If you’re in the Manhattan area, be sure to check out SHoP’s lecture this Wednesday evening at 7:00. The lecture, which will held at Cooper Union in the Great Hall, will include information about the firm’s work over the past few years, so be sure to check out SHoP’s work previously featured on AD to see projects that may be discussed. Gregg Pasquarelli, founding partner with Christopher Sharples, Coren Sharples, Kimberly Holden, and William Sharples will present the office’s current projects with a focus on how the firm seeks to reinvent the business model of architectural practice.

When we interviewed SHoP, the partners explained how their office balances the creative and idealistic side of architecture, with the realistic to reach a middle point. SHoP explained, “We look at an entire project and consider the site, the cultural and economic environment, a client’s physical needs and budget constraints, as well as construction techniques, branding, marketing, and post-occupancy issues…Great architecture demands that design, finance, and technology work together – we’re combining these forces in innovative ways to create a new model for the profession.”

We’re excited to see what SHoP has been working on these past few years and we hope you find the time to attend!

Three projects, one Classic, and an amazing interview with Richard Meier. These are among the many great posts you may have missed last week. Check our selection after the break.

Torreaguera Atresados / XPIRAL The two ‘atretic’ houses proposed, revolved around the idea of a redistribution of the plots along a row. The construction had to abide by the conditions of the maximum height permitted for buildings in the area and having to adapt to the topology of the existing plots (read more…)

The lecture will take place this Thursday 27, at 7:30pm at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Downtown Los Angeles. The lecture is free and open to the public. For more information, click here.

Continuing our coverage of the Shenzhen Stock Exchange (SSE), OMA recently shared the latest photographs of the building while under construction. The building, located in the downtown area of Shenzhen, China, is expected to reach completion in April 2011. The SSE, a new headquarters for China’s equivalent of the NASDAQ, is 132,000 sqm of offices, registration and clearing house, accessory area, securities information company, SSE office area, trading floor and technical operations. The floating podium design, which is suspended 36 meters over a public plaza, projects 54 meters from the base of the tower. The building broke ground in November of 2007, Rem Koolhaas along with local government and the officials from the SSE were in attendance. Check out our previous coverage here.

Follow the break for the latest photographs of SSE.

Or Regev and Shirly Kujawski shared their entry for the new Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art, hosted by Sucker Punch Daily. The project is located at Essex Market in New York City, nearby the Williamsburg Bridge. The architects approached their design for the proposal for MoCCA as an extension of the media that the museum is designed to house and present.

Read on for more on this project after the break.

Architects: Coop Himmelb(l)au Location: Dalian, China Design Principal: Wolf D. Prix Project Partner: Paul Kath (until 2010), Wolfgang Reicht Project Architect: Wolfgang Reicht Design Architect: Alexander Ott Design Team: Quirin Krumbholz, Eva Wolf, Victoria Coaloa Project Team: Nico Boyer, Liisi Salumaa, Anja Sorger, Vanessa Castro Vélez, Lei Feng, Reinhard Hacker, Jan Brosch, Veronika Janovska, Manfred Yuen, Matthias Niemeyer, Matt Kirkham, Peter Rose, Markus Wings, Ariane Marx, Wendy Fok, Reinhard Platzl, Debora Creel, Hui-Cheng, Jessie Chen, Simon Diesendruck, Yue Chen, Thomas Hindelang, Pola Dietrich, Moritz Keitel, Ian Robertson, Keigo Fukugaki, Gaspar Gonzalez Melero, Giacomo Tinari Model Building: Nam La-Chi, Paul Hoszowski, Taylor Clayton, Matthias Bornhofer, Katsyua Arai, Zhu Juankang, Lukas Allner, Phillip Reiner, Moritz Heinrath, Olivia Wimmer, Silja Wiener, Katrin Ertle, Maria Zagallo, Logan Yuen, André Nakonz, Arihan Senocak, Rashmi Jois, Sachin Thorat, Marc Werner 3D Visualization: Isochrom.com, Vienna; Jens Mehlan & Jörg Hugo, Vienna Project Year: 2008-2011 Photographs: Markus Pillhofer

Steven Holl shared with us his winning entry for the Hangzhou Normal University Performing Arts Center, Art Museum and Art Quadrangle in Hangzhou, China. The pair of buildings, situated on either side of the canal, are the heart of the new campus. Holl’s concept early on was two balanced forms, one additive as seen in the design of the Performing Arts Center, and one subtractive displayed in the design of the Art Museum. This dialogue between these two buildings, the utilization of local materials, and the carbon neutral section of the new university provides for a special moment within the campus.

