Happy Pi Day everyone! To celebrate the circle and its influence on architecture, we've decided to round up some rounded structures. First up, Roll It, a cool experimental house/cylinder. Second, Villa Vals, the hobbit-like neighbor of Zumthor's Therme Vals (designed underground to maintain the bath houses' extensive views). Then, the stacked, rounded form of the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts, designed by Moshe Safdie for optimal sound reflection. Next up, Galaxy Soho, designed by the queen of curvature, Zaha Hadid. And - last but not least - the "mothership" itself, Foster + Partners' design for Apple's new campus, scheduled for completion in 2016.

As Rem Koolhaas completes the introductory press circuit for the 2014 Venice Biennale, we're learning more about one of the most anticipated Biennales in recent memory. Here's what we've gleaned from Oliver Wainwright's revealing story in today's Guardian:

1. Koolhaas has been asked to direct the Venice Biennale before, but hasn't accepted until now. "I have been asked to direct it a number of times before, but I held out for two conditions: that I have a year and a half to plan it, and that I can sever all connections with contemporary architecture – which is not in particularly good health."

UPDATE: In a press conference on Monday, Venice Biennale director Paolo Baratta and curator Rem Koolhaas expressed their commitment to using the event to highlight “things that architects can’t ignore.” These “Fundamentals” get back to the basic inventions of modernity, thus individual exhibitions will look to the “elementary particles of architecture.” Paying special attention to the developments of the past century, Baratta and Koolhaas hope that the event will serve as “a reference point and source of inspiration for architecture."

The Biennale website has posted new images and an expanded description of the Biennale and its events:

“Fundamentals consists of three interlocking exhibitions – Absorbing Modernity 1914-2014, Elements of Architectureand Monditalia – that together illuminate the past, present and future of our discipline. After several architecture Biennales dedicated to the celebration of the contemporary, Fundamentals will look at histories, attempt to reconstruct how architecture finds itself in its current situation, and speculate on its future."

Read on to learn more about architecture's most celebrated exhibition.

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The National Museum in Norway has been chosen to curate the Nordic Pavilion for the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale, in collaboration with the Museum of Finnish Architecture, the Swedish Centre for Architecture and Design in Stockholm, and architectural firm Space Group. The exhibition, “FORMS OF FREEDOM: African Independence and Nordic Models” will study modern Nordic architecture’s role in the liberation of East Africa during the 1960s and 70s.

To celebrate our birthday today, we decided to take a look back at the most popular projects of the last six years. Who takes the top spot? Zaha Hadid? Frank Gehry? Well, you may be surprised...

See our 20 most popular projects of all time, after the break...

Over a decade ago on a cycling trip across Europe, photographer Christopher Herwig stumbled upon a curious phenomenon that would become his obsession for years: bus stops. Curiously for a regime usually associated - both architecturally and otherwise - with uniformity and with sameness, the bus stops built by the Soviet Republic display remarkable diversity and creativity. Herwig made it his mission to photograph as many of these remarkable structures as possible, travelling through Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and Russia; Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan; Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, Armenia, and Abkhazia.

Now complete, Herwig has launched a Kickstarter to turn this remarkable collection of photographs into a limited edition book, which he describes as "the most mind-blowing collection of creative bus stop design from the Soviet era ever assembled." Check out some of the images after the break.

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Trimble Buildings Group have recently released SketchUp 2014, the latest version of its 3D modelling platform for architects, engineers, design and construction professionals. With "more than 30 million unique activations in the past year", SketchUp is claimed to be the most widely used 3D modeling software in the world today. The latest incarnation of the simple tool features a new 3D Warehouse and some interesting integrations into the world of Building Information Modelling (BIM).

There are few topics that stir up more controversy on ArchDaily than that of women in architecture. From those of you who vociferously advocate for women in the field to those who steadfastly purport that gender has no place in architecture at all, you, our readers, represent a wide spectrum of viewpoints and opinions on the subject. 

