A guide from Graphisoft on how to create powerful design presentations with Archicad through the use of Archicad version 25.

Children suffering from severe illness often leave their homes and families to receive the necessary care. In most of Sweden, accommodations for the relatives of the ill are built in the vicinity of the larger pediatric clinics.

The largest of these accommodations will be built in Umeå, Norrland. Named “Hjältarnas Hus” or "Home for Heroes," the building was designed by White Arkitekter and broke ground on Friday, March 4.

A total of 12 projects have been shortlisted for the 2016 RIBA East Midlands Awards. The shortlisted buildings will be assessed by a regional jury, and winners will be announced on April 27. Regional winners will then be considered for a RIBA National Award, and National winners are then considered for the RIBA Stirling Prize for the best building of the year.

The 12 projects shortlisted for the 2016 RIBA East Midlands Awards are:

The three winners of the Tokyo Pop Lab competition, which called for the development of an institution for popular culture, have been announced.

Centered on the phenomena of pop culture, the competition examined how “popular culture migrates and changes from person to person and place to place,” and invited entrants “to critically evaluate fundamental correlations between cultural production and architecture.”

Entrants varied in typology from pragmatic to ideological, with successful proposals including “a well considered and articulated definition of popular culture, clarity in representation of both architecture and culture, and a clear programmatic agenda.”

The three winners of the Tokyo Pop Lab competition are:

The AIA has released the results of a survey on diversity in the workplace. Taken by more than 7,500 professionals in the industry, the purpose of the survey was to investigate the careers of architects and observe how firm culture affects career paths, depending on race, ethnicity, and gender.

Some of the key findings included representations of gender and race, challenges to career advancement, work-life balance and its impact on women, factors impacting the representation of minorities, reasons for leaving the architecture field, and job satisfaction levels.

Turncoats, the irreverent architectural debate society from London, is launching an international series, starting chapters in Canada, Scotland, Serbia and the US. Originally created by Phineas Harper, Maria Smith and Robert Mull, Turncoats has “electrified London’s architectural scene” since its inception.

Combining architectural debate with unique settings, alcohol, and an absence of recordings or wireless devices, Turncoats has gathered significant attention, their signature flaming envelope emblem appearing on lapels across the city, and soon all over the world.

Bee Breeders has announced the winner of the Krakow Oxygen Home competition, which asked designers to reconsider contemporary architectural conventions with respect to current cultural and global issues in the city of Krakow, Poland. Due to the large number of coal-burning furnaces in the city, residents of Krakow are threatened by air pollution, which has resulted in a sky-rocketing number of cases of asthma, lung disease, and lung cancer. The competition brief called for the “design of a care center for lung cancer patients as part of the Maria Sklodowska-Curie Memorial Institute of Oncology.”

Working with Drexel University and master developer Brandywine Realty Trust, SHoP and West 8 will transform 14-acres of existing underutilized land with 6.5-acres of public open space to create a collaborative mixed-use neighborhood in Philadelphia’s University City submarket. Schuylkill Yards will feature a mix of 24/7 entrepreneurial spaces, educational facilities and research laboratories, corporate offices, residential and retail spaces, hospitality and cultural venues, as well as a robust public realm network that connects the existing neighborhoods with the adjacent Amtrak 30th Street Station.

Situated next to the third-busiest passenger rail station in the country, Schuylkill Yards will be connected to Philadelphia’s international airport and major cities along the Northeast corridor, making it a major innovation hub on the East Coast.

Toronto-based MacLennan Jaunkalns Miller Architects (MJMA) has been selected to receive the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada's (RAIC) 2016 Architectural Firm Award. Known for their work in community recreation and sports buildings, the more than 50-person practice was chosen by the jury for their "wellness approach" to design and contribution to the "broader communities in which the projects are located."

“MJMA has consistently achieved a very high quality of architecture and bold clarity throughout its large body of work,” said the five-member jury. “In addition to the spectacular spatial qualities, the architecture exhibits a clear problem-solving approach.

The Mies Crown Hall Americas Prize has announced the nominees for this year's MCHAP awards, the biennial prize hosted by the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) to award the best projects in the Americas. Following on from their inaugural prize in 2014 which awarded the best projects of the 21st century up to 2013, this year's awards will focus on the best architecture from 2014 and 2015, and the nominee list features 175 projects in the main MCHAP awards and 55 in the MCHAP.emerge awards.

In 2014, the prize was shared by Álvaro Siza's Iberê Camargo Foundation and Herzog & de Meuron’s 1111 Lincoln Road, while the MCHAP.emerge prize was won by Pezo von Ellrichshausen's for their Poli House. The winners of the two prizes this year will join this short and prestigious list, and also receive funding of $50,000 and $25,000, respectively, in support of research and a publication related to the theme of "Rethinking Metropolis." You can view the full list of nominees of the MCHAP award here, and the full list of nominees for the MCHAP.emerge prize here.