Follow the break for sketches and renderings of this project.

Architects: Steven Holl Architects Location: Hanzghou, China Design Architect: Steven Holl, Li Hu, Chris McVoy Project Architect: Garrick Ambrose, Yichen Lu, Roberto Bannura Project Team: Human Wu, Guanlan Cao, Francesco Bartolozzi, Michael Rusch, Johanna Muszbek, Maxim Kolbowski Frampton, Nathalie Frankowski, Scott Fredricks, Garrett Ricciardi, Jose Carlos Quelhas, Wenny Hsu Structural Engineer: China Academy of Building Research (CABR) Acoustics Consultant: Kirkegaard Associates Sustainability Consultant: Mathias Schuler (Transsolar)

A research team led by Prof. Zhu Jingxiang of the School of Architecture at The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) has developed an advanced architectural system for the construction of the New Bud Study Hall in Sichuan this summer, based on the experience of building the first New Bud Primary School at Xiasi village in Sichuan’s Jiange County, which can be read about here. The new Study Hall is built to outperform the first New Bud Primary school in energy efficiency and space design, while retaining critical distinguishing features of the first school, such as earthquake resistance, durability and a short construction time of only two weeks. The new Study Hall is located in a remote minority village, Dazu, a hilly region of an altitude of 2,600 m on the border of Sichuan Province.

More on this project after the break.

“A Dramatic Detour” is the winning project by ACT - Active City Transformation – for a competition entitled “A Good Detour” for the Solrød Municipality of Copenhagen. The purpose of the competition was to propose the development of projects that encourage innovative design and planning concepts that further the development of better, healthier and more active lifestyles through the infusion of activities into everyday practices in spaces we daily inhabit. ACT is just the type of architecture firm that explores this type of urban landscape development that integrates motion and activities into daily experiences.

Perspective Lyric interactive installation utilized a microphone and an audio analysis algorithm, where the building deformations and figures were controlled by the audience. Utilizing the facade of ‘Celestins’, former Lyrical theater, the video-mapping production was held during the Festival of Lights in December 2010.

Architects Stéphane Bigoni and Antoine Mortemard shared with us their proposal for a competition organized by the city of Brest (Britany) in 2008 for the construction of its councils chamber. More images and architect’s description after the break.

Data Architectes has submitted their project, a proposal for the Cultural and Spiritual Russian Orthodox Center in Paris. Additional images and a short description from the architect after the break.

Popular Architecture has shared with us their competition entry for the proposed Astrium Nature Select Shop in Taichung, Taiwan. While the Brooklyn based firm’s proposal did not win, the design provides an interesting aesthetic and retail solution. More images and a brief description after the jump.

The ARCHI ZINES project, conceived by Elias Redstone, aims to ‘promote publishing as an arena for architectural commentary, criticism and research, and as a creative platform for new photography, illustration and design’. This online archive of international publications is in its first stages with ambitions of expanding the collection – providing an important cohesive resource for the design world.

The AIA Young Architects Forum (YAF) and the AIA Committee on Design (COD) invites architects, students, and allied design professionals to submit sketches to the international 2011 YAF/COD Ideas Competition.

KKA (Kjellgren Kaminsky Architecture) designed a new office building for the steel manufacturer, Lecor. The building is situated in Kungälv, Sweden which is 10 kilometers north of Gothenburg. Lecor builds advanced steel constructions and of course they like to show their skills in their own building. This combined with the opportunity of creating a landmark building visible for the nearby highway has been the starting points of KKA’s design process. Building is planned to commence during 2011. More images and project description after the break.

Projects from Thailand, Egypt, Portugal, and Brazil. Amazing retail buildings for our sixth selection. Check them all after the break.

