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The competition to design a new flagship factory and bottling plant for San Pellegrino has been narrowed down to two firms: BIG and MVRDV. Searching for a “truly innovative project that not only conveys an artistic vision, but also sets new standards in terms of efficiency and compliancy to environmental sustainability,” the jury committee selected the two final proposals from a 4-firm list which also included designs from Snøhetta and aMDL Michele De Lucchi.

“The judging committee were so impressed by the four proposals that they decided to narrow their selection to a shortlist of two and deliberate further before announcing the winning project early next year,” explained San Pellegrino in a press release.

San Pellegrino also released video proposals of the designs, explained by firm founders Bjarke Ingels and Winy Maas.

UNStudio has designed the final portion of a 225,000 square meter (2,420,000 square foot) urban plan for the district of Oosterdokseiland in the city center of Amsterdam. Located at the tip of the island, the last sub-plan will consist of a lively social hub and 72,500 square meters (780,000 square feet) of public facilities, apartments and office space for Amsterdam-based company Booking.com.

“The design for this fully integrated new urban campus is envisioned as a highly multifunctional living and working environment, enriched with special amenity and public programmes,” said UNStudio Founder Ben van Berkel. “The urban gesture of the building weaves together with the existing streets, while the east side of the building will become a recognisable emblem for Oosterdok.”

The Arkansas Arts Center has selected five top architecture firms to compete for the design of a $55 million to $65 million museum expansion project in Little Rock, Arkansas. The project will include a renovation to existing theater and studio spaces, as well as new education facilities for families and gallery space to house the museum’s expanding art collection.

An advisory panel and selection committee named the finalists following a RFQ process featuring 23 local and international firms.

The 5 firms selected as finalists are:

The MIT School of Architecture’s Self-Assembly Lab has teamed up with Google to create Transformable Meeting Spaces, a project that utilizes woven structure research in wood and fiberglass pods that descend from the ceiling, transforming a large space into a smaller one. Designed as a small-scale intervention for reconfiguring open office plans—which “have been shown to decrease productivity due to noise and privacy challenges”—the pods require no electromechanical systems to function, but rather employ a flexible skeleton and counterweight to change shape.

This skeleton is composed of 36 fiberglass rods, which are woven together into a sort of textile or cylindrical braid. Thus, the structure behaves “like a Chinese finger trap: The circumference of the pod shrinks when it’s pulled, and expends when relaxed.”

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In Hidden Dimension, Boston-based Russian photographer Anna Yeroshenko converts a series of architecture photographs into three-dimensional structures. The work is intended to transform the viewer’s perspective of forgettable utilitarian buildings and encourage a closer look at the physical and social impacts of the built environment on our everyday lives.

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Videos

The 2016 MPavilion, designed by Indian architect Bijoy Jain of Studio Mumbai, has opened in Melbourne’s Queen Victoria Gardens. Over the next four months, the bamboo structure will play host to a free public program of over 400 talks, workshops, performances and installations.

Bijoy Jain’s design joins the growing international trend of “handmade architecture” as it becomes the largest bamboo structure in Australia, utilizing 7 kilometers of Indian bamboo, 50,000 kilograms of Australian bluestone, 5,000 wooden pins and 26 kilometers of rope to cover a 16.8 square meter area. The slatted roof panels are constructed from sticks of the Karvi plant and were woven together by craftspeople in India over a four month period.

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Installation art collective Limelight has transformed the Parliament Building of Romania into a eye-popping, psychedelic light show for the iMapp Bucharest International Video Mapping Competition. Titled “Interconnection,” the video utilized projection mapping (also known as spatial augmented reality) techniques to render the world’s third largest building in a blaze of shape-shifting, technicolor graphics and animations. Taking home top honors at the event, the projection required the use of 104 video projectors to cast the 23,000 square meter surface of the Parliament’s front facade in over 1 million ANSI lumens.

According to its creators, “the projection mapping shows the interconnectedness of all things from micro to macro as well as the outer and the inner universe. Conjuring emotions and feelings, the amazing display of color, light and sound aims to reopen the dialogue between the internal and the external, through a cinematic journey from the state of separation to the state of eternal openness.”

