Former ArchDaily's Managing Editor. BA in Architecture from Newcastle University, and interested in how overlooked elements of architectural culture —from the media to competitions to procurement processes can alter the designs we end up with.
A new Serpentine Pavilion has opened in Beijing, China, marking the first time the prestigious program has been implemented away from its usual home at the Serpentine Gallery in Hyde Park, London. Designed by JIAKUN Architects, the pavilion was commissioned by The Serpentine Galleries working in partnership with WF CENTRAL, and is located just 600 meters away from Beijing's Forbidden City.
ADEPT and KARRES + BRANDS have won the international competition to design Oberbillwerder, a new masterplan district in the city of Hamburg. Offering around a million square meters of housing, business, shopping, public buildings, and recreational activities, the Oberbillwerder plan is the largest single development plan in Germany since Hafencity, which contains around 1.7 million square meters of new space (including the Hamburg Elbphilharmonie) and is also currently being completed in Hamburg.
The curators of the 2018 Venice Biennale Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara of Grafton Architects have announced the winning contributions to the 16th International Architecture Exhibition. Selected with the help of jury members Frank Barkow, Sofia Von Ellrichshausen, Kate Goodwin, Patricia Patkau, and Pier Paolo Tamburelli, the winners of the Golden Lion for Best National Participation went to Switzerland. Meanwhile, in the Freespace exhibition curated by Farrell and McNamara at Venice's Arsenale, Eduardo Souto de Moura will take home the Golden Lion for Best Participant in the International Exhibition.
With the opening of the 16th Venice Architecture Biennale comes a look at the first ever contribution by the Holy See, an exhibition that brings together architects to design chapels that, after the Biennale, can be relocated to sites around the globe.
Located in a wooded area on the Venetian island of San Giorgio Maggiore, 10 chapels by architects including Norman Foster, Eduardo Souto de Moura, and Smiljan Radic, are joined by the Asplund Chapel by MAP Architects. This 11th structure serves as a prelude to the other chapels, while reflecting on Gunnar Asplund's 1920 design for the Woodland Chapel.
Since construction was halted on the Chicago Spire, the Santiago Calatrava-designed skyscraper at 400 N Lake Shore Drive, the hole which was to become the tower's foundation has become something of a local punchline, variously being caricatured as the site of semi-ironic proposals for inner-city adventure playgrounds or the pit into which the city's other failed ventures can be metaphorically dumped. But according to a report by the Chicago Tribune, that narrative might be about to change, as their sources within the city government have confirmed that a proposal is in the works to bring two skyscrapers to the site, designed by David Childs of SOM, the lead architect behind 1 World Trade Center.
Arts South Australia has unveiled 6 designs shortlisted in a competition for the Adelaide Contemporary, a new cultural destination in Australia's fifth-most populous city. The shortlist, which was announced in January, features a star-studded list of international practices, pairing some of Australia's most famous firms such as Woods Bagot, HASSELL, and Durbach Block Jaggers with international names such as Adjaye Associates, BIG, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, David Chipperfield Architects, and Ryue Nishizawa.
The Adelaide Contemporary is planned to transform the site of the former Royal Adelaide Hospital (oRAH), and will feature exhibition, research, and education spaces situated in a public sculpture park and community meeting place. The museum will also notably host the Gallery of Time, a first-of-its-kind space to exhibit Aboriginal art alongside art from Europe and Asia, inviting visitors to see Australian art in a global context. The six designs are now being displayed in an online gallery created by competition organizer Malcolm Reading Consultants, and in a public exhibition being held in Adelaide at the Art Gallery of South Australia.
Hong Kong is a unique city. With its unlikely history as a British Colony, its position as a global hub city, and its spectacular geography, the dense, lively streets of Hong Kong feature a variety of urban phenomena that can't be found anywhere else in the world. In this series of video essays, New Office Works probes the urban character of Hong Kong with stunning depth, uncovering histories and explanations that bring new intrigue to an urban fabric that is, both literally and figuratively, already heavily layered.
The title of the series, Middle Man, references Hong Kong's status as a city that mediates between east and west, calling back to the "compradors" that helped the city to grow in the 19th century by translating for traders—middlemen in the most literal sense. Rooted in this history, the urban environment is not one built on grand schemes or overarching ideals, says New Office Works: "The combination of a growing population and limited land has cultivated an instant-fix mentality. There is neither time nor space for architectural ideologies, only pure pragmatism."
Zaha Hadid Architects has unveiled its design for the Lushan Primary School, an educational campus that will serve around 120 students from 12 villages in a rural area of Jiangxi Province in China. The design features a series of barrel and parabolic vaults constructed from concrete, which are oriented to offer optimum lighting conditions and views out to the landscape.
