Here is a short clip from SO-IL about their MoMA P.S.1 installation in motion. Pole Dance was the 2010 P.S.1 Competition winner, and ArchDaily visited the installation and interviewed the Brooklyn based firm. We featured the video interview with SO-IL last month, take a look.

A project for Downtown Fargo: an urban infill competition in North Dakota, F9 Productions began with the question: what would make Fargo grow? They are asking people to imagine if a prairie could become a building’s coat, what could it look like? Can the mighty Red River inform how pedestrians flow though the site? And what form can symbolize the regions enduring strength?

Their solution is to capitalize on the very resources that have been fertilizing this area for the past 100 years – its people and its local businesses. The proposed design is to infuse downtown Fargo with two big box stores that have, that in the recent past, fled to the suburbs. By bringing in Scheels and Trader Joes, along with a much needed Children’s Museum and prominent public plaza they aim to resurrect the downtown life that was once there. More images and architect’s description after the break.

Studio Mode/modeLab is pleased to announce the third installment of the coLab workshop series: Hybrid Prototypes. Hybrid Prototypes is a two-day intensive design and prototyping workshop (with an optional third day) to be held in New York City during the weekend of January 08, 2011. Further information and registration can be found below. We hope to see you next month!

Rotterdam based Studio Marco Vermeulen has shared with ArchDaily their recent proposal for a housing block competition in Moscow. Additional images and a brief architects description after the break.

Amanda Levete Architects, AL_A, has just shared the news that their Central Embassy building is set to start on site this February. Situated along Ploenchit Road, Bangkok’s primary commercial artery, the 1.5 million sq ft project merges a 7 storey luxury retail podium and a 30 storey 5 star hotel tower into a twisting shape. The form marks a grand gesture for the city, as the curved mass climbs high into the sky creating an identifying mark for the area. The interiors are flooded with natural light as the form wraps around two vertical light wells, revealing stepped terraces and vertical gardens.

More about the project after the break.

Located in Kenmore, Washington the new Bastyr University Student Village accommodates 132 students amongst 11 three-story free-standing cottages. The design-rich and eco-friendly village, by CollinsWoerman, was originally designed to meet LEED Gold, however the project exceeded expectations and earned LEED Platinum certification while being completed under budget and ahead of schedule. The student village achieved 34 percent energy savings over more traditional multifamily projects and diverted 97 percent of construction waste from landfills through careful teamwork and planning. The award is the top honor the USGBC makes for multifamily projects.

Bastyr University student village was awarded the Outstanding Multifamily Project in the 2010 LEED for Homes Awards from the US Green Building Council.

More photographs and drawings of this project following the break.

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Architects: CollinsWoerman Location: Kenmore, Washington, USA Design Team: Pat Logan, John Aldredge, Sarah Reisenauer and Brian Walters Project Year: 2010 Photographs: Lara Swimmer and Karen Steichen/CollinsWoerman

We received the following exhibition by Chandler Ahrens and John Carpenter. It is located in Brooklyn, New York City, and it was inaugurated on the occasion of the conference ACADIA 2010 LIFE in:formation hosted by The Cooper Union. It examines concepts, tools and technologies that implement responsive and generative aspects of information in the design process.

The exhibition chairs are Chandler Ahrens, Michael W. Su and Axel Schmitzberger and conference chairs are Pablo Lorenzo-Eiroa, Aaron Sprecher and Shai Yeshauyahu.

Further information and photos after the break.

With almost 35,000 photos from our Flickr Pool, we decided to feature this section on a weekly basis. So starting today, your Best from Flickr Round Up comes every Thursday! 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 andrEs Af in Barcelona, Spain. Check the other four after the break.

Dutch urban planners POSAD, shared with us their proposal for the Solar Park South Competition in Italy, for which they received an honourable mention. More images and press release after the break.

Here’s a video about Unsolicited Architecture, a collaborative workshop initiated by Studio-X Rio + NAI in Rio de Janeiro Brazil. In a 24 hour time period four teams were formed, four neighborhoods were explored (they each explored the neighborhood where the local architect’s office is located), held a brainstorming session, and then presented their ideas – zero clients, zero budget.

“Ninety-eight percent of buildings are boxes, which tells me that a lot of people are in denial. We live and work in boxes. People don’t even notice that. Most of what’s around us is banal. We live with it. We accept it as inevitable. People say, ‘This is the world the way it is, and don’t bother me.’ Then when somebody does something different, real architecture, the push-back is amazing. People resist it. At first it’s new and scary.”

“The thing is, I hate the celebrity architect thing. I just do my work. The press comes up with this stuff and it sticks. I hate the word starchitect. Stuff like that comes from mean-spirited, untalented journalists. It’s demeaning. It’s derisive, and once it’s said, it sticks. I get introduced all the time, ‘Here’s starchitect Frank Gehry…’ My reaction: ‘What the fuck are you talking about?‘”

Don´t miss Frank Ghery’s epic interview on the January issue of Playboy.

More snippets of the interview after the break:

This competition entry for a settlement in Russia by F A S(t) concentrates on the vernacular of traditional Russian architecture. The five building volumes follow Russian building tradition by flaunting accentuated profiles that stand out and are noticeable in the skyline. In addition, they all have an internal organization and relationship to one another that provides for social events to flourish at ground level, also an aspect of Russian design strategies.

For more on this project come back after the break.

There’s still a long road to FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022, but the design and construction of the 12 stadiums has already started. We will be featuring as many as we can, for you to see how will future stadiums look like. To start, sports architecture experts, Populous, shared with us their design for the Sports City Stadium, located along the Persian Gulf in the eastern coastal city of Doha. More images and complete architect’s description after the break.

