Digital technology touches nearly everyone’s life. Be it delivered through cell phones, home entertainment devices, ATMs, storefronts or countless other means, digital design is big business and Robert Miles Kemp is at the forefront of that exploding movement.

The son of a carpenter and general contractor, Kemp visited job sites from the time he was small. At nine years old, his father gave him the challenge of designing a structure for a neighbor, which was subsequently built. Kemp loved both the process and the end product. Thus began a career in architecture. More after the break.

According to Derek Thompson’s article for The Atlantic, the Brookings Institute recently published a ranking of the world’s 200 largest metropolitan economies. The Global MetroMonitor division of the Brookings Institute, published the report on January 2012. In this brief synopsis, he reveals the “10 Fastest-Growing (and Fastest-Declining) Cities in the World”. Among the fastest growing is Santiago, Chile, the only Latin American country in the top 10. The top 10 is primarily populated by Asian countries – China, Turkey and Saudi Arabia all have multiple cities in on the list. Conversly, the tail end of the list is dominated by Western European countries most affected by the economic downturn, with just two cities from the US – Sacramento, California and Richmond, Virginia.

The survey primarily focuses on their economic development comparing income and job growth, to say nothing of the cultural, societal, and political circumstances which may or may not be contributing the dynamism of each city’s economy. Thompson points out, two of the fastest growing cities in the world, Izmir, Turkey and Santiago, Chile are also among the poorest. Developing countries have the most to gain as they join the global economy but it may still be sometime before the economic growth balances a comfortable standard of living. Watch the interview with Alan Berube from MetroMonitor.

With all of that in mind, follow us after the break for a look at the list.

The Pilgrimage Center at Røldal Stave Church, designed by Lund+Slaatto Architects, seeks to reconcile a complex program under the same roof. The building is both a defined end point for the pilgrims and tourists and a gathering place for the locals. The building is present as an object, while remaining deferential to the stave church and the cemetery. More images and architects’ description after the break.

Throughout the past year we have been keeping you updated on the events leading up to the commencement of the Xi’an International Horticultural Expo which ran from May through October 2011 and welcomed over 15 million visitors during its 178-day run. As the largest and best attended international horticultural event of 2011, the Expo offered architects and landscape architects the unique opportunity to design for a traditional event model which became the precedent for the world’s fairs of the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries. To define the expo’s primary experience, the organizers held an international competition, selecting the “Flowing Gardens” project by London-based design firm Plasma Studio and GroundLab. Developed in collaboration with the local landscape practice LAUR Studio, “Flowing Gardens” is comprised of a 37 hectare master plan, including a 5,000SM Creativity Pavilion, a 4,000SM Greenhouse, a 3,500SM Gate Building and various landscapes which run along an extended spine that delineates the site. The project initiated the redevelopment of a large area of Xi’an between the airport and the city’s ancient center, famous as the home of the Terracotta Army of the Qin Dynasty. More after the break.

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Starting today, through July 30, New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) will be running an exhibit featuring the proposals of five interdisciplinary studios that were asked to re-think and re-invent the future of housing in the midst of the foreclosure crisis that remains a threat to many Americans and their homes. Over the Summer of 2011, WORKac, MOS Architects, Visible Weather, Zago Architecture and Studio Gang Architects selected five “megaregions” across the country on which to speculate the form that housing could take: physically, socially and economically. Late this summer, ArchDaily has provided coverage while the work was in progress. Opening today, the results of those speculative efforts will be presented at the MoMA as part of an exhibit called Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream. The Open Studios exercise was organized by Barry Bergdoll, MoMA’s Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design, with Reinhold Martin, Director of Columbia University’s Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture.

Read on for more on the proposals and details about the exhibit.

Architecture professionals often agree that CAD applications, whether in the PC or Mac platforms, could use some help. Revit of course offers some dramatic improvements but not everyone uses it. So some Engineering faculty at Washington State University have come up with an alternative solution. The Virtual Reality and Computer Integrated Manufacturing Laboratory or VRCIM offers a unique solution for increasing the effectiveness of CAD-based design and visualization.

