DSBA, Mihai CARCIUN and upgrade.studio have been declared winners of the Taiwan Tower Conceptual Design Compeition with a design proposal that encompasses the symbolism of Taichung as a city. The team conceptualized a structure for Taichung that would activate the local culture in a design that also stands as a landmark for the city and as a campaign for diligent and responsible design.

More information and images after the break.

The 60th AIA Seattle Honor Awards for Washington Architecture were moderated by Nathaniel Kahn, director of My Architect, and juried by Jim Jennings AIA (San Francisco), Sheila O’Donnell Hon. FAIA (Dublin), and Gilles Saucler FRAIC (Montreal).

The historic Moore Theatre played host to the event which focused on four words to define this year’s submittal categories: visionary, measurable, econimical and tectonic.  There were over 170 submissions and 13 awarded projects.

Follow the break for a complete list of this years winners.

Exploration of contextual, cultural, and life cycle flows offers a critical lens for visualizing new housing strategies for living in the future. The d3 Housing Tomorrow competition invites architects, designers, engineers, and students to collectively explore, document, analyze, transform, and deploy innovative approaches to residential urbanism, architecture, interiors, and designed objects.

The goal for the design of a model arts village in Ghana, Africa was to be easily built from local materials and local labor at a low cost with a budget of $42,000-$62,000. For final year students, Mihai Dorcu, Stefan Padurariu and Vlad Burlacu, their challenge was to provide a comfortable and multi-use space for the international arts community in the rural part of the country. They would go on to achieve this by tapping into local resources for sustainable development to integrate art into architecture for a more sustainable future. More images and description after the break.

The Piranesi Prix de Rome 2010 International Prize has been awarded to the Musealization of the Archaeological Site of Praça Nova of São Jorge Castle designed by architect João Luís Carrilho da Graça of JLCG Arquitectos.

Our profession is all about presentations. It all started at university in the architecture studio, a whole semester had to be condensed into a 10-minute precise presentation in order to get the crits to understand your project, and it continued into professional life as the main tool to communicate with your co-workers, clients, a jury or with other architects in a lecture.

A good presentation could get your project approved, or quickly dismissed if you don’t plan it right. For example, a presentation to a client compared to a presentation for a group of architects is very different, even if the project you need to communicate is the same.

As I usually have to give at least a couple presentations per month, I have always tried to make them worth and not waste other people’s time. A big help for that has been Garr Reynolds, the “Presentation Zen” from which I haven taken some key points of which I will share with you in order to make a good presentation, adapted to our profession.

The Taiwan Tower International Design Competition awarded Little, a Merit Award for its contribution in conceptual designs of a signature tower in Taichung, Taiwan. The emphasis on the competition is to provide a marker to symbolize Taiwan’s history and spirit at the Taichung Gateway Park, an international portal of Central Taiwan as a place for innovation, culture and biodiversity.

More information and images after the break.

LUNDI et DEMI has shared with us their project for the French bookstore situated in the French Institute Bucharest. It was one of the three nominees for the interior design prize at the Bucharest Architecture Biennale 2010. More images of the built product as well as a description from the architects after the break.

Check out this project by London based firm, Haworth Tompkins. The firm renovated a dilapidated old building situated on the Dovecote Studio campus – an internationally renowned music campus at Snape Maltings, founded by Benjamin Britten which is currently undergoing an expansion. Nestleed within the shell of an abandoned building, the firm responded to the existing conditions with a touch of sensitivity, uniting the old structure with the new aesthetic.

More about the project, including more images after the break.

When it’s late at night I start drawing connections between things that at first sight don’t seem to belong together. It makes me think of Jim Jarmusch’s 2003 film, Coffee and Cigarettes. Coffee and cigarettes go together, but the people sitting at the table sometimes did not. The contradictions and discomfort are what made the film work.

More after the break.

Do you think you could live in a house no bigger than a parking space? And not just by yourself, do you think you could live there with your mother? Apparently, Fuyuhito Moriya can. Check the video from CNN and tell us what you think.

Ernst Giselbrecht + Partner present the Kiefer Technic Showroom, an office building and exhibition space with a dynamic facade that changes to outdoor conditions, optimizing internal climate, while allowing users to personalize their own spaces with user controls.

More after the break.

A couple of weeks ago, we featured the winners of the House in Luanda: Patio and Pavilion Competition promoted by the Lisbon Architecture Triennale together with Luanda Triennale. Now, we can have a better look at the winning proposal, designed by the team of Pedro Sousa, Tiago Ferreira, Tiago Coelho, Bárbara Silva, and Madalena Madureira.

