About a decade's passed since Foster+Partners won the competition to re-design Avery Fisher Hall (as part of Lincoln Center's campus-wide re-haul, designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro), and the famous music hall is finally ready to go through with it - just not necessarily with Foster+Partners.

After Lincoln Center and the New York Philharmonic failed to raise the $300 million they needed to cover construction costs, and due to concerns that displacing the orchestra would jeopardize potential revenue, Foster+Partners' plans languished. However, the Philharmonic is now under new leadership, and its young directors are anxious to transform the conventional music hall, hence why they've decided to solicit new proposals for the building.

As the Orchestra's new executive eirector, Matthew VanBesien, told the New York Times: “If you’re not thinking about the way in which our art form and music and audiences are evolving, you’re not serving the art form long term. You really want to build this next great hall in a new way, to do the kinds of things you maybe are doing but want to do in a more compelling way or maybe can’t even imagine yet.”

More info about the proposal for the new Avery Fisher Hall, after the break...

SANAA has just unveiled their plans for the Bocconi University Campus in Milan, Italy. The design features various undulating structures, forming connective inner courtyards, that wind their way across a 17,500 square meter green space open to both students and neighborhood residents.

According to Paola Nicolin, a professor at Bocconi and writer for Domus, the University is a "playground" for the imagination, using "non-hierarchic compositional elements" to establish a relationship between the campus' organic forms and the human lives which inhabit it. In Nicolin's words, the project "speaks of transparency, empathy for nature, and far-sightedness."

More images and info on the project, after the break...

Rob Ford, the Toronto Mayor famous for making enemies of "urban thinkers, designers and practitioners," has been ousted from office for violating a conflict-of-interest act (he spoke and voted on a matter which allowed his own Football Foundation to financially benefit).

There’s a saying that goes “Those who can’t do, teach.” But many could also claim: “Those who can’t do, critique.” Criticism, particularly Architecture Criticism, tends to get a bad rap for being subjective, impenetrable, and - ultimately - useless. But Paul Goldberger, a champion of the craft, would disagree.

In his acceptance speech for the Vincent Scully Prize earlier this month, Goldberger, the long-time architecture critic for The New York Times and current contributor to Vanity Fair, suggests that Architectural Criticism isn’t just vital - but more important than ever before.

With the advent of visually-oriented social media like Twitter, Pinterest, and Tumblr, it’s never been easier for the architectural layman to observe, share, and consume architecture. However, in the midst of this hyper-flow of image intake, Goldberger argues, meaning gets lost. 

That’s where the critic comes in.

JDS Architects and 4 other national/international firms have been shortlisted to design a Master Plan for Town Branch Commons in Lexington, Kentucky.

The Competition, which attracted over 23 proposals, poses an interesting challenge: to bring the Town Branch Creek, which has been underground for over 100 years, to the surface (an idea originally proposed in 2011 by architect Gary Bates and the Norway-based firm Space Group), and redesign the Commons as a two-mile linear stretch of green space to connect the eastern and western sections of downtown Lexington.

Lexington's Downton Development Authority and the dean of University of Kentucky's College of Design, Michael Speaks, were floored by the quality of the proposals they received - a fact Speaks attributes to Jeanne Gang's influence; the well-known architect has designed two plans in Lexington and lectured there recently. As Speaks told Kentucky.com, "Firms have heard that Lexington is friendly to good design, that the mayor is knowledgeable and wants good design."

Find out which other firms have been shortlisted, after the break...

Despite reports that construction firm Broad Sustainable Building (BSB), a subsidiary of Broad Group, could not complete its 220-story Sky City tower in 90 days, the company's senior VP Juliet Jiang has announced that the skyscraper "will go on as planned with the completion of five storeys a day."

Thus, rather than in seven months, the world's tallest tower (838 m; 2,750 ft) will be finished in three - topping out at the end of March 2013.

As we've discussed before here on ArchDaily, the tower could truly be revolutionary in China; Broad Group's 95% prefabricated modular technology, which is responsible for the incredible rate of construction, is also radically environmentally-friendly, earthquake-safe, and cost-effective. In fact, Sky City, designed by engineers who worked on the Burj Khalifa, will cost a tenth of that famous skyscraper (only $1,500 per square meter) - and take a twentieth of the time to build.

