Architecture News

Álvaro Siza's extensive personal archive of built and unbuilt projects is going online with free access, thanks to the collaboration between three institutions – the Serralves Foundation in Oporto, the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon and the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) in Montreal.

Siza donated his archive to the three institutions in 2014, and after three years of archival work, the first batch of entries are set for public viewing.

Japanese architect Kazuyo Sejima, co-founder of Tokyo-based SANAA, has been appointed as the newest member of the Pritzker Prize Jury.

Sejima, the 2010 Pritzker Prize co-laureate, will help to decide the recipient of the 2018 Prize, the 40th edition of what has become known as the architecture world’s most prestigious honor.

Videos

An airplane that skidded off the runway in Trabzon, Turkey, earlier this month (with no injuries) may soon be repurposed into a library for the city.

Five days after the plane was removed from its cliffside perch, Trabzon Mayor Orhan Fevzi Gümrükçüoğlu has reached out to the general manager of airline involved in the incident, Pegasus Airlines, to ask if they will donate the plane as a gift with the condition that it will be used as a library space, explaining that “keeping it here will also erase the bad memories attached to the plane.”

The Harvard Graduate School of Design’s popular free online course, The Architectural Imagination, has returned for 2018, again offering anyone across the globe the opportunity to study the fundamentals of architecture from one of the world’s foremost design schools at absolutely no cost.

Led by professors Erika Naginski, Antoine Picon, and K. Michael Hays, alongside PhD student Lisa Haber-Thomson, the 10-week course will cover topics ranging from learning to “read” buildings as cultural expression to technical drawing and modeling exercises.

Herzog & de Meuron’s design for the new flagship building of the Royal College of Art’s Battersea campus has been granted planning approval by Wandsworth Council. Unveiled last fall, the £108 million building will mark an “important step” in the evolution of the RCA into a STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Mathematics)-focused postgraduate university.

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Stanford University experts digitally assembled what is considered the largest world map produced in the 16th-century. The representation of the world of 1587 by the Milanese cartographer Urbano Monte was divided into 60 pages and published in atlas form, but with clear instructions on how to reassemble it.

David Rumsey, director of the university's historical map collection, acquired the map from a historian in 2017. The publication has only one other handwritten copy in the world and has never been assembled in map form.

A proposal for the 'NaTian' Cup International Design Competition, "The Gentle Giant" from Stefano Corbo Studio acts as a continuation of the existing bridge providing a unique path for the public, as well as a visual link to the surrounding Flower Farm area. The proposed landmark combines the vertical presence of Chinese "Pagodas and Porcelain Towers" with the dynamic geometry of the Great Wall, whose powerful arrangement has a direct relationship to its changing topography.

Indian design and fabrication studio, MuseLAB creates customized furniture and products. Their 2017 creations include to-scale miniature architectural wall hooks. These functional household items were inspired by the works of Oscar Niemeyer, Le Corbusier, Charles Correa, Michael Graves, and others.

Jurors looked for submissions which were not only aesthetic but also pushed the perceived limitations of wood construction.

A mirror-clad shopping mall has been awarded the first prize for its innovative materiality and strong connection to the city in the “2017 Unbelievable Challenge” architectural design competition. “Unwrapped”, submitted by Ben Feicht, a recent graduate of the University of Oregon, was chosen as the winner out of the proposals from 22 different countries. Three other projects were awarded as runner-up.

Take a closer look at the winning design, after the break.  

With a growing number of states choosing to rollback professional architectural licensure requirements, the American Institute of Architects (AIA) has issued a “Where We Stand” statement calling for the reinforcement of the practice, which they believe stand to “protect the health, safety and welfare of the public and shield consumers from unqualified practitioners.”

According to the AIA, over the past 5 years, legislative or executive actions have been taken in at least 25 states to impose the “least restrictive regulations” for professional licensure, with several states recommending the elimination of all licenses in the state.

The 2018 DAM Preis for the best building in Germany has been been awarded to bogevischs buero and SHAG Schindler Hable Architekten for their visionary residential housing project wagnisART in Munich. Selected from a list of 4 finalists, the project was lauded by the jury for setting new “social, architectural, and urban planning standards” in becoming a model for future residential housing projects in Germany.

The DAM Preis for Architecture in Germany was established by Deutsches Architekturmuseum in 2007 to honor outstanding buildings in Germany. Previous winners of the annual award include the European Hansemuseum in Lubeck by Studio Andreas Heller (2017), the renovation of the Neues Museum by David Chipperfield Architects (2010) and the Kolumba Museum by Atelier Peter Zumthor (2008).

Learn more about the winner and see a selection of shortlisted and finalist projects below.

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Freelon Adjaye Bond/SmithGroup’s Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington D.C. has been selected as the winner of the Beazley Design of the Year for 2017.

Presented by the Design Museum in London, the award is given to the project that best meets the criteria of design that “promotes or delivers change, enables access, extends design practice or captures the spirit of the year.”

See more from the overall winner and each of the category winners, below.

Despite 3 years of community input and redesign, BIG’s plans for the new Smithsonian Institution Campus Master Plan in Washington, D.C., has been met with skepticism from the Commission of Fine Arts, one of the two federal agencies charged with approving the plan.

The collaboration of Aranda\Lasch + Marcelo Coelho has been selected as the winners of this year’s Times Square Valentine Heart Design competition for their 3D-printed proposal, Window to the Heart.

Envisioned as the “world’s largest lens,” the installation was in response to its location within one of the world’s most instagrammed places, Times Square. The 12-foot-diameter Fresnel lens, designed with 3D-printing manufacturer Formlabs and structural engineer Laufs Engineering Design, will capture the image of the square within the heart-shaped window at its center, bending and distorting the surround myriad lights and colors.

Steven Holl Architects, in collaboration with Art-group Kamen, has been selected as the winners of an international competition to design a new mixed-use residential development in the Tushino district of Moscow, Russia, beating out proposals from Fuksas Architecture, Zaha Hadid Architects, Mad Global, and Tsimailo, Lyashenko & Partners.

Comprising housing, social spaces and educational facilities, the design of the complex draws inspiration from its historic site, a former paratrooper airfield. In response, Steven Holl Architects proposed a completely new building typology, “Parachute Hybrids,” which “combines residential bar and slab structures with supplemental programming suspended in sections above, like parachutes frozen in the sky.”

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New renderings have been revealed of Gehry Partners’ Grand Avenue Project as construction is finally set to begin this fall. Located across from Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall in downtown Los Angeles, the development now known as The Grand will offer up retail, entertainment and residences within two blocky, terracing towers.

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