More images and architect’s description after the break.

Within this past month we featured STL, Sun & Associates and Maxwan’s proposal for the Kaohsiung Competition. Now, Ojanen Chiou shares with us their design for a Marine and Pop Music Center where they are aiming to bring the waterfront spaces of the marine port and the urban edge of the community together. The dynamic qualities of the form demonstrate not only a cultural heritage, but a look into the future of pop music cultures and activities for the city. More images and architect’s description after the break.

The latest project from Italian architects Massimiliano and Doriana Fuksas features a dramatic tower shaped by bold diagonal cuts. The proposal was awarded first prized for the competition to design Shenzhen’s Guosen Securities tower, and, typical of the Fuksas pair, the schematic design carries a strong presence with the shear mass of the volume broken down into a more manageable scale thanks to the three-dimensional voids. The tower will be the first ecological tall building to be built in Shenzhen.

More images and more about the tower after the break.

Two projects from Spain, two projects from Slovenia, and one from The Netherlands. Enjoy the 4th part of our industrial architecture selection. Check them all after the break.

Epsilon Euskadi / ACXT Epsilon Euskadi is a Motor Racing Innovation and Technology Research Centre that integrates three activities: 1) Design: R&D&I and production of state-of-the-art racing cars; 2) Racing team management: team competitors in the Le Mans 24 Hours, World Series by Renault, Formula Renault 3.5, Eurocup Formula Renault 2.0, Megane, Karting; and aiming for the 2011 Formula 1; 3) Advanced education: offering a Master’s Degree in Motorsport Engineering (read more…)

Occupying a central parcel in the city’s newly planned business district, Goettsch Partners (GP) has been commissioned by developer Guangzhou R&F Properties Co. Ltd. to design a new 294,570-square-meter mixed-use tower in the city of Tianjin, China which is scheduled for completion in 2015 and will be among the country’s tallest at 439 meters. Their design responds not only to the programmatic needs of each function, but also to the decreasing size of the core while creating a relationship with the history of the city. More images and project description after the break.

With the BIX Light and Media Façade on the Kunsthaus Graz, realities:united 2003 made its international name; now a prototype of the installation by the Berlin artists and architects has been added to MoMA’s collection.

BIX is the 900 m2 light and media installation in the façade of the Kunsthaus in Graz. It makes it possible to program the façade like a computer monitor and to broadcast projections, animations, or messages into the urban space. The conceptual highlights are the individual lighting elements that constitute the screen: not filigree, high-tech LEDs, but conventional, circular fluorescent lamps, arranged on a vast scale.

Our profession is based upon collaboration, and tools like BIM have made it easy even on a broader scale, allowing teams to collaborate around the globe on the same project. Graphisoft will host a webinar with 22 architects working on the same model so you can see how it works.

airBaltic has recently hosted a international design competition for their new terminal in Riga, Latvia. We are sharing with you the ten finalists and urge everyone to vote for their favorite design HERE before voting ends December 5th. Additional finalist proposals after the break.

In our AD Photographers section we are now featuring portuguese photographer Joao Morgado. Born in 1985, he has made his photographer career during the last 4 years, working regularly with offices from Portugal, Spain, Netherlands and Italy.

1. When and how did you start photographing architecture?

I always had a passion about photography but it became more intense during my studies in architecture.

Through that time, i visited a lot of buildings and i spent several hours a day in libraries absorbing architecture and somehow i missed something from the photos of the buildings i have visited before. Since then i became more and more interested, not only in my own point of view, but specially in the truth of architecture.

A couple of months later, i had an invitation from an editor to photograph buildings of three respect Portuguese architects for a yearbook publication: Aires Mateus, Promontorio and Menos é Mais.

Here are five great projects you may have missed last week. Check them all after the break.

Tel Aviv Museum of Art Amir Building / Preston Scott Cohen Located in the center of the city’s cultural complex, the program for the Tel Aviv Museum of Art Amir Building posed an extraordinary architectural challenge: to resolve the tension between the tight, idiosyncratic triangular site and the museum’s need for a series of large, neutral rectangular galleries (read more…)

Now more than ever, whom you know and how you stay connected is critical to the growth of your business. This program will focus on how firm principals initiate and nurture client relationships. Panelists will discuss what has or has not worked for them and give essential advice on how to create and maintain new relationships using various networks and strategies.

The Morogoro International School, located in the southern highlands of Tanzania, serves as a model for sustainability and modular architecture for society. With the idea of having the school simultaneously serve as a community hub, Alma-nac architects believed they could achieve this best through their repeating linear form with an emphasis on environmental control strategies. More images and architects’ description after the break.