More info on the world's tallest tower, after the break...

David Chipperfield, the curator of the Architecture Exhibition at this year's Venice Biennale, Common Ground (which wraps up this weekend), will be chatting live this Friday to offer his final two cents on the Exhibition's legacy. 

According to the global affairs magazine Monocle, Britain's cultural cache is at an all-time high.

The magazine's latest annual Soft Power Survey (which measures the "Soft Power" of a country, or "the ways in which a nation can shape the world without relying on financial muscle and overwhelming force") placed the UK as the world's greatest cultural influencer, dethroning the US for the first time.

The magazine cites the UK's action-packed year, which included the Queen's Jubilee, the success of pop-culture phenomena (like Adele and James Bond), and the Summer Olympic Games, as the catalyst which put them on top.

But let's not underestimate the role that architecture has played as a symbol of Britain's cultural import. Despite financial difficulties (which have put London's burgeoning skyline in doubt), the year was nevertheless a good one for Britain's architecture and architects - Renzo Piano's controversial Shard hogged the spotlight in London's Olympic coverage; Dame Zaha Hadid, Glamour's Woman of the Year, has been non-stop in the media thanks to her Aquatics Centre and Galaxy Soho; and, to top it off, British megafirm Foster + Partners will soon be responsible for many of New York's latest skyscrapers. Talk about the Empire striking back.

Find out who else made the list of most influential countries, after the break...

After being hospitalized, recovering, being hospitalized again, and then making a near-full recovery (even working from his hospital bed), famed Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer has now taken a sharp turn for the worst.

Pritzker-Prize Laureate Remment Lucas Koolhaas (you probably know him as "Rem") turns 68 today. The co-founder of one of the world's most renowned architecture firms, OMA, and an urban-planner/philosopher whose theories have provoked admiration (and ire) for over thirty years, Koolhaas is undeniably one of a kind.

It's only been a few weeks since she turned 62 but it's already shaping up to be Zaha Hadid's year. Yesterday, she was announced winner of the Japan National Stadium Competition earlier this week, her latest US project, the Eli & Edythe Broad Museum opened; and the beginning of the month saw much fanfare and frenzy surrounding her extraordinary work in Beijing: Galaxy Soho .
We've already brought you images and video of the project, but the latest images from Hufton + Crow truly allow you to experience Galaxy Soho - in all its curvaceous glory - like never before.Check out all the latest images of Zaha Hadid's Galaxy Soho, after the break...

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Fresh from the acclaimed openings of the Galaxy Soho in Beijing and the Eli & Edythe Broad Museum in the US, Dame Zaha Hadid can now add a new coveted project to her name.

Beating out 10 other finalists (including Populous, a firm known for their sports architecture, as well as Japanese heavyweights, such as Toyo Ito and SANAA), Zaha Hadid Architects were chosen by Tadao Ando and the Japan Sports Council to design the new Japan National Stadium. As Ando described the decision-process: “Our wish is to see a stadium designed by someone who shares this earth, with wisdom and technology that looks to the future of out planet.”

The new 80,000-seat stadium will replace the existing Kasumigaoka National Stadium in Tokyo. It will host the 2019 Rugby World Cup and potentially be the main sporting venue for the 2020 Olympic Games (if Japan's bid is selected). It will also be offered to FIFA as a venue for World Cup football matches.

The Stadium is scheduled for completion in 2018.

More images, after the break...

If you thought "Architecture for Dogs," the project in which world-class architects design "sincere architectural structures" for dogs, couldn't get any cuter, you were very, very wrong.

Today, the project's interactive web site, which allows viewers to browse each of the architect's designs and then download the free blueprints to make them on their own, launched. The site, designed by Yugo Nakamura, the web designer for Uniqlo, features an adorable introductory video, complete with scampering puppies, which imparts the site's mission: "brining a new kind of joy to the relationship between dogs and humans."

More info and Images on "Architecture for Dogs," after the break...