The approach is very simple: embed VR capabilities into CAD to improve the tools and effectiveness of CAD. Basically, we are discussing the ability to perform such simple tasks as visualization and tracking to complete haptics drawing within the CAD platform. This first step in improving CAD involves the construction end of projects using VR and CAD. Thus, one can envision the assembly and disassembly of projects using VR versions of mechanical tools such as wrenches and the like. And the functionality is easily adapted to haptic devices. And of course, the team has designed templates that can be easily implemented.

ShaGa studio, in collaboration with MaDG, shared with us their proposal for The Lantern, a new metro station and public arena for the future extension of Metro Line 1 in Sofia, Bulgaria. Shortlisted from over 130 entries in the Station20 competition, their design fluctuates between scales, creating a strong iconic image towards a southern public plaza while providing a soft landscape link as a northern station entrance. More images and architects’ description after the break.

Designed by BudCud, the Kyiv Islands masterplan proposal, one of the finalists in the open international urban competition, responds to the ‘genius loci’. In the wild area, it is humble and almost invisible, but where the islands make visual connection to the city, their project gets an urban manner. The areas of different nature preservation status were distinguished with the implementation of loops, stripes, paths and objects – micro islands that create networks. More images and architects’ description after the break.

The Oil Silo Home, designed by PinkCloud.DK, recycles existing empty oil silos by transforming them into affordable housing for families worldwide. It’s a 100% self-supporting housing solution for the post-oil world and as an adaptive-reuse design, it incurs extraordinarily low costs. It’s highly structurally stable, efficient to assemble and disassemble, and has the capacity for pre-fabrication and mass production. More images and architects’ description after the break.

Haptic Architects, in collaboration with Narud Stokke Wiig Architects & Planners, and Griff Arkitektur recently won the open international competition for the new airbaltic terminal at Riga International Airport in Latvia. Selected from 125 entries from 70 different countries, their design features a roof for the airbaltic terminal that is influenced by the gently undulating forms of the latvian landscape, with peaks and troughs responding to the structure’s internal configuration and passenger flows. More images and project description after the break.

“A Thousand Traps to Escape” is a temporary installation designed by 13 students from Laval University under Olivier Bourgeois in the Magdalen Islands in Quebec, Canada. The project builds on the collaboration of themes of architecture, art, landscape and installation in the creation of space based on simple materials, the landscape and “the basic rules of construction”. The “local material” chosen for this construction is the ubiquitous lobster trap made of wood and fishnet. Its formal simplicity allowed for an basic stacking technique that produced relatively complex visual results of transparencies and opacities.

Read on for more information on the development of this project.

Architect: Marlon Blackwell Architect Project Location: 2570 Old Missouri Road, Arkansas, USA Project Year: 2000 Photographs: Timothy Hursley, Richard Johnson

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The battle carries on as world-famous artist Christo fights for approval to construct a temporary work of art that will suspend 5.9 miles of silvery, luminous fabric panels high above the Arkansas River, along a 42-mile stretch between Salida and Cañon City in south-central Colorado. Over the River has been on the drawing boards for 20 years now, with over $7 million of Christo’s money invested into it with environmental studies, mock-ups, surveys from the air and wind tests.

In November, Christo received approval from the federal Bureau of Land Management, which owns 98 percent of the riverfront. This was a huge step forward in the project and now only a few more local permit approvals are standing in the way.

Continue reading for more.

Together, BIG + Times Square Alliance + Flatcut + Local Projects and Zumtobel celebrates Valentines Day with a BIG red pulsating heart in the middle of Times Square, New York. The 10-foot-tall heart pulsates as the 400 transparent, LED lit, acrylic tubes sway in the wind. Once people touch the heart-shaped sensor, the light grows brighter and the pulse beats faster. Joining hands with more people will increase the intensity of the heart.

“The heart reflects what Times Square is made of: people and light – the more people, the stronger the light,” Bjarke Ingels, Founder & Partner, BIG.

See the love with the video above and more images after the break.

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We recently came across an opportunity to work with a friend of ArchDaily to expand our Tokyo Architecture City Guide that we could not pass up. Carlo Fumarola shared with us his knowledge and photographs of Tokyo. Today, we bring you twelve buildings from his list. Check them out after the break.

Also be sure to check out the previous Tokyo City Guide with 12 additional buildings.

