Ross Ching’s video takes a look at a car-free Los Angeles, something unimaginable for a city that is so automobile dependent. But last weekend people had no choice as the heavily traveled 405 was closed. Carmageddon as it was called was part of a $1 billion dollar reconstruction project, including installation of an HOV lane and upgrading of some on/off ramps. The 10 mile section of the freeway was anticipated to be closed for 53 hours from midnight on July 15th until 5am July 18th however the construction ended a bit earlier. Tshirts were sold, apps were produced, and viral videos were all part of the epic closure of the 405.

Beirut based, Lebanese architect firm Hapsitus has presented us their work for the BLC Headquarter Landmark high rise design competition in Beirut. Follow after the break for more images of their winning proposal for this highly visible project.

Architects: James Law Cybertecture International Location: Mumbai, India Client: Parinee Developers Pvt Ltd. Photographs: Courtesy of James Law Cybertecture International

Parinee I is a 21st century office tower designed by world renowned architect James Law of James Law Cybertecture International at the heart of Mumbai, India. Uniquely, this dynamic 160 meter tall tower is designed to provide ultra modern office spaces for a wide range of business occupants including the creative industries of the India movie business. Not only can the building form provide different views and experience from the office space inside, the diagonal façades are also installed with LED screen for film and graphic projection.

Many great museums for our 8th selection, including an AD Classic, and even a Tree Museum! Check them all after the break.

New Acropolis Museum / Bernard Tschumi Architects Located in the historic of Makryianni district, the Museum stands less than 1,000 feet southeast of the Parthenon. The top-floor Parthenon Gallery offers a 360-degree panoramic view of the Acropolis and modern Athens. The Museum is entered from the Dionysios Areopagitou pedestrian street, which links it to the Acropolis and other key archeological sites in Athens (read more…)

The Royal Institute of British Architecture (RIBA) recently released the shortlist for this year’s Stirling Prize, the UK’s most prestigious architecture prize. Presented annually to the architects of the ‘building that has made the greatest contribution to the evolution of architecture in the past year’ this year’s six shortlisted projects range from the most expensive city academy school every built to a 1932 refurbished theater. The winner will be announced in October at the RIBA Stirling Prize dinner, held at the Magna Science and Adventure Centre in Rotherham, winner of the 2001 RIBA Stirling Prize.

Follow the break for the complete shortlist and more details about the RIBA Stirling Prize.

Join A+D Museum and Moore Rubble Yudell Architects and Planners for a children’s workshop exploring the world of staircases. Children will work alongside professional architects to plan, design and build a staircase. Whether their models are sweeping and grand or sky-high and wild, ARkidECTs will gain hands-on experience in the world of a professional architect… stepping up to the design of their imaginations. Parents are welcome to join the fun!

Architects at Enota have shared with ArchDaily their recent competition entry, a “natural experience” hotel resort in Bled, Slovenia, entitled ‘Mivka’. For additional images of their design as well as descriptive text from the architects themselves, please follow after the jump.

Following years of research, a+t publishers presents the first theoretical-practical book on hybrid buildings. Taking its inspiration from the four issues of a+t magazine’s Hybrid series, the book takes a look at the theories and projects which have had the greatest historical importance. Steven Holl prefaces the book with an introduction where he foresees the path which hybrid typologies should take towards the creation of new urban spaces.

The University of Oxford has received planning permission for a new £170M chemistry laboratory complex designed by Francis- Jones Morehen Thorp (FJMT). This follows a unanimous vote in favour of the scheme by Oxford City Council’s West Area Planning Committee where the scheme was described as one of the most striking new buildings in Oxford. More images and complete press release after the break.

The Bangkok-based Architecture firm S+PBA has been invited to attend the exhibition Water-Curse or Blessing!? organized by Aedes East – International Forum for Contemporary Architecture n.p.o. as part of the Asia Pacific Weeks 2011. The event will take place at Aedes Gallery in Berlin from the 9th to 21st September 2011. More images and event description after the break.

