DawnTown, a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting architecture in Miami, is announcing an open call for portfolios to their new competition: DAWNTOWN DESIGN/BUILD 2.

The Institute without Boundaries (IwB) is seeking curriculum partners for Connecting Divided Places, a project that investigates social, economic, environmental, and cultural divisions in cities. They are calling out to municipalities, not-for-profit organizations, and companies interested in working with them to address the wicked problems dividing their cities and regions. They are looking for organizations interested in collaborating on design solutions that make for more balanced, healthier, and resilient city-regions of the future. They want to know what challenges your city is facing.

Videos

In Joshua Tree, California, artist Phillip K Smith III has completed Lucid Stead: an optical illusion/installation that modifies an abandoned 70-year-old homestead with mirrors in order to make it appear transparent. The cabin was also fitted with LED lighting to “extract the distilled experience of how light changes over time — how a mountain can be blue, red, brown, white, purple, and black all in one day.” As Smith stated, the project is about light, shadow, and tapping into the quiet of the desert. Check out more images and a video of the cabin after the break!

+ 3

In this interesting report in the Ottawa Citizen, Maria Cook exposes the plan to renovate the Arthur Erickson-designed Bank of Canada Building in Ottawa. The existing building, which features a public atrium complete with a tropical garden, is being extensively remodeled to improve security and building performance, although arguably at great cost to the design. Cook exposes how the bank turned down a prestigious design award in 2011 as it was already at that point privately considering the changes, and explains how its privileged position - related to the government but not controlled by it - effectively means that the bank has nobody it has to answer to who might stop these plans. You can read the full article here.

The Rockefeller Foundation has named the first group of cities selected in the “100 Resilient Cities Centennial Challenge.” Each city has been chosen for demonstrating “a commitment to building their own capacities to prepare for, withstand, and bounce back rapidly from shocks and stresses.” More than 1,000 registrations and nearly 400 formal applications from cities around the world were submitted. After careful review of each city's challenges, these 33 where chosen:

The American Institute of Architects New York State (AIANYS) has announced a new competition celebrating design and professional excellence in publicly funded buildings in New York State. The Excelsior Awards will provide a model for future state-funded building design and professional practice and advocacy.

Building Trust International is very pleased to announce their 5th Design Competition. The challenge is to design a health facility that can easily be relocated. This could be in response to a natural disaster, or to inoculate and educate in areas with specific medical emergencies or outbreaks, it will also help aid agencies that don't have the funds or means to purchase land, offering short term leasing opportunities.

Herzog & de Meuron just celebrated the grand opening of the Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM), alongside the commence of the Art Basel in Miami Beach. Located on a waterfront site overlooking the Biscayne Bay, near the MacArthur Causeway, the three-story museum’s low-profile seems to almost disappear into its surroundings - a pleasant contrast to the ornate and often form-based architecture that is typically found throughout the city. This lack of form, as Jacques Herzog described, is all about “permeability.”

“Miami is known for its iconic art deco district – in fact art deco was about decorated boxes with no great relationship and exchange between inside and outside,” Herzog continued. “The greatest thing, however, that makes Miami so extraordinary is its amazing climate, lush vegetation and cultural diversity. How can these assets be fully exploited and translated into architecture? That’s the way we tried to go with our design for the new art museum in Miami.”

Continue reading for a sneak peak inside the Museum...

According to John Gallagher of the Detroit Free Press, Detroit may soon be removing one of its downtown freeways, the I-375, and converting the trench-like road into a more pedestrian friendly surface level street. The change could be a boon to residents of nearby areas such as Lafayette Park and Eastern Market, which were cut off when the road was built in 1964, and follows a wider trend of cities removing freeways in order to regenerate downtown areas. The city government is currently working with major stakeholders to investigate the potential effects of the change, with a proposal due for summer 2014. You can read the full article here.

Eight international teams have been shortlisted to design a 100-meter tall Observation and Broadcast Tower for the historic city of Çanakkale. The competition, now in its second stage, has required each team to develop their schematic designs before submitting them to the jury in February. 

As stated by the competition brief, “competitors are strongly recommended to consider the technological requirements of the broadcasting tower and recreational potentials of a public entity with equal emphasis.” Once complete, the forested hilltop site will be transformed into a public destination, offering exhibition spaces, recreational facilities and observation decks, in addition to an “iconic antenna tower.”

The complete shortlist includes: 

Correction: The HOK-team has been appointed to appraise the options for refurbishment and has not yet been commissioned for the work itself. 

In the wake of the destruction of Typhoon Haiyan, architects were asking: "couldn't we have avoided this?" Technically, yes. But while the opportunity to build better exists, such measures are often expensive - and in poverty-stricken areas like the Philippines - cost-prohibitive. A recently published article by Carey Dunne on Co.Design breaks down why disaster-proof construction is such a complex challenge.

It's been exactly one year since the world first mourned the passing of a great master of 20th century architecture: Oscar Niemeyer. 

After 104 years of life, the renowned architect left a profound legacy. His works  - known for their impressive curves, embrace of  light, and profound relationship to their surroundings - made him an icon. Not just in Brazil, but the world.

