Architecture News

Zaha Hadid’s exhibition design for Kurt Schwitters: Merz opened to the public earlier this week at Galerie Gmurzynska in Zurich. In an article about the exhibition in T Magazine, senior designer and director at Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA), Patrik Schumacher said, “It’s literally the last project of Zaha, finished by her team.”

The exhibition, presenting seventy works – in all media – from each period of the artist’s career, honors five decades of the gallery showing Schwitter’s work. Hadid’s design is a reflection on the artist’s well-known, but destroyed, Merzbau, a sculpture that filled the artist’s workspace from 1923-1937. According to the Hadid’s office, “[Merzbau was] a living, inhabited collage, ever-shifting and expanding, and this was the starting point for [Zaha’s] exhibition design which pushes beyond mere random collage to embrace the unpredictable richness and the complex variegated order found in nature.” The design builds on an established relationship between Hadid and Galerie Gmurzynska; Merz following in the footsteps of an earlier exhibition space designed for another of the architect’s inspirations, Kasimir Malevich.

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Alison Brooks Architects (ABA) has been selected to design the latest Maggie's Centre, at the edge of the Musgrove Park Hospital Grounds in Somerset, England. Known as Maggie's Taunton, the project is a collaboration between ABA, Johanna Gibbons of JLH Landscape Architecture, and structural engineers Webb Yates.

Maggie's is a charity that provides free practical, emotional, and social support for cancer patients and their families and friends. Considering architecture as a vital element of care, since 1996 the organization has commissioned a who's who of contemporary practices to design their facilities, including Frank Gehry, OMA, Rogers Stirk Harbour, Steven Holl, and the late Zaha Hadid.

The Latvian Museum of Contemporary Art Foundation has selected Adjaye Associates to lead the design for a new contemporary art museum in downtown Riga. Selected from a pool of 7 finalists including wHY and Lahdelma & Mahlamäki, the winning design features a strongly animated roof geometry designed to pull soft northern light into each of the gallery spaces.

Adjaye Associates, working with local firm AB3D, envisioned the museum as a social incubator, a welcoming and porous space where people could be brought together through a variety of formal and spontaneous interactions. The jury found that the proposal’s distinctive silhouette would give the museum a strong presence within its context of planned commercial and residential developments, and that is orientation and materiality showed a keen awareness of the vernacular and cultural contexts.

Thomas Heatherwick’s Garden Bridge project has been under fire since plans were announced in 2013, drawing skepticism of the fairness of the competition process, and even being called “nothing but a wasteful blight.” Last month, London's new mayor Sadiq Khan gave a lukewarm endorsement of the project, noting that since £37.7m of the £60m allocated by the government has already been spent, scrapping the project now would end up costing taxpayers more than going forward with it.

The current predicament has inspired architects Allies and Morrison to design an alternative option – one that could both save the taxpayers money and create a new greenway spanning the Thames. Many of the complaints directed toward the original design have been associated with the cost of building a new bridge that would serve limited transportation needs; Allies and Morrison eliminate this issue by simply placing a garden pathway onto an existing piece of infrastructure, the nearby Blackfriars Bridge.

In an effort to create affordable housing in Maputo, Mozambique, Casas Melhoradas is an applied research project aimed at eliminating city slums. Organized by the Institute of Architecture, Urbanism & Landscape, at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts Schools of Architecture, Design and Conservation, in collaboration with the Mozambican NGO Estamos, the Faculty of Architecture and Urban Planning at Universidade Eduardo Mondlane (FAPF) and the Danish branch of Architects Without Borders (AUG), the project is part of research initiative on urban development in the Global South.

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After weeks of movement testing, the British Airways i360 observation pod has achieved its maximum height of 138 meters as the attraction enters final inspection phases in preparation for its opening this summer. As a part of “the world’s tallest moving observation tower,” the 18 meter diameter viewing pod will provide 360 degree views of the British seaside resort towns of Brighton and Hove, the Sussex coast and the English Channel, for to up to 200 passengers at a time.

The Moinian Group announced that they had been collaborating with the late Zaha Hadid to develop a “visionary” new project for New York City. The project, at 220 Eleventh Avenue in West Chelsea, is a multi-residential apartment building with a cultural institution at street level.

This announcement comes after Zaha Hadid Architects pledged to complete all 36 projects that were in construction or design development at the time of her death, as her office continues her powerful legacy.