IVANISIN. KABASHI. ARHITEKTI won the open international competition for their design intervention at the River Piva in Mratinje, Montenegro in 2009. The design strategy was to illuminate the natural and engineered elements of the site, located at the Piva-Mratinje Hydro-Power Plant, built in 1975 at the narrowest point of the river. As a whole, the intervention is located on the sunny end of the damn in front of the concrete reinforcement of the cliff.

Conceived in five phases, the architecture is designed in such a way that it can become occupiable at any stage of completion. The project consists of five elements: Tower-Down, Plateau, Tower-Up, Bridge, and Floating Platform. These magnifiers of natural and technological elements seek to address the humility of architecture in this sublime junction of the natural and man-made.

Read on for more on this project after the break.

We, the architects, are a special breed. We have very particular tastes, dress in very particular ways and we even invented our own language. For us, a pen can be even more meaningful than our computers, and you might find yourself looking all around town for that perfect standard notebook that you have used for ages. So we decided to compile this special gift guide with things that we use, we like, and that we would love to find below our christmas tree.

Hope you like it! Feel free to share your gift ideas for architects on the comments below.

Back in June we had the chance to interview Lawrence Scarpa in Miami, at the AIA Convention when Pugh + Scarpa Architects received the 2010 AIA Firm Award.

When Ben van Berkel of UNStudio first unveiled his vision for Five Franklin Place, the elaborate façade of layered strips offered a dynamic picture of what TriBeCa’s newest architectural creation could be. A contemporary take of the area’s traditional metal facades of the 19th century, the 20 story residential tower incorporated a series of metal bans that became the building’s trademark. The black undulating lines served more than a mere aesthetic as they branched from the building’s vertical plane to become spatial entities – providing balconies for residents, and even dual functioning as sun screens. Yet, as Liana Grey shared with ArchRecord, van Berkel’s artistic vision may quickly be coming to a hault.

More about the status of the project after the break.

The 40 metre Spencer Dock Bridge with its fluid lines and undulating concrete surface takes trams, traffic and pedestrians across the Royal Canal. Amanda Levete Architects design for the span bridge peels down the edges of the deck to reveal a space for pedestrians to pause and take in views of the dock and Linear Park which is currently under construction.

Follow the break for more photographs of the Spencer Dock Bridge.

Architects: Amanda Levete Architects Location: Dublin, Ireland AL_A Team: Amanda Levete, Alan Dempsey – Project Architect, Peter Feldman, Jordy Fu, Alvin Huang, Theo Sarantoglou Structural Engineers: Arup Main Contractor: Laing O’Rourke Client: Dublin Docklands Development Authority, Railway Procurement Agency Project Year: 2009 Photographs: Gidon Fuehrer

A few days ago, we shared Visiondivision’s Nature’s Choice – a series of vacation homes that attempt to blend into their unique site placement. The firm just shared their latest competition entry for a hotel room atop a cloud. Presented in a comic strip, the proposal delivers a temporary hotel room to accommodate visitors of the 2012 London Olympic games.

More about the hotel room after the break.

Think Space serves as a platform for spatial experimentation and exchange of conceptual ideas. Each cycle lasts a calendar year and is constituted by four competitions under the annual theme determined by a guest curator. Each competition brief is formulated by a juror who is proposed by the guest curator and the organizing committee. At the end of the cycle a conference will be held in Zagreb under the annual theme along with the Award ceremony.

Recently, I have been thinking about what would happen if you just removed the physical presence of the office from the profession of architecture. A firm would simply be a network of people scattered all over the place who came together as needed. This is what I call the cloud office.

Given the technology and the economy, there are many start-ups who can’t afford the overhead of a real office. Many of the ones I have heard of operate out of apartments, coffee houses—wherever they can get free wifi. They may not realize it but their economic limitations have placed them on the cutting edge of business culture. In fact, larger, more established firms could learn a lot from recent grads with laptops and smart-phones.

More after the break.

The installation of Emergency Exit, the Polish Pavilion at the 2010 Venice Architecture Biennale, by artist Agnieszka Kurant and architect Aleksandra Wasilkowska, seeks to go beyond the logic of urban reality through the creation of ‘urban portable holes’: in-between spaces, places of uncertainty and doubt, of time-space discontinuity, such as abandoned or unfinished buildings, sites of catastrophe or accidents, illegal markets, rooftops and tunnels. The title refers ironically to the health and safety regulations in buildings and urban space that seek to plan, control risk and eliminate the accidental and unexpected. More images and architect’s description after the break.

We see CoCities as a platform for exchange and mutual inspiration. We invite urban planners, designers, technology geeks, environmental experts, public officials, urban gardening enthusiasts and cultural influencers to be part of the conversation. We can only make our cities more livable if we work together to improve them.

After two years of planning and waiting for financing, the North Carolina chapter of the American Institute of Architects, designed by Frank Harmon Architect PA, finally held its official, public groundbreaking ceremony for its new headquarters building and design center on Thursday, December 9, at 11:30 a.m.

The building will be constructed on an oddly shaped, previously unused lot on Peace and Wilmington streets between Peace College and the NC Government Complex.  The new building will also be designed to meet LEED standards at the Platinum level. The AIA NC Center for Architecture & Design will be “a modern building with a green heart,” as Frank Harmon, FAIA, likes to call it, whose firm won a professional competition for the project in 2008. More images and project description after the break.