Since the concept of driverless cars first became a serious prospect, a lot of attention has been given to the possibility of their malfunction—if an autonomous vehicle damages property or even harms a human, who is at fault? And, given a worst-case scenario, how should a vehicle's software choose between whose lives it prioritizes, the passenger or the pedestrian? This last question even became the basis for the Moral Machine, an online platform created by the MIT Media Lab that essentially crowdsources public opinion on different variations of the classic trolley problem thought experiment.
However, all of these questions had been considered largely theoretical until last night when, as The New York Times reports, a woman was struck and killed by an autonomous vehicle in Tempe, Arizona. As a major component of many predictions of futuristic "smart cities," the development and testing of autonomous vehicles hold huge implications for urbanism (ArchDaily has previously covered predictions of major change by car manufacturers and researchers) meaning that this fatal event could have a ripple effect on the development of cities.
At a press conference earlier today, curators of the 2018 Venice Biennale Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara of Grafton Architects revealed more information about this year's upcoming event, to be hosted from May 26th to November 25th. Building on the thematic concept the duo presented last June—“Freespace”—the event will feature a main exhibition in the Central Pavilion of the Giardini and the Arsenale featuring work by 71 participants, while two Special Sections will feature a total of 29 further participants. Elsewhere, 65 national pavilions will present contributions from around the world, including 7 first-time participants: Antigua & Barbuda, Saudi Arabia, Guatemala, Lebanon, Mongolia, Pakistan and the Holy See.
Kalix, a small town in Northern Sweden, has plans to replace its current bridge over the river in 2019. As part of the process, The Swedish Traffic Administration commissioned Erik Andersson Architects to design an initial study for a bridge that would not only replace the existing bridge's functions, but also add new elements to turn the new bridge into a gathering space and public amenity for the town.
American artist Janet Echelman's latest sculpture is currently on display at Madrid's Plaza Mayor. Titled "1.78 Madrid," the piece is the latest of Echelman's suspended thread sculptures, and the newest piece in her Earth Time Series begun in 2010. On display until February 19th, the piece was unveiled on Friday to mark Madrid's 400th anniversary.
Snøhetta has unveiled its design for "Svart," a hotel for sustainable tourism company Arctic Adventure of Norway. Located within the Arctic Circle, on the edge of Norway's Holandsfjorden fjord at the base of the Svartisen glacier, the building is designed to the "Powerhouse" building standard, a system developed by Snøhetta and a group of collaborators for creating energy-positive sustainable buildings.
Bjarke Ingels Group and Carlo Ratti Associati have broken ground on 88 Market Street, a new skyscraper at the heart of Singapore's business district. Transforming a site which was previously occupied by a parking structure from the 1980s, the 280-meter-tall building will include plentiful greenery both on its facades and internally. Inside, the building will include offices, 299 serviced residential units, and ancillary retail space.
David Chipperfield Architects has won a competition to design the Elbtower, a 230-meter tall building in Hamburg that will be the city's tallest. Located on the eastern edge of the Hafencity, the sculptural building has a strong presence on the riverfront, forming a counterpoint to Herzog & de Meuron's Elbphilharmonie to the West. The building hosts office space in the tower, over a podium containing a bar, hotel, restaurant, retail and exhibition areas.
UNStudio has won a competition to design a new, 3-kilometer long cable car in the Swedish city of Gothenburg. The cable car's route, which will connect the old city on the south of the river with three locations to the north, will feature a total of six towers which have been designed around an adaptable, asymmetrical structural system intended to mimic the cranes in the city's shipyards. The expected opening date for the cable car is in 2021, with the new transportation system being inaugurated as part of the celebrations of Gothenburg's 400th anniversary.
Around 1 in 7 women in UK architecture practices has experienced sexual harassment in the workplace in the past year alone, according to the results of the annual Women in Architecture survey conducted by The Architects' Journal. The poll of nearly 1,500 architects also found that more than half of women have experienced some form of discrimination ranging from bullying to workplace rules that leave them disadvantaged in the same period. The AJ's survey, which in previous years has largely focused on issues such as pay disparity between men and women, focuses this year more broadly on gender discrimination and sexual harassment—a response to the global shift in awareness organized around movements such as #MeToo and #TimesUp.
London's Serpentine Gallery has announced Mexican architect Frida Escobedo as the designer for the 2018 Serpentine Gallery Pavilion in Hyde Park. Escobedo, known for her work in activating public spaces, will be the youngest architect to have participated in the Serpentine Pavilion program since it began in 2000. Her design features an enclosed courtyard created by two rectangular volumes positioned at an angle. With its interplay of light and water, the design is intended to evoke the sensation of Mexican domestic architecture, while using British materials and containing references to its London context.