In Warsaw, Poland in the district of Wola lies a small crack of space between the buildings on 22 Chłodna Street and 74 Żelazna Street. Jakub Szczęsny of Centrala, recognized the potential to create something unique within this narrow area, and derived a design of an art installation entitled Keret House. The house upon completion shall become the narrowest house in Warsaw, measuring an interior that will vary between 122 centimeters and 72 centimeters in its narrowest spot.

Architects: Centrala Location: Wola, Poland Designer: Jakub Szczęsny Project Area: 14,5 sqm Project Year: December 2011 Project Curators: Sarmen Beglarian, Sylwia Szymaniak Project Announcement: Wola Art Festival “CityProjectWola“ Organizers: Modern Polish Art Foundation, President Piotr Nowicki, Wola District Office of the Capital City of Warsaw; Coordinator Anna Fiszer-Nowacka; Gmina Wyznaniowa Żydowska w Warszawie, Coordinator Judyta Nekanda-Trepka

Just over 53,000 photos in our Flickr Pool! As always, remember you can submit your own photo here, and don’t forget to follow us through Twitter and our Facebook Fan Page to find many more features.

The photo above was taken by Wojtek Gurak in Madrid, Spain. Check the other four after the break.

Yesterday Apple released the latest version of their operative system: Mac OS X Lion. I started using it yesterday and it works like a charm on my Macbook. At a first glance, there’s a lot of focus on handling all your applications thanks to features like Mission Control (an improved view of everything running on your computer) and Launchpad (a new way to organize your apps). Other interesting feature is Airdrop, which will allow you to easily share files with your co-workers. There is also a lot of focus on security, back up, system recovery and versions of files, that I know will be very useful for architects.

Sustainability and Form have dominated architectural discourse, trapping the discipline between utopian play-acting—promising what it cannot deliver—and computerized “gaming” of design extremism.”

– Mark Jarzombek, “ECO-Pop” in Cornell Journal of Architecture 8:RE, January 2011.

In what he calls ECO-POP, Mark Jarzombek, associate dean of the School of Architecture and Planning at MIT (i.e. someone with credentials), draws attention to how sustainability is deployed as an ideology and visual trope more than as a repertoire of achievable, well-thought-out strategies. This is my unabashedly biased interpretation of his manifesto-like article—in fact, let’s just call it a manifesto.

Mikolai Adamus shared with us his design for the Quarter Cultural Center located in Gdansk, Poland. The main idea was to supplement the empty square with tissue which surrounds the site for a more intimate and open expression. More images on the project after the break.

We recently got to preview the newest addition to In DETAIL’s typological series, Work Environments: Spatial concepts, Usage strategies, Communications. It will be available next month (August 2011), and it is great for anyone who is interested in improving a user’s working conditions beyond the basic ergonomic and safety requirements. The first third of this volume deals with spatial organization, acoustics, lighting, and user satisfaction. The rest of the volume features projects from which the various concepts developed in the first third can be used to analyze them. I, personally, enjoyed the section on user satisfaction and how to measure it. After reading this section I speculated how researchers would control for the various confounding factors that exist in the uniqueness of each building presented in the rest of the book. This would not be an easy task by any means, but the necessity of such research is made clear throughout this volume.

Read more after the break.

VINCI-FAYAT consortium has been selected as preferred bidder for the ‘Grand Stade de Bordeaux’ which includes designs by Herzog & de Meuron and landscape design by Michel Desvigne. Slated for completion in 2015 the ‘Grand Stade de Bordeaux’ will be located within the city’s existing green belt district. The design provides a natural sense of fluidity, with easy approachability beginning with the multiple staircases at all points of the stadium. Never loosing site of the stadiums location a large focus of the concept incorporates the surrounding environment blending with the building, as reflected in the concave roof which is supported by a series of spindly white columns, appearing like a forest of birch trees. Home field to the FC Girondins de Bordeaux, the ‘Grand Stade de Bordeaux’ will also host a variety of cultural events.