Central Plaza Shopping Mall / Manuelle Gautrand With more than 300,000 sqm dedicated to almost every possible brand name, the CentralPlaza is the biggest shopping mall located in Bangkok, Thailand on Chaengwattana Road. Manuelle Gautrand‘s office took over the project with studies already well advanced by another firm because the client was looking to improve the overall design (read more…)

The chin on the typewriter. It’s a typewriter. The college haircut. Before the personal computer, the Internet. No cell phones. Coffee had not yet been fetishized to the degree it is today. I suspect the coffee thing goes along with the technology. Black. Sugar. Cream. I think she likes black. I know I have another one of her books on my shelves. I know almost nothing about her beyond the book, Formless. For a long time I kept this on my desk when I worked at a corporate firm. I was surprised to find this book of collected essays spanning her career as an art critic and historian. I didn’t look inside, just the cover. That was enough.

To be perfectly honest with you, I’m simply too exhausted to write an in-depth piece on the economic outlook for 2011. I did have good intentions. I woke up in the middle of the night with something nearly complete in my head. It was going to be really informative. Let me summarize: if you are working in 2011 you are getting paid less, working longer hours and have less security. If you are running a firm, now is the time to re-envision your vision, identify your identity, and consolidate your consolidatables. I’m in a good mood…and you might be too…so why ruin it with more of this. I’ll write that piece when I’m in a bad mood. And, to be perfectly honest again, it’s just too early in the year to get a grasp on where it is going. So, let us turn to something else that has been on my mind.

More after the break.

MCM Partnership has shared with us their design for the Great Northern Way’s new campus building, the Center for Digital Media. Follow after the jump for additional rendering, graphics and a description from the architect.

LightHearted is the winning design for this years Times Square Valentine, an annual competition to deign and build a heart for Times Square. Designed by Freecell, a 2010 P.S.1 contestant, in collaboration with Peter Dorsey, the ten-foot diameter heart is a light weight construction, with five pairs of aluminum elliptical loops radially arranged with rotating connections. The structure is covered with an open weave red fabric that both captures and reflects light while letting wind pass through.

LightHearted is an interactive installation, six people will hold the heart up for fifteen minute intervals. The ten-day event, February 10 to February 20, will need over 2,600 volunteers to share in this collective experience.

Head to the LightHearted website and sign up for your fifteen minutes on their volunteer calendar!

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Architects: Freecell, and Peter Dorsey Location: 46th Street and Broadway, New York City, New York, USA Web Design: Deelux Sponsor: Times Square Alliance Public Art Program Photographs: Courtesy of Freecell

The Museum for African Art, New York, and Columbia University’s Institute of African Studies, Committee on Global Thought, and Center for African Education have announced the creation of Sightlines: New Perspectives on African Architecture and Urbanism, a lecture series devoted to Africa’s rapidly changing urban environments.

Sightlines will comprise talks by distinguished practitioners of architecture, urban planning, and architectural theory, each of whom will apply his or her particular area of expertise to the exploration of contemporary African cities as unique built environments. The lectures, which will be open to the public free of charge (see schedule below), will examine the architectural, social, physical, and emotional contours of the cities, while also addressing the global relevance and applicability of this emerging field of discourse. Sightlines additionally includes a lecture by Senegalese artist Viyé Diba, whose work is tied to urbanization.

Complete lectures schedule after the break.

The project below is the Honorable Mention Winner, BLOCK 39: Centre for Science Promotion in Belgrade, Serbia designed by RTA-Office. The public, cultural and college building was designed by RTA-Office’s teams in both Barcelona and Shanghai. The conceptual framework of the building is to generate an event: an institutional, urban expression pole that becomes an international lure. The studio seeks to achieve the occupation of the site and its transformation, to provide guidelines for a new fluid system of urbanism that liberates the space and repurposes it for an open, continuous program for its users.

More on this project after the break.

Fibre Composite Adaptive Systems is a thesis project as part of the master program, Emergent Technologies and Design, at the Architectural Association in London by Maria Mingallon, Sakthivel Ramaswamy and Konstantinos Karatzas. The thesis developed a material system capable of emulating self-organization which is then extended into an architectural application. More images and project description after the break.

Best from Flickr part 30! Five amazing photos from Europe that we carefully selected from 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 Jose Sebastian Ordenes in Paris, France. Check the other four after the break.