Francesco Piffari shared with us the design proposal for the Amsterdam Pedestrian Bridge. To design a new iconic bridge, it is essential to reflect on the concept of bridge; what a bridge is in the collective imagination. Considering the bridge in its core meaning, it can be said that the peculiarities of a bridge is to “touch” the ground in just two points, to hover in the air and to be suspended over the obstacle; it is very clear that a bridge establishes a strong relationship with air and water, the two elements it is surrounded with. More images and architect’s description after the break.

From March 20 – May 11, the “American City: St. Louis Architecture: Three Centuries of Classic Design” exhibition will be up at the Willis Tower (formerly the Sears Tower) in downtown Chicago. The show consists of 83 large prints of over 40 historic buildings in St. Louis, including acclaimed landmarks such as Louis Sullivan’s Wainwright Building, James Eads’ Eads Bridge, Eero Saarinen’s Gateway Arch and Tadao Ando’s Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts Building. The timeline stretches from 1839 to 2010. The show is being staged in the Willis’ ground floor atrium and lobby and is free to the public. More information on the exhibition after the break.

The first prize winning proposal for the Museum Nasional Indonesia by Aboday aims to bring back this massive institution to its original role as a public facility. Their design addresses the question of urban context by inserting a new corridor between the existing museum building (A) and building (B) that will maintain an openness to the pedestrian and city park on the Eastern part of the complex. More images and architects’ description after the break.

Winners of the National Exhibition of Migrating Landscapes have been announced! This nation-wide, open ideas competition is the main process for creating Canada’s official entry to the 2012 Venice Biennale in Architecture, entitled Migrating Landscapes. Themed around migration and cultural identity, entrants comprised of young Canadian architects and designers, ages 45 and under, where invited to reflect on their migration experiences and cultural memories, and design dwellings onto a new landscape that would be showcased through a series of seven regional exhibitions across the country. Together with the Winnipeg-based Migrating Landscapes Organizer (MLO), the jury has selected 18 winners out of 26 finalists to represent ‘Team Canada”. Continue after the break to review the winning competitors.

We announced last month that the LEGO® Architecture series will now include Jørn Utzon’s Sydney Opera House, the 12th building in this popular series. Thanks to LEGO® Architecture, four of our readers will win a LEGO® Architecture Sydney Opera House.

‘The Fabergé Big Egg Hunt’, launched on the 21st of February, has provided London, England with 209 giant and stunningly crafted Easter eggs, designed by artists, architects, jewelers and designers. The four presented here were designed by architects Zaha Hadid, Sir Nicholas Grimshaw, Fourfoursixsix and interior design firm Candy & Candy. The designs are unique, structural and conceptual. Thirty-one among the 200 will be chosen for a live auction on March 20th. The rest can be bid on on-line. The proceeds from the auction will go towards the £2million target for Action for Children, a charity for vulnerable and neglected children, young people and families, and Elephant Family, a charity for the endangered Asian elephant. This Easter egg hunt invites the whole public to participate in finding these eggs throughout the city; the scale of this event is set to break Guinness World Records for the most participants in an Easter egg hunt.

Read on to see the designs after the break.

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Just in time for the warm weather, Visiondivison has shared a great collection of summer houses with us. Entitled the Spröjs Series, the residences stem from an organizing modular system present in their built project Spröjs House (previously featured on AD). And, in this collection, in typical Visiondivision fashion, the firm has exploited the potential of the module and crafted residences ranging from a simple shed and cabin to a crazy castle.

Check out the range of residences after the break.

GRAPHISOFT® recently announced it has joined forces with buildingSMART® International, Tekla® and several leading software vendors to launch a global program in order to promote Open BIM collaboration workflows throughout the AEC industry.

From their release: Open BIM is a universal approach to the collaborative design, realization and operation of buildings based on open standards and workflows. Open BIM is an initiative of buildingSMART and several leading software vendors using the open buildingSMART Data Model.

More info after the break.

The winning proposal for the new Theater of Cachan, designed by O-S Architects, acts as a curtain that rises over the city with the aim to transform the neighborhood with an urban, cultural and social point of view. The overall image of the project is conceived as a technological and functional tool that confirms the dynamism of the city of Cachan, for the sake of architectural and landscape quality. More images and architects’ description after the break.

The Lavance Shade Screen, a project designed and built by Benjamin Hall & Michael Lavance, was created out of appreciation for the desert climate and its harsh effects on specific materials. This inspiration and architectural concept led to this unique and regionally specific approach in providing much needed shade to a custom residential outdoor barbecue and bar near the downtown of Scottsdale, Arizona. More images and architects’ description after the break.

The public space proposal for the Urban Intervention competition creates a new way of creating a dialog between the park and the city. Designed by PRAUD, each solid and void creates its own topography, and thus the topography of the solid provides different experiences for pedestrians and joggers, while topography of the voids provide different types of functions and landscape fields. More images and architects’ description after the break.

