Architecture News

Chilean architect Samuel Bravo has been selected as the winner of the Harvard University Graduate School of Design 2017 Wheelwright Prize, a $100,000 travel grant established to support “investigative approaches to contemporary design.”

Bravo’s research proposal, Projectless: Architecture of Informal Settlements, seeks to study the architecture of traditional and informal settlements, offering a contemporary revisiting of Bernard Rudofsky’s “architecture without architects” exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in 1964.

The design of the world’s tallest hybrid timber building, by Shigeru Ban Architects, has been revealed by Vancouver-based developer PortLiving. Named “Terrace House,” the project will be located in Vancouver’s Coal Harbour neighborhood, adjacent to the landmark-listed Evergreen Building, designed by late architect Arthur Erickson. The design of the “Terrace House” pays tribute to its neighbor, picking up the architectural language of triangular shapes, natural materials, and an abundance of greenery.

Moscow-based architecture practice Meganom has unveiled their design for a supertall luxury skyscraper in Manhattan. The parcel, on 262 Fifth Avenue is located in the city’s NoMad neighborhood near Madison Square Park. The site owner, Israeli developer Boris Kuzinez from Five Points Development, submitted plans for the project in September 2016. Kuzinez and Meganom have previously worked together on several projects, including the award-winning Tsvetnoy Central Market in Moscow. 262 Fifth Avenue will be the debut project in the U.S. for both, and the skyscraper will be the tallest ever built by a Russian architect in America.

At this morning’s press event, The Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA) unveiled the completed renovations to the east end of its museum campus, while also revealing for the first time the full design of their multi-year expansion project designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro in collaboration with Gensler.

With the completion of the east wing renovation, which began in February 2016, the museum has created two spacious third-floor galleries by reconfiguring 15,000 square feet of space, allowing for better flexibility in installing the collection and temporary exhibitions.

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Google has submitted the design for its new London office to Camden Council for planning approval. Designed by BIG and Heatherwick Studio, the 11-story "groundscraper" design will be located in King's Cross, and will combine with their existing office at 6 Pancras Square and a third, forthcoming building to create a campus for up to 7,000 Google employees.

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Snøhetta has unveiled plans for a new riverwalk masterplan located alongside Oregon’s Willamette Falls – the second largest waterfall by volume in North America – that will open up the attraction to public access for the first time in over 150 years. Selected to lead the project in 2015 alongside Mayer/Reed and DIALOG, Snøhetta’s scheme is the result of a 2-year design process developed as a collaboration with the city and thousands of individual community members.

The resulting plan calls for the reutilization and augmentation of existing industrial structures on the 22-acre site, giving visitors the opportunity to experience the falls and its rugged basalt shoreline and reconnecting Oregon City to its historic waterfront.

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UPDATE: You still have time to perfect and submit your award-winning entries! The final entry deadline for the World Architecture Festival Awards is this Friday 2 June at Midnight (BST).

The World Architecture Festival (WAF) has announced the theme for the tenth edition of the conference: ‘Performance.’

Held November 15-17 at the Arena Berlin in Germany, the festival will focus on the topic of performance in architecture. This will include several new additions to the tour program, including a visit to Hans Scharoun’s revolutionary Berlin Philharmonie; Gerhard Spangenberg’s Radialsystem V, a former pump station transformed into a venue for contemporary dance and music; and Frank Gehry’s recently-completed Pierre Boulez Concert Hall.

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With construction nearing completion ahead of its September opening date, the first building at the new Cornell Tech campus on New York City’s Roosevelt Island has been dubbed “one of the most environmentally-friendly buildings in the world” by the university, as they revealed their aspirations for the building to reach Net Zero and LEED Platinum status.

Designed by Morphosis, The Bloomberg Center (named for Emma and Georgina Bloomberg, daughters of former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg) will employ a range of strategies including solar power; geothermal ground source heat pumps; a dynamic energy-efficient facade which balances transparency and opaqueness to maximize building insulation; and an array of smart building technologies that monitor lighting and plug load use, among other metrics.