And so, in honor of International Women's Day, we've decided to take a look back at some of our past comment-stirring articles (even more after the break):

Infographic: Women in Architecture by Megan Jett

The 10 Most Overlooked Women in Architecture History by Nicky Rackard

Why Do Women Really Leave Architecture" Is the Wrong Question by Vanessa Quirk

"When Will Architects Speak Up for Women's Rights?" by Carla Soto

Why 2013 was Denise Scott Brown's Year by Guy Horton

In honor of International Women's Day, we've once again rounded up some stunning architecture designed by female architects (In case you missed Part 1, featuring work by Zaha Hadid, Jeanne Gang, and more, click here).

In honor of International Women's Day, MASS Design Group has released the latest in their video series “Beyond the Building,” a visual exploration of the ways architecture impacts lives around the world (see the first in the series here).

In his talk at TEDx Vilnius, Koen Olthuis compares the cities of today with those at the turn of the 20th century: "cities are not full, we just have to search for new space... they made elevators and built a vertical city. We have to do exactly the same, but our generation has to look at water." With that in mind he looks at the top 10 reasons that floating cities are becoming a more popular idea, including: they provide solutions for topical issues such as flooding and sustainability; they can be used as 'plug in' travelling global amenities, useful for things like Olympic Stadiums; or could even allow us to rearrange urban areas.

In this article originally published by Metropolis Magazine as "Urban Hopes, Urban Dreams", Samuel Medina reviews a new book on the work of Steven Holl in China. Focusing on five major projects, the book places Holl's work in the wider context of his urbanistic influences - including ideas from his own early paper architecture that are just now resurfacing.

Steven Holl is the rare architect whose concepts are equally known as his buildings. Chalk that up to Holl’s prolific output, in both buildings and monographs, and his knack for branding his ideas. Urban Hopes: Made in China (Lars Müller, 2014), a condensed reader on Holl's latest work in China, is the latest in a stream of small books that have continually repackaged the architect's growing body of work.

Anchoring and Intertwining appeared in 1996 and expounded on architectural themes and spatial notions only partially evinced by his work up until that time. In both, the buildings were few and far between, scattered between pages imprinted with “paper architecture,” the primary outlet for Holl’s creative energies in the prior decades since his move to New York in 1976. These and more titles were followed up by Parallax in 2000, a blend of philosophical, scientific, and poetic references that invest the architecture with the aura of the Gesamtkunstwerk. Holl’s idea of “porosity” made its debut here, if prematurely, where it was applied rather literally to Simmons Hall at MIT and its sponge-like facade. It wasn’t until a few years later, when the architect first got his feet wet in China, that the concept would be baptised as a core tenet of 21st-century urban design. 2009’s Urbanisms advances as much, while further recapitulating the big ideas of the previous book installments.

Read on after the break for the review of Urban Hopes

Architect's Journal has reported on an embarrassing - and controversial - fumble from the BBC. Not only has the media outlet been criticized for "largely ignoring women architects in its series The Brits Who Built the Modern World," but it's now come under fire for an image (appearing at the beginning of episode 3) in which Patty Hopkins is photoshopped out of a group that includes her husband Michael Hopkins, Norman Foster, Richard Rogers, Nicholas Grimshaw, and Terry Farrell.

The six architects are featured in RIBA's tie-in-exhibition; however, as the series chose to focus on the five male architects, the photographer removed Ms. Hopkins from the shot (unbeknownst to the BBC).

Lucy Mori of KL Mori Business Consulting for Architects told Architect's Journal: ‘I am shocked that women’s contribution to architecture has again been “airbrushed” from this populist history programme."

