Casa Besign is a temporary project born out of the need to showcase the talent of interior designers, mostly from Puebla, as part of Besign México—a platform created to honor Puebla's 2015 designation as a “Design Capital” by UNESCO, connecting disciplines, key players, and companies in the fields of design, creativity, and innovation.
The Ministry of Culture, through the National Institute of Indigenous Languages, invited multidisciplinary teams, communities, and groups of graphic and industrial designers, architects, curators, exhibition designers, artists, and engineers, among other disciplines, to submit individual or co-authored conceptual design proposals for the Indigenous Languages Pavilion at the 2019 Oaxaca and Guadalajara International Book Fairs. This year, the Ministry of Culture's participation in these prominent international book fairs will not focus on book sales—which will be managed by the relevant institutions—but will instead align with the country's cultural policy.
This month, DARP (De Arquitectura y Paisaje) was announced as the winning team of the public competition for the preliminary architectural design of Building A, part of the Physical Development Plan of the University of Ibagué. The project places the university within the contemporary academic architecture landscape that characterizes the national scene.
The degree to which heritage is crucial for the tourism and commercial value of cities like Cartagena is highly debated. As this value rises, the real estate sector invests more heavily in buildings that clash with the historic urban landscape. Especially since Cartagena is a warm, Caribbean, coastal vacation city, massive high-rise developments like Miami are often used as benchmarks. How far can real estate ambition go?
The answer is likely: until the city's long-term interests override those of private developers. This is the case of the controversial Aquarela building, whose already advanced construction was halted following a statement by UNESCO warning that they would remove the walled city of Cartagena from the World Heritage list. Consequently, the mayor of Cartagena reaffirmed his commitment to demolishing the unfinished structure.
Under the theme 'Factory of Ideas and Innovation,' the 33rd CAP Steel Design Competition for architecture students awarded first place to the team from Universidad Central, composed of students Hugo Valenzuela and Diego Lacazette, guided by professors Ricardo Atanasio and Álvaro Herrera, for their proposal "Biome and Seed Research Center."
The student team's proposal consists of "a controlled space for experimentation and observation of crop species in the face of desertification," as explained in the official project description.
From September 30 to October 7, Madrid will be the featured capital of the 16th Architecture Week 2019, organized by the Official Association of Architects of Madrid (COAM) through the COAM Architecture Foundation.
The XI Ibero-American Biennial of Architecture and Urbanism (XI BIAU) concluded last Friday, October 11, in Asunción, featuring lectures by Jorge Scrimaglio, one of the two winners of the 2019 Ibero-American Architecture Prize, and a closing lecture by Solano Benítez and Gloria Cabral, co-founders of Gabinete de Arquitectura.
Over the next five years, Bogota will inaugurate a series of public and private projects across the city, from skyscrapers to Felicidad Centers, highlighting those resulting from public architectural design competitions, legally managed by the Colombian Society of Architects.
Below, explore the main projects set to open:
During Chilean architect Felipe Assadi's course at the 2019 Summer Workshop of the Faculty of Architecture of the IUAV University of Venice, students reflected on the idea of a floating city and its inhabitants, resulting in floating architecture for a fluctuating population. To this end, the architecture students built a wooden floating pavilion as a scale prototype of a micro-dwelling, which forms part of a geometric system for expanding the city over water.
Read about the project in detail below, in the words of its designers.
With the launch of the new Urban and Building Code, approved by the Buenos Aires City Legislature in late 2018, the city of Buenos Aires has begun to reconfigure how information is accessed in the urban and architectural fields. In line with this approach, Plano Abierto BA serves as a tool that allows any resident to access online data regarding development capacity, permitted uses, building heritage listings, maximum heights, construction records and inspections, and the current status of each individual plot in the city (including cadastral data, built area, and number of floors). This provides indicative urban planning information to facilitate the understanding of the New Urban Code of Buenos Aires.
Usina de Innovación Colectiva is a cultural initiative of the School of Architecture, Design, and Urbanism at the University of the Republic in Uruguay.
It was established to revitalize disciplines related to architecture, design, landscape, and the city by creating opportunities that foster exchange, reflection, and the dissemination of work in these areas.
As part of the celebrations for the Bicentennial of Peru's Independence, the Ministry of Culture, the Municipality of Lima, and Grupo Centenario announced an international architecture and landscaping competition to design a metropolitan park along the perimeter of the Pachacamac Sanctuary in the Lurín district of Lima. The competition sought to encourage reflection on Lima's relationship with its historical and landscape heritage, as the Sanctuary houses some of the most important structures of the national archaeological heritage, spanning more than fifteen centuries of human occupation.
Fifty of today's leading architects—answering the call of the Now Institute and its director, Thom Mayne—were convened to assess the architectural legacy of the last century. Their goal? To compile a definitive list of 100 buildings that represent, in their view, the 100 most remarkable architectural achievements of the 20th century. Prominent figures such as Tadao Ando, Steven Holl, Richard Rogers, Kazuyo Sejima, Toyo Ito, Rafael Moneo, Kengo Kuma, and Denise Scott Brown, among others, formed the voting panel.
The abandoned industrial building of the Clesa Factory, which closed its doors for good back in 2012 after nearly two years in bankruptcy proceedings, is set to become the "Matadero" of northern Madrid. The industrial site, located at 67 Avenida de Cardenal Herrera Oria, was designed in 1959 by architect Alejandro de la Sota and officially opened in 1962. The former dairy plant's 37,928 square meters are now being transferred to the Madrid City Council, which aims to convert the space into a major “cultural container.”
In recent days, Mexico City has experienced pollution levels reaching 150 points on the Air Quality Index in various areas, such as Nezahualcóyotl in the State of Mexico. On May 13 of this year, Mexico City Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum reported that while hazy conditions and low visibility prevailed in the nation's capital, an environmental contingency had not yet been declared.
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On Friday, May 7, the winning proposal of the second "Imagining Machines" (Máquinas Imaginantes) open call was announced. The initiative invited architects, researchers, and writers to reflect on "machines" of the past and present operating within architecture as tools for social analysis and production. The open call accepted both real and speculative projects, incorporating installations, historical documents, archival material, performance formats, and publications that engaged with the creation of imagining machines.
In February of this year, construction will begin on the renovation of Plaza de España in Madrid. The project is a collaborative effort by design firms Guadiana and Porras La Casta Arquitectos, led by architects Lorenzo Fernández-Ordóñez and Fernando Porras-Isla.
The project, known as Welcome Mother Nature, seeks to create a large green area in the city center, recovering its long-lost identity as a "plaza," which had been reduced to a transit space. The proposal emphasizes the definition of a plaza as a "social place of expression, gathering, and freedom." The project's main priority is to create a space where "it is easy to build shared civic experiences," while creating a new lung for a city that constantly lives under a cloud of pollution and smog.
Dear readers,
.jpg?1570822093 "Courtesy of Hugo Valenzuela and Diego Lacazette")