Additional renderings and a video can be found following the break. Be sure to take a look.

This open ideas competition invites practicing architects, architecture students and designers to design an Academic Interchange for the University of Bremen, Germany. The Academic Interchange is envisioned as an incubator for interdisciplinary collaborations and international relations for academics at the university.

NEEDS-Architecture in Developing Countries, edited by Salvatore Spataro with GGAF (Young Architects of Florence). The book points out the real NEEDS of users, particularly the necessity to make structures which could satisfy them, facing up to lack of economic and technological resources. The sixteen works collected in this volume express a clear idea about the developing project of that belongs within the community within which it is situated. Each project is a reflection of architecture that does not impose organizing models extraneous to the local culture and does not flatten itself on the existent reality.

Scroll through images from the exhibition after the break!

Two young architecture firms have joined forces to create the non-profit association Adobe for Women. The goal of the association it to both recover and teach vernacular construction skills while simultaneously providing aide to women in need.

Inspired by the work of Mexican architect Juan José Santibañez, who twenty years ago helped twenty women in difficult living conditions to build their homes, two decades later blaanc borderless architecture and CaeiroCapurso have planned to construct twenty sustainable houses in the indigenous village of San Juan Mixtepec, in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca.

The construction of the first house began in March of this year, enthusiastically lifting the women’s hopes for this project. With their commitment and determination they have produced more than 40.000 adobe bricks using earth from the surrounding areas. The houses are energy efficient and built with local materials such as adobe and bamboo. Each house costs only 3 830,84€ (the price of half a square meter in Paris or Amsterdam or a square meter in the Baltic capitals). For these twenty women with limited financial resources, having a home represents the dream of a lifetime.

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Released just this week, this video highlights the first ever high-performance district in the USA. Motivated by the Architecture 2030 challenge, Seattle 2030 District has applied these ideas to a larger area creating a collaborative model between public and private sectors. This ground breaking district in downtown Seattle is aiming to ‘develop realistic, measurable, and innovative strategies to assist district property owners, managers, and tenants in meeting aggressive goals that reduce environmental impacts of facility construction and operations’.

The Association for Computer Aided Design in Architecture (ACADIA), in collaboration with Brooklyn-based fabrication house FLATCUT_ recently announced the winners of this year’s ACADIA 2011 Design + Fabrication Competition. The competition challenged designers to create new forms in the categories of furniture, partition and lighting using innovative materials and digital fabrications applications. The winners brought not only ingenuity to their designs, but a sense of beauty and functionality that excited the jury. More images and information on the competition winners after the break.

Next week we will be taking our Architecture City Guide to Berlin and we need your help. To make the City Guides more engaging we are asking for your input on which designs should comprise our weekly list of 12-24. In order for this to work we will need you, our readers, to suggest a few of your favorite modern/contemporary buildings for the upcoming city guide in the comment section below. Along with your suggestions we ask that you provide a link to an image you took of the building that we can use, the address of the building, and the architect. (The image must be from a site that has a Creative Common License cache like Flickr or Wikimedia. We cannot use images that are copyrighted unless they are yours and you give us permission.) From that we will select the top 12 most recommended buildings. Hopefully this method will help bring to our attention smaller well done projects that only locals truly know. With that in mind we do not showcase private single-family residences for obvious reasons. Additionally, we try to only show completed projects.

The Xi’an Expo 2011 has officially opened and, as expected, the international horticultural event has attracted a staggering 200,000 in just the first weekend! We’ve been covering the Expo beginning with Plasma Studio + GroundLab’s conceptual design, and we have been featuring updates about the project over the course of the last few months. The Expo embodies the idea of transformation as the site was formerly a sandpit where the water was severely degraded during the 1980s. Efforts over the past two decades have restored the ecosystem and now the Expo is able to demonstrate what can be accomplished through the use of the most advanced technology, ideas, and materials. As we reported earlier, the 37 ha complex includes three buildings that are interconnected with a dynamic landscape of unfolding paths and networks of water, circulation and foliage.

More images after the break.