Today, TIME unveiled "Top of America," a multimedia site relaying the gripping story of One World Trade, the David Childs-designed skyscraper that stands 1,776-feet tall within Daniel Libeskind's masterplan. Beyond providing interesting tidbits of information (did you know that both an 18th century boat and an ice-age formation were found while digging out the building's foundations?), the article, written by Josh Sanburn, is a fascinating and often deeply moving account -- one that gets across the sheer force of will and the extraordinary amount of collaboration it took to raise this building into the atmosphere:

"Nine governors, two mayors, multiple architects, a headstrong developer, thousands of victims’ families and tens of thousands of neighborhood residents fought over this tiny patch of real estate…. Almost 13 years later…. America’s brawny, soaring ­ambition—the drive that sent pioneers west, launched rockets to the moon and led us to build steel-and-glass towers that pierced the clouds—is intact. Reaching 1,776 ft. has ensured it."

TIME's investment into the story was considerable (and, one can speculate, motivated by a desire to rival the fantastic multimedia features of The New York Times). The site is accompanied by a special issue of TIME, a documentary film, an unprecedented 360-degree interactive photograph, and - come April - even a book. Sanburn was not only granted exclusive access to the project for about a year, but photographer Jonathan Woods is the only journalist to have ascended to the skyscraper's top. Woods, start-up Gigapan, and mechanical engineers worked over eight months to design (on AutoCAD no less) a 13-foot long, rotating jib that could sustain a camera in the harsh conditions at the top of the tower’s 408-ft. spire; over 600 images were then digitally stitched together to create the 360-degree interactive photograph (which you can purchase here. A portion of the proceeds go to the National September 11 Memorial & Museum).

You can explore TIME's interactive at TIME.com/wtc . Click after the break to watch some incredible videos from the project & read some particularly moving quotes from Sanburn's article.

Envisioned as a three-and-a-half-meter wide “wound” within the landscape, Swedish artist Jonas Dahlberg’s powerful monument to those lost in the 2011 Utøya terror attacks has won Oslo’s July 22 Memorial competition.

“My concept for the Memorial Sørbråten proposes a wound or a cut within nature itself. It reproduces the physical experience of taking away, reflecting the abrupt and permanent loss of those who died,” described Dahlberg.

In this article, originally published by Metropolis as "Houses Without Windows: Meditative Respites or Architectural Straightjackets?", Komal Sharma looks into the architectural oddity that is the completely enclosed house. While many would shudder at the idea, there is a rich history of houses which, in exceptional circumstances and with exceptional clients, make sense without windows.

The Vertical Glass House by Chinese architects Atelier FCJZ is disingenuous to say the least. Its name suggests a vertical derivative of Philip Johnson's canonical house, and in fact its architects describe it as a 90-degree rotation of the typical modernist glass house. Instead, what welcomes visitors at Shanghai's Xuhui waterfront is a four-story concrete house without any windows. Where is all that promised glass, you might ask?

The answer is inside. The house's textured concrete walls give it the appearance of a bunker, but the interiors are actually light-filled. The architects accomplish this through an inverted sense of space. Where one expects walls of glass, yielding a platonic prism that brazenly exposes inhabitants to the outside world, the house instead delivers a surprising twist: the 7-cm-thick floor slabs are completely transparent, endowing users with a Superman-like sense of see-through vision. The experience of looking up through all of the house's spaces, even the most private spaces like the bathroom, is breathtakingly novel.

Read on for more about the phenomenon of window-less houses

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Federico Babina has unveiled yet another playful collection of architecturally inspired illustrations: Derived from the "symbiotic relationship and implicit partnership" between art and architecture, Archist reinterprets the expressive language and aesthetic of prominent artists as built form.

“Art and architecture are disciplines that speak and lightly touch each other, the definition and function of the architecture are changing constantly with the development of contemporary art,” described Babina. “I took pleasure imagining architecture steeped of art, designed and constructed through the interpretation of an artist’s language.”

Just imagine, what if Dalí designed a house or Miró a museum? See what Babina envisioned, after the break...

Construction is officially underway on 610 Lexington Avenue, a 700-foot ultra-thin condominium tower designed by Foster + Partners in New York City. Designed as a contrast to its neighboring landmark, Mies van der Rohe’s midcentury Seagram Building, the slim 61-story tower will feature 91 luxury units encased within a pure white glass facade.