To check out other cities visit our world map or our Architecture City Guide page.

Architects are nothing if not romantic.

And, over the last few days, Architects across the world have stepped up and tweeted their affection. You can peer into their angsty souls by searching for the hashtag Twitter (which was started a few days ago by Bryant Turnage aka- @turnageb). Obviously, nothing says romance more than sleep deprivation and illusions of grandeur. So, this Valentines Day, we Architects are getting in touch with our sensitive side. Check out some of the softer sides of the profession HERE.

To commemorate the love-fest, I’ve assembled a few of  mine and Bryant Turnage’s quotes here. Feel free to print them out and give them to that special someone. And, please add your own in the comment section below, or tweet them with the hashtag #architectvalentines.

And, If you still need proof of the romantic inclinations of Architects, just ask “Architecture Ryan Gosling” (HERE).

Much love, & Happy Valentines, from the Architects.

more love from coffee with an architect after the break

DRDS recently won the international competition for South Korea’s Land and Housing Corporation. Located in Jinju, South Korea, the aim of their proposal is to create a sustainable campus with integrated green architectural design features for a new corporate headquarters building. The 65,000sm program consists of administrative offices, public services, welfare and cultural facilities that include sports facilities, exhibition hall, classrooms, broadcasting studios, library, credit union, cafeteria, child care and conference center. More images and architects’ description after the break.

Photographer Cristobal Palma shared with us the extended version of his video of the Xi’an Expo, a project by Plasma Studio + GroundLab that we saw during several stages, from the award winning entry in 2009, to conceptual design and opening, when it was visited by more than 200,000 people on the first weekend.

The Expo embodies the idea of transformation as the site was formerly a sandpit where the water was severely degraded during the 1980s. Efforts over the past two decades have restored the ecosystem and now the Expo is able to demonstrate what can be accomplished through the use of the most advanced technology, ideas, and materials, as seen on the video. As we reported earlier, the 37 ha complex includes three buildings that are interconnected with a dynamic landscape of unfolding paths and networks of water, circulation and foliage.

More videos by Cristobal Palma at ArchDaily:

Landscape architect, James Corner, has a way of not only designing captivating landscapes, but making places where people want to be. While thousands have experienced his transformation of New York’s industrial rail line, Corner’s impact is also evident in major metropolises on an international level as his competition entries and built work inspire a sense of urban renewal and restore confidence in their settings. In fact, Fast Company has recently named James Corner Field Operations as one of 50 most innovative companies of the world for “creating intimate green spaces out of industrial urban blight.”

More about JCFO after the break.

The Department of Landscape Architecture at Penn State is announcing a call for the inaugural A.E. Bye / Landscape Architecture Archives Research Fellow for the calendar year 2012. The Fellowship provides a $2,500 stipend for a minimum of one week of archival research in the Eberly Family Special Collections Library at Penn State’s University Park campus in State College, Pennsylvania. The records (drawings, papers, photographs, and videos) of the celebrated twentieth-century American landscape architect A. E. Bye ( as well as those of landscape architects John Bracken and Stuart Mertz) are held at Penn State and the deadline is March 7th, 2012. More information after the break.

The concept for the Father and Son skyscraper, designed by IAMZ Studio, is divided into three main elements including the shape, style and urban design along with green areas implemented into the design. The main reason for the skyscraper typology is to decrease the crowding in the capital Cairo. More images and architects’ description after the break.

A temporary pavilion in the public space for the Grenswerk Festival in Enschede, Netherlands, ‘Abondantus Gigantus’ was to be a meeting point and a stage for performances and exhibitions. Designed by LOOS.FM in 2011, is made up of so-called Legoblocks: concrete blocks that are very similar to the famous Lego bricks. The blocks are nondescript, yet they possess an industrial beauty. More images and architects’ description after the break.

Since 2007, controversy has been stirring due to the rising costs and delayed schedule of Herzog & de Meuron’s Elbphilharmonie concert hall in Hamburg, Germany. Recent reports state the court has approved the city of Hamburg’s €40 million lawsuit against the primary contractor HochTief, who has stopped working in four areas of the €600 million project this past November. HochTief blames the architect due to differences in its plans.

Continue reading for more.