GBL Architects' 8X Tower in Vancouver has won approval to be built, with construction set to begin in the fall. The site is located at the western corner of Richards and Helmcken Street in Vancouver’s Yaletown neighborhood. The building’s conceptual design combines the context of three surrounding areas: Emery Barnes Park, which flanks the western edge of the site; the grid of the nearby streets; and the Yaletown skyline which displays a wide range of architectural styles.

As part of its 50th anniversary celebrations, the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco has announced major renovation and expansion plans by wHY Architecture. The practice is expected to design a new 12,000-square-foot exhibition pavilion, reconfigure the Museum’s existing galleries, and modernize its education and public programming spaces. Work will begin in 2017.

"The new pavilion will underscore San Francisco’s cultural diversity, create one of the nation’s premier exhibition spaces dedicated to Asian art, and increase the number of special exhibitions on view for visitors," says the Museum.

If you haven't had the opportunity to step inside Santiago Calatrava's World Trade Center Oculus, here is your chance. Miguel de Guzmán of Imagen Subliminal has captured the incredible space in VR (Virtual Reality), granting you 360-degree views of the infamous oculus. Put on your Google Cardboard and see it for yourself.

20 prominent women in architecture have been shortlisted for the arcVision Prize - a prize that "aims to give recognition to women whose work brings an innovative new design, theoretical or practical approach to the economic, social and cultural issues at play in the field of architecture." Referred to some as the "Pritzker for women," the yearly arcVision Prize is now in its fourth edition.

The full list of nominees includes:

Sketches are analog tools of representation, where the drawings' imperfections come from the artist, skewed by their way of seeing the world. Academia, especially in architecture, often calls for quick drawings to demonstrate ideas that words can’t describe, and constant practice on everyday items like napkins, the backs of notebooks or loose sheets of paper preserves ideas and makes way for the use of journals. Journals can be used to remember design processes or journeys and for learning. I have included a selection of my drawings from trips at the end of this article, in order to encourage readers to practice this method.

Expressing an idea is something anyone can do, whether it's through drawings, words or creating figures. The hands are often used as a mediator between thought and reality: "... drawing is where thought has a direct relationship with action, with your hand, with the experience of your body."

+ 10

A total of 68 buildings have been shortlisted for the 2016 RIBA London Awards, including projects from John McAslan + Partners, dRMM Architects, Níall McLaughlin Architects, Eric Parry Architects and Rogers Stirk Harbour. All shortlisted buildings will now be visited and carefully assessed by one of four regional juries, and regional winners will be considered for a RIBA National Award. The shortlist for the RIBA Stirling Prize - given to the UK's best building of this year - will be composed of the winners of the RIBA National Award.

See a complete list of shortlisted buildings after the break.

The Architectural Guide China is a travel book which covers cities primarily located on China’s eastern coast. These cities—such as Beijing, Shanghai, and Hong Kong—have become centers for forward-thinking urban design and architecture. The guide offers maps, drawings, photographs, historical background, and essays describing Chinese architecture at all scales – ranging from small temples to the organization of major metropoli.

Based on the authors' experiences of directing study abroad trips throughout the country, Evan Chakroff, Addison Godel, and Jacqueline Gargus, have carefully curated a selection of contemporary architectural sites while also discussing significant historical structures. Each author has written an introductory essay, each of which contextualizes the historical and global socioeconomic influences, as well as the stylistic longevity of the chosen sites in this book. One such essay, by Chakroff, has been made available exclusively on ArchDaily.

+ 12

Common Edge has published a cheeky "letter to prospective architecture parents" that preps them for the changes their child will soon undergo by detailing the 6 phases of architectural education: "Architecture school is a peculiar beast. It almost never actually prepares students to be practicing architects, and 90% of what is written by architects and architectural theorists is incomprehensible garbage. But being able to discern what is and what is not incomprehensible garbage is a profoundly useful life skill."

The six phases each architecture student goes through includes: 

The City of Vancouver has agreed to purchase the Arbutus Corridor from Canadian Pacific Railway for $55 million to make way for a future public greenway. According to a report by CBC, this ends a long-standing dispute between the city and CP Rail over the worth of the nine kilometer stretch of land, which hasn't been used for nearly 15 years.

8 years ago today, ArchDaily launched with a daunting mission: to provide inspiration, knowledge and tools to the architects tasked with designing for the 3 billion people that will move into cities in the next 40 years. This mission has captured the imagination of architects worldwide, leading us to become the world's most visited architecture website – serving over 400,000 visitors daily in English, Spanish, Portuguese and now Chinese. In our 8th year, we've made great strides towards this goal: from conveying information in another language through ArchDaily China to finding new ways to transmit information such as our ArchDaily Essentials series; from better ways to engage readers such as our #YourArchDaily Instagram campaign to presenting more of an editorial voice through articles such as our selection of most inspiring leaders of 2015; and from a better way to display our site with our new redesign to a better way to manage our database with our custom publishing platform.

Of course, the most important part of this progress is the continued support and engagement of our ever-growing readership. By sharing our content on social media or discussing it with friends and colleagues, you're helping us to reach more and more architects, and thus helping us to fulfill our goal – thank you for joining us on this mission. Read on after the break for a round-up of our highlights from the past year.