Architecture News

In one of the largest mergers ever to occur in the architecture world, world renowned Danish firm Schmidt Hammer Lassen Architects has joined Perkins+Will in a strategic global partnership aimed at extending the firms’ international reach and reinforcing a commitment to sustainability and design excellence.

Founded in 1986, Schmidt Hammer Lassen has grown to become one of Scandinavia's most prominent and reputable practices, completing projects such as the Dokk1 Library and ARoS Museum of Art in Aarhus, Denmark; the Halifax Central Library in Nova Scotia, Canada; and The Black Diamond, the extension to the Royal Library in Copenhagen. The firm had a particularly successful 2017, winning competitions for projects in locations as wide ranging as Shanghai, Melbourne, Copenhagen, and Detroit.

University of Arkansas students are abuzz about the latest addition their university: Stadium Drive Residence Halls. Currently, under construction, the new 202,027 square foot residence halls are the nation’s first large-scale, mass timber higher ed residence hall project and living learning setting. The design collaborative behind the project is led by Boston-based Leers Weinzapfel Associates, Modus Studio in Fayetteville, Arkansas, Mackey Mitchell Architects in St. Louis, and Philadelphia landscape and urban design firm, OLIN.

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Studio Gang has revealed concept designs for their campus master plan for the California College of the Arts (CCA) in San Francisco. Currently split between facilities in San Francisco and Oakland, the new unified campus will bring together the school’s various art and design programs into one “vibrant indoor-outdoor environment.”

The design concepts aims to become a “highly sustainable model for the future of creative practices,” arranging programs into upper and lower ground levels to encourage interaction and cross-departmental osmosis. 

Update 1/23/18: The jury for the competition has been announced as the architects arrive on site for walkthroughs.

Six star-studded teams have been shortlisted in the Adelaide Contemporary International Design Competition, which is seeking to create a new contemporary art museum and public sculpture park on a significant site near the University of Adelaide and the Adelaide Botanic Garden in Adelaide, Australia.

Selected from 107 teams made up of over 500 individual firms, the six shortlisted teams were chosen through the “outstanding quality” of their initial submissions and for the complementary strengths of each of the team members.

 “This is an extraordinarily rich list of diverse creative partnerships of architects looking to complement their talents by working with both peers and smaller talented practices. The final decision was very demanding but these are the teams that convinced us through the outstanding quality of their submissions,” said Nick Mitzevich, Director, Art Gallery of South Australia.

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In a country famous for its below sea level towns, combating flooding has been a key challenge for Dutch designers for centuries, resulting in the construction of numerous dikes, levees and seawalls across the country. But when tasked with creating a new pedestrian link across an urban river park in Nijmegen, NEXT Architects and H+N+S Landscape Architects decided to try a different approach: to celebrate the natural event by designing a stepping stone bridge that only becomes useful in high water conditions.

Known as the Zalige Bridge, the structure was completed in March 2016, but only just was given the opportunity to prove itself in January 2018, when water levels in the park rose to 12 m NAP+, the highest point in 15 years.

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In 2017, ArchDaily went from strength to strength, as we continued to grow our audience around the globe. Last year we reached more people than ever before, with increases being particularly notable in developing countries. This means that ArchDaily's community of readers is more diverse than ever before

2017 was a defining year for ArchDaily. The change and uncertainty around the globe which emerged during the past year allowed us to double down on our mission to provide information, knowledge, and tools to architects, leveling the access to architectural knowledge and enabling a more diverse, equitable profession. As part of this, we now have a renewed focus on data-driven decisions and crowdsourcing architecture's understanding of its own work. The flagship of this crowdsourcing effort has always been our annual Building of the Year awards.

Now, for the 9th consecutive year, we are tasking our readers with the responsibility of recognizing and rewarding the projects that are making an impact in the profession, with ArchDaily's 2018 Building of the Year Awards. By voting, you are part of an unbiased, distributed network of jurors and peers that has elevated the most relevant projects over the past eight years. Over the next two weeks, your collective intelligence will filter over 3,500 projects down to just 15 stand-outs—the best in each category on ArchDaily.

