The Architectural League of New York has announced the recipients of its 2018 Emerging Voices awards, spotlighting individuals and firms “with distinct design voices and the potential to influence the disciplines of architecture, landscape design, and urbanism.”

The Serpentine Galleries has announced the expansion of their popular summer pavilion program, collaborating with Beijing’s WF Central to commission the inaugural Serpentine Pavilion Beijing. The first Serpentine Pavilion to be built outside of the Galleries’ Kensington Gardens home in London, the Beijing Pavilion will be located just 600 meters away from the historic Forbidden City in the Dongcheng District, where it will host a program of cultural activities and events.

The inaugural pavilion has been designed by emerging Chinese studio JIAKUN Architects, led by architect Liu Jiakun. Drawing both from the historical and social of Beijing and from the storied 17-year history of the Serpentine Pavilion commission, the design features an arched form that balances forces of tensions and compression.

Videos

Nine visionary projects focused on living within the relatively unexplored terrains of sea and space have been selected as winners of the 2017 Jacques Rougerie international architecture competition.

Established in 2011, the competition aims to foster the creativity of young architects by challenging them to complete “innovative, audacious and promising projects” that imagine new methods of sustainable development within the realms of sea and space. 

Architectural submissions were awarded this year within three categories: Innovation and Architecture for the Sea, Innovation and Architecture for Space, and Architecture and Sea Level Rise. Within these categories, projects were selected in three disciplines: the overall Grand Prix, the “Focus” theme award, and the Coup de Coeur.

Check out the winning projects below.

+ 5

AIA New York and the Center for Architecture have announced five practices as winners of the 2018 New Practices New York awards, founded to identify and promote the city’s emerging young architects. Established in 2006, the awards are given biennially to practices headquartered in New York and in operation for 10 or fewer years.

Under this year’s theme of Consequences, firms were asked to submit portfolios containing design ideas that promoted “the capacity of architectural practice to offer transformative value within the broader context of the city.”

Álvaro Siza's extensive personal archive of built and unbuilt projects is going online with free access, thanks to the collaboration between three institutions – the Serralves Foundation in Oporto, the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon and the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) in Montreal.

Siza donated his archive to the three institutions in 2014, and after three years of archival work, the first batch of entries are set for public viewing.

MVRDV has revealed the design of The Milestone, a new mixed-use office building to be built in the city of Esslingen, Germany. Featuring a distinct, part-reflective “crystal rock” facade and a hollowed-out pixelated core, the building will become a standout new landmark and public amenity for the city.

+ 3

Japanese architect Kazuyo Sejima, co-founder of Tokyo-based SANAA, has been appointed as the newest member of the Pritzker Prize Jury.

Sejima, the 2010 Pritzker Prize co-laureate, will help to decide the recipient of the 2018 Prize, the 40th edition of what has become known as the architecture world’s most prestigious honor.

Videos

An airplane that skidded off the runway in Trabzon, Turkey, earlier this month (with no injuries) may soon be repurposed into a library for the city.

Five days after the plane was removed from its cliffside perch, Trabzon Mayor Orhan Fevzi Gümrükçüoğlu has reached out to the general manager of airline involved in the incident, Pegasus Airlines, to ask if they will donate the plane as a gift with the condition that it will be used as a library space, explaining that “keeping it here will also erase the bad memories attached to the plane.”

The Harvard Graduate School of Design’s popular free online course, The Architectural Imagination, has returned for 2018, again offering anyone across the globe the opportunity to study the fundamentals of architecture from one of the world’s foremost design schools at absolutely no cost.

Led by professors Erika Naginski, Antoine Picon, and K. Michael Hays, alongside PhD student Lisa Haber-Thomson, the 10-week course will cover topics ranging from learning to “read” buildings as cultural expression to technical drawing and modeling exercises.

Herzog & de Meuron’s design for the new flagship building of the Royal College of Art’s Battersea campus has been granted planning approval by Wandsworth Council. Unveiled last fall, the £108 million building will mark an “important step” in the evolution of the RCA into a STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Mathematics)-focused postgraduate university.

+ 3

The 2018 DAM Preis for the best building in Germany has been been awarded to bogevischs buero and SHAG Schindler Hable Architekten for their visionary residential housing project wagnisART in Munich. Selected from a list of 4 finalists, the project was lauded by the jury for setting new “social, architectural, and urban planning standards” in becoming a model for future residential housing projects in Germany.

The DAM Preis for Architecture in Germany was established by Deutsches Architekturmuseum in 2007 to honor outstanding buildings in Germany. Previous winners of the annual award include the European Hansemuseum in Lubeck by Studio Andreas Heller (2017), the renovation of the Neues Museum by David Chipperfield Architects (2010) and the Kolumba Museum by Atelier Peter Zumthor (2008).

Learn more about the winner and see a selection of shortlisted and finalist projects below.

+ 14

Freelon Adjaye Bond/SmithGroup’s Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington D.C. has been selected as the winner of the Beazley Design of the Year for 2017.

Presented by the Design Museum in London, the award is given to the project that best meets the criteria of design that “promotes or delivers change, enables access, extends design practice or captures the spirit of the year.”

See more from the overall winner and each of the category winners, below.

Despite 3 years of community input and redesign, BIG’s plans for the new Smithsonian Institution Campus Master Plan in Washington, D.C., has been met with skepticism from the Commission of Fine Arts, one of the two federal agencies charged with approving the plan.

The collaboration of Aranda\Lasch + Marcelo Coelho has been selected as the winners of this year’s Times Square Valentine Heart Design competition for their 3D-printed proposal, Window to the Heart.

Envisioned as the “world’s largest lens,” the installation was in response to its location within one of the world’s most instagrammed places, Times Square. The 12-foot-diameter Fresnel lens, designed with 3D-printing manufacturer Formlabs and structural engineer Laufs Engineering Design, will capture the image of the square within the heart-shaped window at its center, bending and distorting the surround myriad lights and colors.

Steven Holl Architects, in collaboration with Art-group Kamen, has been selected as the winners of an international competition to design a new mixed-use residential development in the Tushino district of Moscow, Russia, beating out proposals from Fuksas Architecture, Zaha Hadid Architects, Mad Global, and Tsimailo, Lyashenko & Partners.

Comprising housing, social spaces and educational facilities, the design of the complex draws inspiration from its historic site, a former paratrooper airfield. In response, Steven Holl Architects proposed a completely new building typology, “Parachute Hybrids,” which “combines residential bar and slab structures with supplemental programming suspended in sections above, like parachutes frozen in the sky.”

+ 3

New renderings have been revealed of Gehry Partners’ Grand Avenue Project as construction is finally set to begin this fall. Located across from Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall in downtown Los Angeles, the development now known as The Grand will offer up retail, entertainment and residences within two blocky, terracing towers.

+ 1

In one of the largest mergers ever to occur in the architecture world, world renowned Danish firm Schmidt Hammer Lassen Architects has joined Perkins+Will in a strategic global partnership aimed at extending the firms’ international reach and reinforcing a commitment to sustainability and design excellence.

Founded in 1986, Schmidt Hammer Lassen has grown to become one of Scandinavia's most prominent and reputable practices, completing projects such as the Dokk1 Library and ARoS Museum of Art in Aarhus, Denmark; the Halifax Central Library in Nova Scotia, Canada; and The Black Diamond, the extension to the Royal Library in Copenhagen. The firm had a particularly successful 2017, winning competitions for projects in locations as wide ranging as Shanghai, Melbourne, Copenhagen, and Detroit.