Check out animation stills and the full video performance after the break.

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ArchDaily is looking for a motivated and highly-skilled architecture-lover to join our team of interns for Winter 2016/2017! An ArchDaily internship in Classics provides a unique opportunity to learn about our site and write about historically significant architecture projects.

Interested? Then check out the requirements below.

Videos

The winners of the 2016 Leading Culture Destinations Awards have been announced. Presented this past weekend at a ceremony in London, the LCD Awards are given annually to recognize the success of “museums, art organizations, and cultural destinations from around the world [that] are investing in iconic architecture, cross-sector collaborations, [and] audacious programming […] to diversify the experiences offered to visitors and establish their global reputations.”

This year, awards were presented in four categories: Leading Cultural Destination of the Year; Best New Museum of the Year (for museums opened in the past 15 months); Best Soft Power Destination of the Year (a new award for 2016, given to destination who exhibit 'excellence, relevance, transparency, accountability and sustainability'); and the Traveller’s Award for Best Place to Visit.

The overall winner for 2016 was Diller, Scofidio + Renfro’s Broad Museum in Los Angeles. Continue reading to see the full list of winners.

via GIPHY

Maybe it’s the eighties nostalgia. Maybe it’s the cast of lovable characters (a few reminiscent of The Goonies). Or maybe it’s just a break from reality via a fantastical monster. Whatever your reason for watching (binging) it, the hit Netflix series Stranger Things has left fans yearning for Season 2. 

Till then, we have the next best thing: drawings of two major S.T. settings from architect Boryana Ilieva, who creates studies of space and light in cinematic architecture. Warning: the following contains spoilers regarding the first season.

As the month-long 3rd Istanbul Design Biennial draws near, the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (İKSV) have revealed a full list of projects and participants. Curated by Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley, the biennial—which is titled Are We Human? The Design of the Species: 2 seconds, 2 days, 2 years, 200 years, 200,000 years—will revolve around one pressing provocation: that design itself needs to be redesigned.

Presenting more than 70 projects from five continents by designers, architects, artists, theorists, choreographers, filmmakers, historians, archaeologists, scientists, laboratories, institutes and NGOs, the exhibitions will be spatialized by Andrés Jaque and the Office for Political Innovation and spread across five main venues – the Galata Greek Primary School, Studio-X Istanbul and Depo in Karaköy, Alt Art Space in Bomonti, and the Istanbul Archaeological Museums in Sultanahmet. The work of a dense array of international writers, video makers, and designer researchers will also be presented online.

Maksim Sodomovsky of iVision3D has created a virtual tour of the Dominion Office Building, designed by Zaha Hadid Architects, in Moscow, Russia. Completed in 2015, the project is among the new infrastructure being built to support the growing creative and IT industries in the southeast of the city. The design is organized as a series of stacked plates, connected with curving elements and surrounding a central atrium exposed to natural light.

Check out the virtual tour here:

Vancouver-based Leckie Studio Architecture + Design has founded the Backcountry Hut Company to bring affordable recreation structures to outdoor enthusiasts. Inspired by IKEA's philosophy of providing superior design at a moderate price point, the prefabricated hut prototype aims to embody the company's four cornerstones: function, quality, sustainability, and value.

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From Yaba in Lagos to the suburb of Bandra in Mumbai, Metropolis Magazine provides a scenic tour around the world’s “most creative” neighborhoods. Spread across ten rapidly growing cities like Cape Town and Turin, the article provides a comprehensive glimpse into these lesser discussed hubs of creativity.

The Fallen Leaf, designed by Eric Rodrigues, has been named the first-place winner of the competition for the new Sylvan open air theatre in Cherkasy City Park, Ukraine. With a plan to demolish the old building, the new theatre is inspired by nature: it integrates into the landscape of the Cherkasy municipal park and uses only natural and locally sourced stone and wood. The form of the glue laminated timber roof is that of a falling leaf, whose organic slope helps to enhance the theatre's acoustics.

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