British urban design consultancy URBED (Urbanism, Environment, Design) have been announced as the winners of the 2014 Wolfson Economics Prize for their proposal to reenergise the Garden City (GC) movement, first conceived by Sir Ebenezer Howard in 1898. David Rudlin and Nicholas Falk's submission argues that forty cities in England, including Northampton, Norwich, Oxford, Rugby, Reading and Stafford, could benefit from 'GC status'. The award comes in the wake of polling conducted for the prize showing that 68% of the 6,166 Britons polled thought that garden cities would protect more countryside than the alternatives for delivering the housing we need.

Read about URBED's submission, and the fictional town of Uxcester, after the break.

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The Glasgow School of Art have announced that they will hold two symposiums in order to discuss the restoration of the school's library which was devastated in a fire in May of this year. The first conference, to be held in Venice's Querini Stampalia, will act as a precursor to a second conference to be held in Glasgow in 2015. According to Professor Christopher Platt, head of the Mackintosh School of Architecture, the meetings will help to answer the question: "What should the plans be for bringing the Mackintosh building into full use once more and how should we approach the particular issue of the Macintosh library?"

Videos

The 6th Annual Architecture and Design Film Festival is set to return to New York City on October 15th for five days of premieres and showings. With a special themed focus on Women in Architecture, the US's largest architecture-related film festival will present over twenty five feature-length and short films in a programme curated by Kyle Bergman and Laura Cardello. Designed to provide "rare glimpses and intimate portrayals of seminal figures and growing movements in the fields of architecture, design, urbanism and fashion," this year's festival will also feature a 3D film series exploring six iconic structures from filmmakers such as Wim Wenders and Robert Redford.

Explore the highlights and find out more about the festival after the break.

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Dutch based practice Mecanoo, nominated for this year's RIBA Stirling Prize for the Library of Birmingham, have begun work on vast cultural centre in Shenzhen marking their first project to break ground on Chinese soil. Comprising of a large public art gallery, a science museum, a youth centre, and a book mall, the 95,000 square metre development will strengthen Longgang District's identity by "providing citizens and visitors with a renewed sense of place." Forming a dynamic link between the high-rise of the city's commercial district and the open spaces of Longcheng Park, the four sculpted forms emerge from the ground to create a series of arches and sheltered spaces to facilitate public events.

See the full set of images and an illustrative film after the break.

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House Housing, "An Untimely History of Architecture and Real Estate in Nineteen Episodes", was recently exhibited at Columbia University's Casa Muraro in Venice. Staged as an "open house" organised and funded by the Buell Center, the exhibition responded unsolicited to Rem Koolhaas's call to exhibitors at the 2014 Venice Biennale to focus on Fundamentals by exploring housing in nineteen "discrete episodes." In narrating these episodes, brought together from across the last one hundred years in a mixture of domestic media, the exhibition brought together a collection of excerpts from global processes.

Ochoalcubo (Eight-Cubed) is a pioneering project in Chile that seeks to unite leading Chilean and Japanese practices with ground-breaking architecture. The collaborative enterprise was started by Eduardo Godoy, a design impresario who began working in Chile in the 1980s and who has always been a strong advocate for innovative design and architecture in the country. For a nation that boasts more than forty individual schools of architecture, the ever growing number of professionals seems to have had a relatively small impact on Chilean cities. Faced with the seemingly infinite landscape of 'cookie-cutter housing' in the suburbs, Godoy implemented Ochoalcubo in order to provide opportunities for young professionals, alongside fostering a new kind of appreciation for the profession itself. With a large number of architects having taken part in the first stage, including Smiljan Radic (designer of the 2014 Serpentine Pavilion), the third and fourth stage of what is certainly one of the world's largest active architectural laboratories will be launched in the coming days.

See images from all sixteen proposals from third and fourth stages of the Ochoalcubo project, including those by SANAA, Sou Fujimoto, Kengo Kuma, Alejandro Aravena and Atelier Bow Wow, after the break.

To coincide with the opening of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA)'s new Architecture Gallery at their headquarters in London's Portland Place, the first major retrospective of Edwin Smith will open next month. Smith, one of Britain's foremost 20th century photographers, was considered a master of capturing the essence of the places, landscapes and buildings he documented over an extensive career. The exhibition, entitled Ordinary Beauty, will display over a hundred carefully curated black and white images from a collection of over 60,000 negatives and 20,000 prints donated by Olive Cook, Smith's widow and collaborator, to the RIBA Library.

PWFERRETTO, a practice split between London and Seoul, have won second place in a competition to design the National Park and Memorial in the Republic of Korea's capital. In materialising the boundary of the site into an "active monument" that reconnects the forgotten history of the park into "a memorial for the Catholic martyrs who lost their life fighting for their beliefs," the design hinges around the site's constant struggle between belonging and being excluded from the city it is a part of. This paradoxical "inclusive / exclusive" premise is the starting point for the designers' conceptual approach.

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In a short film for The Guardian Lead Architect and Partner of Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners, Graham Stirk, tours Robert Booth around the almost-complete Leadenhall Building. The building is referred to as a relative of it's neighbour, Lloyds of London, which was completed by Richard Rogers's practice in 1986. Leadenhall, dubbed the "Cheesegrater" due to its angled façade, is twice the height of Lloyds and is considered to be the physical manifestation of the evolution of Rogers' architectural and tectonic language. Although less "structurally showy" than its counterpart, the building is still unconventionally bold when it comes to structural expression.

The search for the 2014 Young Architect of the Year Awards (YAYA), organised by BDOnline, has begun. Now in its 16th year, YAYA "recognises the most promising new architectural practice in the European Union." Open to fully qualified architects who have been practising for twelve years or less, the winner of this year's YAYA will be announced at the Architect of the Year Awards gala dinner on the 2nd December 2014 at The Brewery, London.

Consistently ranked as among some of the best digital tools available for architects and designers, the team behind the Morpholio Project today release Board 2.0., the second version of their moodboard and layout app for iOS. The app has been made possible by a number of collaborations with high profile interior designers in order to develop a 'gallery' of "significant design objects", with contributions from the likes of Dyson, Herman Miller, and Knoll. For the past year Morpholio have "assembled research groups and canvased design leaders worldwide" in order to better understand the power and potential of the 'board'. The general consensus was that getting style, products, and sketching onto a single platform could "change the way designers access, build, and share ideas."

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The Atelier of the Future competition asked entrants to design a "creative and artistic vision of an atelier." Having been organised by FAKRO, in conjunction with A10 New European Architecture magazine, the proposals also were required to feature at least three FAKRO products (roof lights and windows) as part of a space which is functional, technologically astute, and able to "create the appropriate mood to stimulate creative visions."

With sixty two entries in total, a third of which were from Poland and 90% of which were from within Europe, the jury deliberated entries that "stimulated [their] imaginations and provoked a set of reflections about the possible futures of architecture and its fields for action." Divided among themes which ranged from projects associated with Industry, to Nature, to Water, entrants proposed solutions for "underwater resorts, skylofts, subterranean spaces, derelict areas, wheels of fortune and metabolist towers."

See the winning entries after the break.

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