Earlier this month The Guardian reported that the King of Sweden, Carl XVI Gustav, has denounced David Chipperfield's designs for Stockholm's new Nobel Center (Nobelhuset) in the Dagens Nyheter (DN), a national Swedish newspaper, as both too volumetrically large and badly sited. The practice's initial proposal, which was lauded by the awarding jury for its “lightness and openness,” is a glass and stone structure which attempts to “convey dignity” and embody the ideals of the Nobel Prize.

Architecture competition organizers Bee Breeders have announced the winners of the London Internet Museum competition. This speculative project challenged architects to design a museum for “something historically profound and typologically unprecedented — the internet.” Given a site at the former Great Eastern Railway terminal station building, designers were tasked with creating a location that would “connect visitors to both the history of the internet and open them to the possibilities of the future.” Submissions took a wide variety of approaches, and prizes were awarded to projects that rejected the typical associations and precedents that the internet calls to mind.

Continue reading to see the winning entries with brief descriptions.

The visual identity of West Hollywood’s Sunset Strip has been synonymous with billboard advertising since the 1960s. Over time, different eras have been displayed through the advertising; from the rock bands and cigarette brands of the 60s and 70s, to the highly commercialised signage of today. As part of an initiative to probe the value of this signage as both an identifier and a valuable public asset, The City of West Hollywood (WeHo) launched The Sunset Strip Spectacular Pilot Creative Off-Site Advertising Sign Competition.

The competition sought a multi-dimensional, kinetic billboard “spectacular,” and attracted firms from advertising, marketing, design, architecture and engineering backgrounds. A pool of nine entrants has been narrowed down to four finalists: JCDecaux/Zaha Hadid Project Management Limited; Orange Barrel Media/Tom Wiscombe Architecture/MoC; Outfront Media/Gensler/MAK; and TAIT Towers Inc. Following public presentations in May, the proposals are now visible to the public before the jury make their recommendation later this month.

As part of ArchDaily's coverage of the 2016 Venice Biennale, we are presenting a series of articles written by the curators of the exhibitions and installations on show.

Britain is suffering from a terrible housing crisis – one that is an incredibly predictable outcome of decades of neoliberal economic policy. The Chilean architect Alejandro Aravena has become well-known for building “half a house” – only completing core infrastructure in social housing, then encouraging residents to finish the other half with their own money over time. In effect, the first generation get a significantly cheaper home, but once the house has been doubled it could be sold at market rate. The discount, and profit, only applies to the original owners.

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Videos

Last year we published a list of 22 websites meant to make an architect's job a little bit easier. From selecting the perfect color scheme to tracking the price of your next big purchase, solving technical problems or simply trying to balance your sleep and caffeine intake, the list sought to offer solutions to a diversity of issues – with something (hopefully) for everyone.

This year we offer an addendum with seven additional sites meant to further allay the ever-stressful life of architects. From using peripherals for additional screen real estate to receiving your daily fill of the top architecture news, or converting PDFs to DWGs and adding scale figures to models, ArchDaily seeks to share more of the best of what the web can offer to architects.

Videos

Students from the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture, Taliesin West have designed and built “Little Shelters,” a collaborative project in the Sonoran Desert in Arizona, as part of a design and build studio led by little maps.

The project began with an individual exercise, where students Daniel Chapman, Mark-Thomas Cordova, Jaime Inostroza, Dylan Kessler, Pablo Moncayo, Natasha Vemulkonda, and Pierre Verbruggen each created their own temporary shelters. Partially due to harsh desert conditions, the students, with their instructor David Tapias, later decided to design and build as a collective effort instead.

The Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) has released the results of their Future Trends Survey for April 2016. The report shows continued growth in employment and workload predictions, as the industry edges closer to pre-recession levels. Notably, it shows a rise in revenue for projects outside of the UK, with this figure jumping for large practices.

The Boston Society of Architects (BSA) has announced the winners of the Northern Avenue Bridge Ideas Competition. Launched in March, the competition sought to gather ideas for the future of the bridge that center around improving mobility, honoring history, and creating destination. The bridge, which opened in 1908, was closed in December 2014 due to structural integrity concerns.

As it was open to the public, the competition received ideas from architects, designers, historians and community members, overall resulting in 133 submissions, including 99 graphic designs and 34 essays.