of the Governmental historic and cultural complex on the grounds of the former order castle Königsberg in Kaliningrad (“Post-castle,” 4,5 ha). The competition aims to find a contemporary architectural image of Kaliningrad's historic center, while accommodate for new functions, such as a concert hall, museum of archaeology, and history museum of the King's castle.

The controversial renovation of Eileen Gray's E1027 on the Côte d’Azur is complete. Once a "lost legend of 20th-century architecture," the quaint holiday home has been brought back to life and is now open to the public. Announcing the news, The Guardian author Rowan Moore has recounted the cliffside project's turbulent past, reciting its significance as Gray's first architectural project.

Google's proposed California headquarters will be built with robots, according to the most recent planning documents received by the City of Mountain View Council. As the Architects' Journal reported first, the documents detail BIG and Heatherwick Studio's plan to construct the canopy-like structure's interiors with a team of robotic-crane hybrids known as "crabots."

These crabots would, in theory, establish a "'hackable' system for the building of the interior structures," says the documents, that would allow for limitless, easy, and affordable reconfiguration of space throughout the building's life. 

The Dubai Design District (d3) has tapped Foster + Partners to design its masterplan's second phase. Spanning one million-square-feet, the new development will be a "Creative Community" that will serve as a "thriving cultural epicenter" within d3, and an "incubator" for emerging designers an artists.

“This is an exciting initiative, which supports young creatives, and allows Dubai’s design scene to flourish from within," says Gerard Evenden, Studio Head at Foster + Partners.

In an article for the Washington Post, Philip Kennicott argues that "technology has scrambled the lines between public and private." He questions whether, in an age of "radical individualism" spurred on by our fascination with solitary communication, our collective understanding and appreciation for the public, civic space has been diminished. Kennitott foreshadows that "one thing is certain: We will live in more crowded spaces, and we will increasingly live indoors, cocooned in climate-controlled zones with a few billion of our closest friends" as rapid urbanisation merges with the changing climate.

Janet Echelman's latest aerial sculpture has been suspended 365 feet above Boston's Rose Kennedy Greenway. On view through October 2015, the monumental installation spans 600 feet, occupying a void where an elevated highway once divided the city's downtown from its waterfront.

"The sculpture’s form echoes the history of its location," describes Echelman. "The three voids recall the 'Tri-Mountain' which was razed in the 18th-century to create land from the harbor. The colored banding is a nod to the six traffic lanes that once overwhelmed the neighborhood, before the Big Dig buried them and enabled the space to be reclaimed for urban pedestrian life."

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Car Talk has written a scathing review on Buckminster Fuller's three-wheeled Dymaxion Car, 81 years after its unveiling. The famed architect and inventor, known best for his geodesic dome, hoped to revolutionize the car industry with a three-wheeled, 20 foot-long, "highly aerodynamic" reinvention of the car.

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According to Forbes, the University of Chicago has been selected to be the official home of the Barack Obama Presidential Library and Museum. The proposal, selected over sites at Columbia University, the University of Hawaii, and the University of Illinois at Chicago, will be built in the city's South Side Hyde Park, near a home owned by the Obamas.

ArchDaily is in need of a select group of awesome, architecture-obsessed interns to join our team for Summer 2015 (June - August)! If you want to spend your days researching/writing about the best architecture around the globe – and find out what it takes to work for the world’s most visited architecture website – then read on after the break…

The Listeners Project, a small London-based initiative that works with young filmmakers in unique architectural spaces to develop and create short films, have taken residence in the former BBC Television Centre. The building, designed by Graham Dawbarn of Norman & Dawbarn in the late 1940s, has an iconic plan that resembles a question mark. The centre, which was once the beating heart of the majority of the British Broadcasting Company's television production, was listed in 2009 before it was finally vacated in 2013.

In the celebratory spirit of its recent 2015 Skyscraper Competition, eVolo has compiled a list of the contest's most innovative submissions. 20 skyscrapers from 13 countries rose above the rest in terms of their unorthodox forms and imaginative solutions to socio-environmental issues. The avant-garde designs, which range from self-sustaining micro-climates to extensive sky-bound bicycle networks, address the cultural, social, and sustainable contexts of the future through groundbreaking means.

See all 20 innovative skyscrapers after the break.

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