Architecture News

Every two years, the International VELUX Award challenges architecture students from around the world to envision the future of daylight, drawing inspiration from creative exploration and research.

For the 2018 edition, the jury—composed of Carme Pigém Barceló, Rick Joy, Li Hu, Saša Begovic, and Martin Pors Jepsen—has announced the global winners. Selected from among the 9 regional winners, the chosen projects are ‘Light Forms Juggler’ by Anastasia Maslova, and ‘Road to Light’ by Yuhan Luo, Di Lan, Yuan Liu, and Yusong Liu.

Mumbai-based NUDES architecture office have revealed a new design called "Mosque of Light" as their entry in the Dubai Creek Harbor competition. The project was designed as a play in light with a multi-layered geometrical form to filter daylight softly into the prayer hall. The mosque explores the combination of light and built form around a spiritual experience.

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Six outstanding projects across four categories were recognized in Chile with the 2018 Urban Contribution Award (PAU), an initiative promoted by the Chilean Chamber of Construction (CChC), the Ministry of Housing and Urbanism (Minvu), the Architects' Association, the Association of Architectural Offices (AOA), and the Association of Real Estate Developers (ADI).

The award was open to any company with projects in Chile. As the project owners, these companies represent the rest of the professional team and firms involved in the work, including architects, construction companies, structural engineers, and landscape architects, among others.

Canadian Architect has announced the winners of its annual Awards of Excellence program. Now in its 51st year, the awards are “the highest recognition for excellence in the design stage in the Canadian architectural sector.” Celebrating unbuilt and student work, the awards place emphasis on design ambition, innovation, and social and environmental sustainability.

This year, fourteen entries were recognized from a pool of 190 professional and student submissions. The winners, featured below, were divided into Awards of Excellence, Awards of Merit, Student Awards of Excellence, and the inaugural Photo Award of Excellence.

A historic hotbed of architectural styles and a current architectural capital of the world, cities in the United Kingdom are awash with iconic buildings from the Georgian, Neoclassical, and contemporary era. Such buildings, from the Clifton Suspension Bridge in Bristol to the Southbank in London, have come to define the cities in which they stand, drawing the eyes of tourists and designers alike from around the world.

It is therefore an interesting exercise to examine what these cities would look like if such structures didn’t exist. To this end, Neomam Studios has partnered with QuickQuid to produce a series of images demonstrating what six British cities could have looked like, resurrecting some of Britain’s most surprising unbuilt structures.

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The International VELUX Award 2018 sought to highlight the work of architecture students around the globe who challenge the use of daylight in built environments. The award, titled “Light of Tomorrow,” was launched in 2004 and is awarded biennially for creative interpretation, exploration, and investigation of daylight in built environments. This year, the winners were selected from over 600 submissions.

PLP Architecture’s Tower Ten, the new expansion of the World Trade Center Amsterdam, officially began construction last week. The ground breaking ceremony was launched by deputy director Sandra Thesing of the City of Amsterdam and Ronald van der Waals of CBRE Global Investors. Located in the Zuidas central business district, the project will create a radically different appearance from its predecessor, adding 32,000 sqm of new office space and amenities in the process.

Yong Ju Lee Architecture and Atelier KJ have created "Elusive Boundary" for the Korean Pavilion at Expo 2020 Dubai. The project is designed as a place for radical encounters in different fields. The main theme of the Korean Pavilion, Mobility, is defined as a new space of possibility created by movement between territories and escape/expansion to new territories. The movement defined by new mobility is not linear, but a simultaneous event between territories.

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UNStudio has released images of their proposed Lyric Theatre complex in the West Kowloon Cultural District of Hong Kong. Intended as a “celebration of the world of theater,” the mixed-use scheme will house three theaters, rehearsal room, and dining, retail, and entertainment functions.

Designed to be open, inclusive, and welcoming, the compact scheme is comprised of a series of stacked transparent elements making the arts accessible to the general public. Open displays draw visitors inside from a series of reactivated plazas surrounding the scheme, supported by “an additional programme for the public to enjoy that is independent of performance timetable.”

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Richard Rogers has been awarded the 2019 AIA Gold Medal by the American Institute of Architects. The world-renowned architect and founding principal of Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners has been recognized “for his influence on the built environment [that] has redefined an architect’s responsibilities to society.”

Honoring “an individual or pair of architects whose significant body of work has had a lasting influence on the theory and practice of architecture,” the AIA Gold Medal is often considered the highest honor awarded in the United States for architecture.

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Zaha Hadid Architects and A-Lab have been announced the winner of a competition to design two new metro stations in Oslo. The stations, Fornebu Senter and Fornbuporten, are to be part of Oslo's new Fornebubanen line, connecting a major existing rail interchange to the Fornebu Senter, a major shopping center in the city.

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Videos

What are the exact dimensions of the Royal Palace of Madrid? How many rooms does it have? How many doors and windows? These questions stem from a need for definitive answers. This is exactly what Patrimonio Nacional—the Spanish state institution responsible for managing and preserving its historic buildings—set out to do: create an accurate 3D model of the palace to produce a unified digital record of the building's interior and exterior.

Using Leica Geosystems technology, an "almost millimeter-accurate" model of its interior spaces, facades, and roofs was created, mapping every corner of the building's two basements and six floors—totaling approximately 137,500 square meters of built area that required more than 2,500 scans.

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The Museum of Modern Art and MoMA P.S.1 have announced the five finalists of their 2019 Young Architects Program (YAP). The competition was founded to offer emerging architectural talent the opportunity to design a temporary, outdoor installation within the walls of the P.S.1 courtyard for MoMA’s annual summer “Warm-Up” series. Architects are challenged to develop creative designs that provide shade, seating and water, while working within guidelines that address environmental issues, including sustainability and recycling.

Italian furniture brand Cassina has reissued an iconic piece of Frank Lloyd Wright-designed furniture, the Taliesin 1 chair. The chair was designed by Lloyd Wright in 1949 for the Garden Room in Taliesin West. The iconic chair didn’t enter mass production until the late 1980s, but was discontinued in 1990 as it was seen as “too avant-garde.” The Taliesin 1 is constructed from a single piece of folded plywood, and will release in its original beech plywood with a cherry wood veneer.

The Aga Khan Award for Architecture has announced the master jury for the 2017-2019 award cycle. The jury, a diverse and global group comprising architects, academics, and theorists, will select the recipients of the award, each of whom will, in turn, receive a USD $I million prize for their winning work.

The Bardi Institute has just inaugurated its "Summer Pavilion," a structure built at the foot of the Glass House by Lina Bo Bardi, which will host a schedule of concerts, exhibitions, lectures, and other events. Built amidst the vegetation and featuring an organic shape that evokes Lina's work, the pavilion both blends in and stands out in its context. All proceeds raised during these activities will go toward the maintenance and cultural programming of the Bardi Institute / Glass House in 2019.

Read the project description by Sol Camacho below.

Bjarke Ingels Group has revealed new images for their King Street West condo community in Toronto. The development was formed as sets of pixels extruded upwards to create space for housing, retail and boutique offices. The concept was made to avoid the footprints of heritage buildings that already exist on site. The latest renderings revealed both interior and exterior images of the striking new development.

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The Royal Institute of British Architects has awarded the 2018 RIBA President’s Medal for Research to Chris Hildrey of Hildrey Studio for ProxyAddress: Using Location Data to Reconnect Those Facing Homelessness with Support Services. Hildrey’s project addresses one of the main causes of homelessness in the UK: the end of an ‘assured short-hold tenancy’, where a landlord is legally entitled to issue a possession order. ProxyAddress tackles this issue through collaborative research and real-world application.