A short while ago we received Pamphlet Architecture 11-20, the second volume that accumulates the continually growing series. Steven Holl and William Stout started the Pamphlet series back in 1978. They wanted to create a venue “for publishing the works, thoughts, and theory of a new generation of architects.” The resulting publications are graphically pleasing and theoretically engaging. Interestingly, as Steven Holl points out, many of these once theoretical ideas are be realized in contemporary ideas. For example, Steven Holl says his “Horizontal Skyscraper” in Shenzhen, China “could be considered an outgrowth of experiments began in 1996′s Edge of a City (PA 13).

Due to the popularity of last weekends video exploring Little Big Berlin, we present to you this stop-motion video capturing a Spring day in the city of Kiev. Created by Tel Aviv-based artists Efim Graboy & Daria Turetski, MiniLook Kiev highlights the movement of the colorful city. Over a course of five days and two nights, the artist captured 25,000 images only to select 4,500 frames for the final edit.

The Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation (GSAPP) at Columbia University will be holding the Interpretations: Promiscuous Encounters Syposium taking place Friday, March 23rd from 12:00pm – 8:30pm. Promiscuous Encounters, which is free and open to the public, has two main ambitions: first, to examine the fascinating blurriness and productive interplay between the critical, curatorial and conceptual capacities of architecture, including how and where they intersect and overlap and, second, to expand the definitions of what these terms mean in relation to theory and practice by reexamining the sites of criticality and their modes of operation. More information on the event after the break.

Hallway House, a radical residential project designed by NL Architects, has been conceived within the framework of a ‘match making’ program set up by the Dutch Architecture institute (NAi), together with Housing Corporation VANKE. As a Sino-Dutch collaboration in social housing, NL Architects has created a new concept for high-quality affordable housing on a site in Huilongguan, Beijing. More images and architects’ description after the break.

TEX-FAB Digital Fabrication Alliance is seeking research proposals that actively connect academia, the profession and the fabrication industry in the Continuing Research category and in the Speculative Proposal category new start-up projects. As this is a “design to fabricate” competition, TEX-FAB will match the network of fabricators and consultants with the projects that best manifest research through computational fabrication and apply it toward more intelligent integers of materiality and construction. Submissions are due no later than June 2nd. More information on the competition can be found here.

Studio E Architects faced a compelling challenge when designing the first phase UC Davis West Village, which opened last October in California’s upper Central Valley. Experiencing moderate winters, warm summers, prevailing winds and moderate rainfall within the heart of former agricultural fields, the new addition to UC Davis was to be a net-zero facility. Serving as the largest of its kind and a model for campus communities and environmentally conscious urbanism. That is sustainable and community oriented. The program required 123 units of student apartments in one, two and three-bedroom configurations, 45,000 square feet of ground level commercial space all of which would emulate the central park space in downtown Davis and become the heart of West Village.

Follow us after the break to see the sustainable solutions that Studio E Architects came up with!

As many of us have already realized, sustainable design contributes to an awareness of environmental patterns and thereby creates communities that are more resilient to the devastating effects of the natural disasters that we have seen across the globe in recent months. Many people have accepted the cause and effect relationship that exists between current practices – those that pollute water and food sources, strip minerals, disturb fault linesand throw off ecosystems – with the rapidly increasing changes in climate. For those that do not, U.S. Green Building Council and the University of Michigan released this report: Green Building and Climate Resilience: Understanding Impacts and Preparing for Changing Conditions, which addresses pre- and post-emergency management situations while stressing a consciousness about the environment and ways in which to design and build communities that are physically and structurally prepared for natural disasters.

More on this report after the break.

Josep Lluís Mateo, of Mateo Arquitectura, recently presented his masterplan for the Pôle Multimodal Nice-Aéroport quartier d’affairs Grand Arénas which imagines a city of the future. His brief description and a video can be viewed after the break.

The intention of the design for the School Farm by Felipe Grallert Architects is to enhance the history of the place of Antilhue, once a train station, located in the Los Lagos town. Their design aims to put value on the station area as a large urban public square and create a path along the railroad tracks. Doing so would add history and cultural identity through an urban element capable of enhancing the rural characteristics. This would then translate into concrete action, an element capable of educating and bringing new opportunities based on its own roots, the vernacular and unique place. More images and architects’ description after the break.

Above is a video of NOW presenting their project, Kulttuurisauna, a new public building for the city of Helsinki, the World Design Capital 2012. Their design features saunas, cafe, offices, and a courtyard that opens directly to the sea. Using their model as a reference, you are able to get a sense of the spaces and their relationship to each other, as well as to the city itself which is discussed in the video.

Exhibited from April 6 – Mary 13, the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) is pleased to present “Towards Comfo-Veg,” a large scale, site-specific installation designed for the SCI-Arc Gallery by architect and artist Peter Cook and partner Gavin Robotham of London-based CRAB Studio. Building on CRAB’s internationally recognized experimental work, Towards Comfo-Veg introduces an almost completely light-tight, multimedia experiential space welcoming visitors through a single point of entry and leading towards hints of an invented and dreamlike world. More information after the break.