On the 61st anniversary of Ghana’s independence, President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo has unveiled plans for a New National Cathedral of Ghana to be built in the capital city of Accra. Led by British-Ghanaian architect David Adjaye of Adjaye Associates, the design is envisioned as a “physical embodiment of unity, harmony and spirituality” where people of all faiths will be welcome to gather and practice their faith.
Hide & Seek by Jennifer Newsom and Tom Carruthers of Dream The Combine, in collaboration with Clayton Binkley of ARUP, has been selected as the winner of the 2018 MoMA PS1 Young Architects Program. Jennifer Newsom and Tom Carruthers were selected from a shortlist of five young firms unveiled in November.
Inspired by “the jostle of relationships found in the contemporary city,” Hide & Seek will feature a landscape of kinetic, responsive elements that connect the courtyards of the MoMA PS1 site to its surrounding streets.
The Chicago Architecture Biennial has announced the selection of writer and curator Yesomi Umolu as Artistic Director for the event’s 2019 edition.
Currently holding the position of Exhibitions Curator at the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts at the University of Chicago, Umolu draws from her background in architectural design and curatorial studies in creating exhibitions that explore the politics of the built environment. Recent projects include Kapwani Kiwanga: The sum and its parts, The Land Grant: Forest Law, and The Museum of Non Participation: The New Deal.
“The Nobel Prize in Architecture.” “The profession’s highest honor.” These are some of the terms used to describe the Pritzker Prize. One day before the 2018 Pritzker Prize winner is to be revealed, ArchDaily’s editors discuss whether the prize still lives up to its hype.
The Architectural Association has announced that Eva Franch I Gilabert has been selected as their new Director, following a public months-long search to replace former Director Brett Steele and interim Director Samantha Hardingham.
The AA School Community, consisting of students, staff and Council members, selected Franch i Gilabert from a shortlist of 3 candidates by a majority vote of 67%, the highest percentage received in a contested election since 1990. Over 1,000 total ballots were cast.
Nearly 8 months after the devastating fire at London’s Grenfell Tower resulted in the loss of 71 lives, the UK government has announced that they will be working together with the tower’s survivors, families and community to determine the future of the Grenfell Tower site.
A government document released with the announcement outlines the guiding principles for handling the future of the site and its memory. According to the document, the most likely results will be an on-site memorial and the renaming of the nearby Latimer Road station of the London Underground:
As part of our 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale coverage we present the proposal for the Saudi Arabia Pavilion. Below, the participants describe their contribution in their own words.
The first Saudi participation at the International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia will be located in the Arsenale and will feature an exhibition commissioned by the Misk Art Institute under the theme of “Un/Design.”
The hyperrealistic representation of architecture is not a new concept due to the ubiquity of tools that offer the possibility of creating perplexing images with photographs. However, those who defend the expressive capacity of hand drawings have found ways to take advantage of the digital tools of the last decades to represent their architectural projects.
A new group of young Mexican architects is committed to a form of representation that relies on tools from our era, simultaneously taking up concepts from the sixties and seventies, where the technique of collage made it possible to face the frustrating reality that took place at the time to represent the utopias thought up by architects.
Architecture photographer Marc Goodwin is continually adding to his world atlas of architecture offices. While photographing studios in Barcelona, Goodwin spent a little extra time at the post-World War I cement factory Ricardo Bofill transformed into his studio, gardens, and residence. After the cement-filled silos were uncovered, Bofill defined a new structure and program for his architectural fortress.
As part of our 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale coverage we present the proposal for the Finnish Pavilion. Below, the participants describe their contribution in their own words.
Finland’s representation at the 16th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia responds to the theme "Freespace" by transforming the Alvar Aalto Pavilion of Finland into a temporary library space.
Earlier this month, in a conference held by the City of Arts and Sciences (Valencia) the winner of a private architecture competition to build the new CaixaForum Valencia was announced. The future cultural center in the Spanish city will be located inside one of Santiago Calatrava's building.
Of the nine proposals presented, architect Enric Ruiz-Geli (Figueres, 1968) from Studio Cloud 9 was chosen as the winner. An investment of around 18 million euros is expected to be needed to make the CaixaForum Valencia project a reality. In addition, about 5 million euros will be allocated annually for the maintenance, programming and operation of the center.
The argument, made by architectural historian Charles Jencks in the introduction for the recently released book Postmodern Design Complete, that Postmodern styles never truly left the architectural profession is stronger than ever. The movement from the late 70s and 80s which began as a reaction against the utopian canon of modernism has recently been re-entering the architecture scene and defining our present moment of architectural culture.
This brings up an important question: What is the current movement of architecture? And what came directly after postmodernism? If anything, it was an immediate cry of “No more Po-Mo,” followed recently by a wave of “save Po-Mo” perhaps best demonstrated by the rallying to save Philip Johnson’s AT&T Tower from a Snøhetta makeover. Even Norman Foster claimed that although he was never a fan of the postmodern movement, he understood its importance in architectural history. Postmodernism is making its recursive return with Stirling-esque rule-breaking jokes and pictorial appearances.
Currently under construction in Chongqing, China, Moshe Safdie's Raffles City Chongqing features an extraordinary engineering feat of erecting a 300 meter long “horizontal skyscraper” above four 250 meter high towers. An extensive urban district set at the meeting point between the Yangtze and Jialing rivers once constructed Raffles City Chongqing will hold the world record of the highest sky bridge linking the towers.
LEGO is going green. The Danish company has announced that they have begun production on a range of pieces made from a plant-based plastic sourced from sugarcane.
As a nod to their plant-based origins, the first sustainable pieces will take the form of LEGO botanical elements such as leaves, bushes and trees.
Two South American architects have been selected as the winners of The Architectural Review and The Architects’ Journal’s 2018 Women in Architecture awards. This year’s top prize, Architect of the Year, has been awarded to Peruvian architect Sandra Barclay, while Paraguayan architect Gloria Cabral has been selected as the winner of the Moira Gemmill Prize for Emerging Architecture, with both being recognized by the jury for their mastery of materials.
At a press conference earlier today, curators of the 2018 Venice Biennale Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara of Grafton Architects revealed more information about this year's upcoming event, to be hosted from May 26th to November 25th. Building on the thematic concept the duo presented last June—“Freespace”—the event will feature a main exhibition in the Central Pavilion of the Giardini and the Arsenale featuring work by 71 participants, while two Special Sections will feature a total of 29 further participants. Elsewhere, 65 national pavilions will present contributions from around the world, including 7 first-time participants: Antigua & Barbuda, Saudi Arabia, Guatemala, Lebanon, Mongolia, Pakistan and the Holy See.
Fosun Group hired Woods Bagot to transform commercial planning of Dahua, an 82-year-old historic textile mill, into China’s next retail and entertainment district. Located in Xi’an’s urban center, the site sits next to Daming Palace, the Tang Dynasty’s royal residence and a national heritage site which attracts thousands of tourists each year.
As part of our 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale coverage we present the proposal for the UAE Pavilion. Below, the participants describe their contribution in their own words.
The National Pavilion UAE will present “Lifescapes Beyond Bigness,” an exhibition exploring human-scale architectural landscapes, at the 2018 Venice Biennale. The exhibition aims to highlight the role of architecture and urban design in forming the choreography of people’s daily routines. It particularly investigates the role of ‘quotidian’ (every day) landscapes in accommodating, enhancing, and facilitating social activities across different places in the UAE.