OMA New York has revealed renderings for it latest project, a 490,000-square-foot mixed-used retail and office development located at 88 Seaport Boulevard in the emerging Boston Seaport neighborhood. Being developed by Massachusetts-based property developer WS Development, the structure adds to a growing collection of quality architecture commissioned for the district, including projects by James Corner Field Operations, Sasaki, and NADAAA.

The latest Google Doodle, on display today on Google's homepage in many countries around the world, honors the late Zaha Hadid on the 13th anniversary of her acceptance of the Pritzker Prize. The highest honor in the architectural profession, Hadid became the first woman to be selected as a winner in 2004.

The doodle portrays the architect in front of one of her most acclaimed buildings, the Heydar Aliyev Center in Baku, Azerbaijan. Earlier concepts for the doodle are shown to have featured Hadid's designs for the Glasgow Riverside Museum and Galaxy Soho in Beijing.

Development on the site of the former Domino Sugar factory in Williamsburg, Brooklyn is moving straight along, with today marking the launch of leasing at 325 Kent, the first building to open as part of the mega-development. Designed by SHoP Architects, the doughnut-shaped building will offer up 16-stories of modern apartment units arranged around an elevated courtyard featuring uninterrupted views of the East River and the Manhattan skyline.

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Looking to mount something or make alternations to a wall, but worried about hitting something inside? A new device, the Walabot DIY, will end those fears forever by giving you the real-life equivalent of Superman’s X-ray vision.

Unlike a traditional stud finder, the Walabot is able to detect a variety of different materials and objects, including but not limited to pipes, wires, conduit, studs and even living creatures like mice. Additionally, the device can even find objects that aren’t directly touching the outer sheetrock or concrete surface, up to 4 inches deep.

Taking third place in the recently-concluded Kaira Looro competition to design a multi-faith place of worship for the community of Tanaf in Senegal, this design by Sean Cassidy and Joe Wilson proposes a circular chapel with a sunken exterior moat in which locals can privately reflect and pray. Meanwhile, the central sanctum is designed to be constructed by locals with handmade clay bricks, forming a design which, as Cassidy and Wilson explain, "literally comes from the 'God given land'" that the community equally "can take pride in and call their own upon completion."

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Bee Breeders have selected winners of the Stone Barn Meditation Camp competition, seeking to create a place of refuge for individuals amidst the pristine natural beauty of one of Latvia’s most remote regions. In announcing the competition results, the jury applauded the respect and regard shown to the environment by submitted schemes, commenting that the most successful projects stood out for their simplicity, elegance, and balance with nature.

The competition winners, including noted ‘Green’ and ‘Student’ schemes, are set out below.

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Vivid LIVE, part of the annual festival of lights and music known as Vivid Sydney, is taking place this weekend. As in previous years, the event was launched with a mesmerizing video projection mapped onto the sails of Sydney's iconic Opera House. Titled "Audio Creatures," this year's projection was created by Ash Bolland sees the Opera House writhe and squirm to a soundtrack by Amon Tobin; at times the shells of the building crack open to reveal new life inside, at other moments, infestations crawl their way across from the building's edges.

Read on to see more photographs from the show and the full video of the event.

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With a combination of resilience, sustainability, and pleasing aesthetics, the use of copper in architectural design is often indicative of a building’s craft and attention to detail, as demonstrated by fifteen projects selected as recipients for the 2017 North American Copper in Architecture Awards (NACIA). The 10^th edition of the annual awards celebrates a variety of projects throughout North America for their “outstanding use of architectural copper and copper alloys.” Projects were selected across three categories: New Construction, Renovation/Restoration, and Ornamental Applications.

Here are this year’s fifteen NACIA winners:

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Federico Babina, the illustrator behind the series of popular architectural interpretations including ARCHITALE and ARCHIPLAY, has just released his latest project: PORTRART, 35 illustrations that tell 35 short stories describing and relating to the individual personalities of 35 artists.

"The shapes, the sculpted and painted geometries of the artists are transformed to draw their faces," explains Babina. Each composition portrays a realistic fantasy in a series of geometric shapes around a central matrix, the portrait. 

Babina continues, "The project attempts to visualize the likeness, personality, and capture the essential features of the protagonist through simple lines, geometries, color, and ink. The idea is to achieve an almost abstract representation without losing the essence of figurative representation." 

See all the portraits after the break.