The Curate Award recognizes that we are all curators. Everything we choose and collect to surround us has meaning. Great curatorial expressions and ideas on how to exhibit can be communicated in all artistic forms and media, by anyone, whether in the art world or not. Participation in the competition is not limited to aspiring or established curators; anyone with a great concept is encouraged to enter.

Tyler Architecture at Temple University in Philadelphia focuses on design in the contexts of culture, technology, and stewardship of the built and natural environment. Its programs stress critical inquiry and innovation as part of the creative process, teaching students how to intervene in the physical world through carefully considered acts of making.

The Department engages the city, exploring and addressing the ethical and social dimensions of architecture and the urban environment. Through this engagement, it seeks to develop an ethos of responsibility in the students, preparing them to become effective leaders in practices and discourses surrounding the complex global and local issues of our time.

More after the break.

The Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) has announced the President’s Medals Student Awards at a special event in London. The awards, known to be the world's most prestigious awards in architectural education, were inaugurated in 1836 and are therefore the institutes oldest award (even older than the RIBA Gold Medal). Three medals - the Bronze for a Part I student, the Silver for a Part II student, and the Dissertation Medal - are awarded to "promote excellence in the study of architecture [and] to reward talent and to encourage architectural debate worldwide."

Around 300 schools of architecture from over 60 countries were invited to nominate design projects and dissertations by their students, of which students of the Bartlett School of Architecture at University College London won all of this year's primary awards.

The winners of the 2013 AR+D Awards for Emerging Architecture have been announced! The awards, presented by The Architectural Review and now in its 15th year, have seen "projects from locales as diverse as Bloomsbury and the Himalayas." This year over 350 entries were discussed by four esteemed judges, including Sir Peter Cook, and have led to four winners who will share a prize fund of £10,000. See both the four winning entries and the ten highly commended schemes after the break...

In collaboration with the Union of Estonian Architects, the Arvo Pärt Centre has announced a two-stage competition for designing a building for the Arvo Pärt Centre in Laulasmaa, near Tallinn. The aim of the competition is to find the best architectural solution for the building, which will house the Arvo Pärt archive at its core.

The competition will be carried out in two stages. The deadline for the first stage is 22 January 2014, when the applications for participating need to be submitted. The second stage will see up to 20 architect teams complete design concepts with technical drawings.

The total prize fund for the two-stage competition is 30,000 euros, and the final results will be announced on 20 June 2014. More after the break.

As part of their annual research for the World Architecture Top 100, Building Design (BD) has compiled a list of which architects are most admired by their colleagues from across the globe. Last year's results were somewhat predictable, with Foster + Partners leading and Renzo Piano's Building Workshop and Herzog + de Meuron close behind. According to BD, "this year saw a trend towards more commercial names."

This year's "most admired" list includes:

Dubai has been selected as the host city for the Expo 2020, besting bids from Turkey, Brazil and Russia. This means HOK will now move forward as a lead designer by refining the site's 438-hectare master plan, which was inspired by Dubai’s “Connecting Minds, Creating the Future” Expo theme.

"This win is a testament to the commitment of the UAE citizens to create a prosperous future for their country and region," said Daniel Hajjar, HOK's managing principal in Dubai. "We are proud to have been the lead designer of the Expo site and to be associated with producing a winning entry for the UAE so that this great country can continue to boost its reputation on a global stage."

More than 25 million is expected to attend during the Expo’s short, six-month duration. This will be the first time a Middle Eastern city to host this international exhibition in its 160-year history. Read on for more details on HOK's design.

Known for his superior design and unparalleled craftsmanship, the 2009 Pritzker Laureate and 2013 RIBA Gold Medal Award winner, Peter Zumthor, was recently invited to speak at the School of Architecture in Tel Aviv University. In a lecture titled “Presence in Architecture - Seven Personal Observations,” Zumthor shared some of the inspirations behind his greatest projects, giving us insight into his poetic, intelligent, (and some might say) “nearly divine” mind.

Zumthor’s Seven Points on “Presence,” after the break...

+ 15

Solar panels are often an added bonus in design, becoming a means to an end. But why shouldn't they be the star of the show? A recent article in Metropolis Magazine shows off the Kagoshima Nanatsujima Mega Solar Power Plant, the largest solar facility in Japan. A symbolic response to the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster, the power plant is but one project in Japan's transition into one of the fastest growing solar markets in the world. Check out the full story here.

Crossrail, "the largest infrastructure project in Europe, costing more, for example, than the London Olympics", has been slowly winding it's way beneath London for years. Getting access to the labyrinthine collection of underground tunnels and volumes, Rowan Moore of The Observer says that - despite the superficial furore surrounding it - this £5 billion undertaking will eventually be worth it: alongside the tunnels and tracks will be three million square feet ("or about six Gherkins") of commercial development, and one million square feet of 'public realm'.

Después del incendio, el futuro del Memorial de América Latina de Oscar Niemeyer, es incierto.

De acuerdo con el presidente del Memorial, João Batista de Andrade, se está esperando que terminen las investigaciones del Departamento de Bomberos y la Policía antes de determinar qué acción se tomará: "Tenemos que saber cuál es el impacto del fuego en la estructura del edificio. Si tenemos que demoler, lamentablemente, tendrá que hacerse. Si la seguridad lo requiere, vamos a demoler".

Más detalles, después de la pausa...

+ 8