This is your chance to reward the architecture you love by nominating your favorite for the 2018 Building of the Year Awards!

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Amazon’s innovative, checkout-free convenience store concept, Amazon Go, has opened to the public in Seattle.

Located in the base of an existing Amazon office building, the 1,800-square-foot (167-square-meter) store offers grocery and convenience items. To begin shopping, customers simply scan an Amazon Go smartphone app and pass through a turnstile.

Using machine learning, computer vision and artificial intelligence technologies (incorporated into the software powering cameras and weight sensors), the store can then track the actions of customers as they remove items from the shelves, creating a virtual shopping list as they go. When a customer is finished shopping, they simply exit the store through the turnstiles and the user’s Amazon account is automatically charged.

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Beoffice and HSY Architects’ competition-winning proposal for Bandırma Onyedi Eylül University Campus in Turkey represents a generation of knowledge that will flourish and support Bandırma’s innovation in industry and economy. The university will take an integrated approach to the region, blurring the boundary between campus and city with interactive spaces that can open up for flexible use.

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From the creators of Museum Of The History Of Polish Jews in Warsaw, comes a competition finalist proposal for the new Museum for the Defense and Siege of Leningrad in St. Petersburg. Lahdelma & Mahalmäki Architects, in collaboration with Ralph Appelbaum Associates, designed three main parts: the Thread of Life (museum and exhibitions), the Memorial of Heroes of Leningrad and the Square of Testimony. Thought to have the popular vote, this entry sought to redevelop and reconnect the city of to the park and museum with its Neo-Classical grid.

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Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP) has launched the United States’ first-ever Ph. D in Historic Preservation. GSAPP is ranked within the top 10 architecture graduate schools in the US in the latest figures for 2017. It’s leadership in learning and experimental practice is about to be further enhanced by the introduction of the course.

Foster + Partners has revealed designs for the new headquarters of the PGA TOUR to be located in Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida. Located on a large freshwater lake at the TPC at Sawgrass resort, the 187,000-square-foot building will create an “uplifting and inspiring” environment for employees and visitors through its transparent walls, lush greenery and all-encompassing roof structure.

Schmidt Hammer Lassen Architects has revealed the design of a new campus complex for the Norwegian Geotechnical Institute, Norway’s largest geotechnical specialist community, to be built in Northern Oslo.

The 30,000-square-meter (323,000-square-foot) complex will be comprised of two new buildings linked by a common entrance podium and a series of elevated walk- and bikeways. Aimed at housing up to 300 new employees, the NGI is envisioned as a new “knowledge axis” that will spawn increased pedestrian and bicycle traffic in the coming years.

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Amazon has announced the list of 20 finalists in the running to become the new home city for their highly hyped second headquarters, known as HQ2.

The tech company, based in Seattle, selected the finalists from more than 238 applications from cities located in Mexico, Canada and the United States, each hoping to raise their global profile and jump start their individual economies with the 50,000 new jobs the company says it would create.

The finalist cities include:

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Apple has announced plans to open a second U.S. campus as part of a $30 billion plan to invest in United States operations over the next 5 years.

Apple’s new Foster + Partners-designed headquarters, known as Apple Park, opened last year.

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel has announced the figures for the 2017 Chicago Architecture Biennial, which closed its four month run on Sunday, January 7th.

The second edition of the event, helmed by Artistic Director Sharon Johnston and Mark Lee, was able to match the success of the inaugural edition, seeing 554,866 visitors from around the world.

Loose or corroded joints have been identified as the likely culprit of the collapse of a mezzanine floor at Jarkarta’s Indonesia Stock Exchange on Monday that resulted in injuries to more than 70 people.

According to the Australian Broadcasting Company, a preliminary report released by the Indonesian Ministry of Public Works based on interviews with building management and analysis of CCTV footage found that the structure had possibly failed as a result of weak shear joints from “loose or corroded bolts.”

This scenario could have caused the mezzanine to be vulnerable to high weight concentrations, such as occurred Monday when nearly 100 visiting university students were gathered on the platform.