Architecture News

As 2018 draws to a close, accommodation website Airbnb has dived into their data to reveal the most creative cities and countries from the year. Based on the percentage of hosts who are in the creative industries, the list builds on a previous survey by Airbnb which found that one in 10 Airbnb hosts and one in three Experience hosts identify as members of the creative community.

Read on below for the list of top creative countries and cities according to the new Airbnb study. For architects already planning a New Year’s getaway, check out an article we published of ten projects previously featured by ArchDaily, now available for booking through Airbnb.

Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas will give the final keynote lecture today at the World Architecture Festival. ArchDaily will be streaming this keynote from our Facebook page.

Brazil-based Carla Juaçaba Studio has been announced as the winner of the AR’s Emerging Architecture Awards 2018 in Amsterdam. The firm will receive a £10,000 prize in recognition of exemplary projects such as their chapel for the Pavilion of the Holy See at the 2018 Venice Biennale, and the Casa Santa Teresa in Rio de Janiero.

The practice was chosen from a shortlist of 14 by a judging panel featuring Spanish architect Ángela García de Paredes of Paredes Pedrosa, finalists of the inaugural 1999 AR Emerging Architecture awards; Indian architect Gurjit Singh Matharoo commended in the 2009 edition; and Ronald Rietveld of Dutch practice RAAAF, winners in 2013.

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The 2018 World Architecture Festival has announced the second-day winners of this year’s edition, featuring works from such diverse firms as SeARCH, Sordo Madaleno, NextOffice, and Grimshaw.

The second day’s judging categories spanned a wide area, from future masterplanning visions to completed religious structures. The festival, held this year in Amsterdam, will culminate Friday 30 November with the World Building of the Year and Future Project of the Year Awards. These awards, selected from the festival’s list of category winners, will be selected by the festival’s “super jury”: Nathalie de Vries, Frederick Cooper Llosa, Lesley Lokko,Li Xiaodong, and Manuelle Gautrand. 

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Portuguese architectural practice Aires Mateus have designed a new addition and entrance to the Museum of Augustins in Toulouse, France. Bringing together the museum and the Convent of Augustins, the proposal was made to clearly open to the city. The design aims to respect the spatial values of the convent and museum while standing out from its context and historical reference.

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IKEA and Tom Dixon have collaborated to investigate the future of urban farming, “making homes the new farmland.” In an upcoming entry to the Chelsea Flower Show, the UK’s most popular landscape event, the team will share their first ideas on how “affordable, forward-thinking solutions can be used to grow plants and vegetables at home and beyond.”

The ethos behind the collaboration is to celebrate food as a crucial part of everyday life, and inspiring a healthier, more sustainable lifestyle. Identifying the potential savings in transport miles, water usage, and food waste, the team will use IKEA’s democratic design principles to “develop affordable, sustainable food farming and consumption within our homes and urban communities.”

Make sure to tune in to our Facebook live streams of today’s selection of lectures. We’ll also be streaming the winners at 19:15 CET. To see the previous day’s streams, click here.

The World Architecture Festival (WAF) has announced the ten winners of the WAFX prizes, awarded to “future projects that identify key ecological and societal challenges which architects are actively seeking to address over the next ten years.”

This year, participants tackled issues such as climate change, water waste, and aging populations, with winning proposals including river parks in Colombia, a transformed coal plant in the United States, and solar panel fields in the Netherlands.

We’ve rounded up the winners below, along with further information about the upcoming 2018 World Architecture Festival taking place in Amsterdam this November. Tickets for the festival are available online now, with a 20% discount available for ArchDaily readers who enter the code ARCHDAILY20 at checkout. Our site will also have news coverage and live-streams of festival events.

Carlo Ratti has been announced as Chief Curator for the 2019 Shenzhen Bi-City Biennial of Urbanism/Architecture. He will join Academic Curators Politecnico di Torino and South China University to critically explore the impact of artificial intelligence on communities and urban space.

The team will investigate “how our relationship with the city might change when buildings become able to respond to our presence.” Ratti’s expertise in the area of future technology and artificial intelligence is reflected in his role within the MIT Senseable City Lab, whose experiments propagate future scenarios for the built environment.

Haysom Ward Miller's Lochside House in the West Highlands has been named RIBA House of the Year 2018. The annual accolade is given by the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) to the UK’s best new architect-designed house. Lochside House was revealed as the winner in the final episode of a special Channel 4 series Grand Designs: House of the Year. The award-winning project was designed as a modest, sustainable home for a ceramic artist on the edge of a Scottish lake.

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Following an extensive day of presentations, panels, critiques, and talks The World Architecture Festival (WAF) has announced the Day 1 category winners in their 2018 programming. Winners are recognized in over 35 categories over the first two days of the conference, which culminates with the announcement of the World Building of the Year 2018 on the third and final day of the conference.

While still early days, the world’s largest architectural award program, the WAF Awards is poised for its biggest year yet, with a total of 535 shortlisted projects from 57 countries across the world.

Bjarke Ingels Group, James Corner Field Operations, and Gensler have released new renderings of the new Oakland Athletics baseball stadium and surrounding development. The new stadium will replace the Oakland A’s existing 51-year-old Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum, which the A’s share with the Oakland Raiders football team. The mega-ballpark includes a waterfront “jewel box” stadium at Howard Terminal and would turn the current Coliseum site into a tech and housing hub.

The design of the USA Pavilion for the Expo 2020 Dubai has been revealed, designed by Curtis W. Fentress and Fentress Architects. Destined to represent more than 325million Americans, the pavilion seeks to “provide a unique platform for [the United States] to come together to showcase the very best of [their] cultural and commercial achievements.”

The pavilion is to be circular in form, with “slants fashioned to project a sensation of movement, making the viewer feel like the building itself is in motion.” The pavilion’s interior will showcase American innovation and technology, including the premiere of the Virgin Hyperloop One ride experience.

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Lima-based architect Karina Puente has created a new series in her personal project: to illustrate each and every "invisible" city from Italo Calvino's 1972 novel. Her collection, which ArchDaily published in 2016, and again in 2017, consists of mixed media collages, drawn mainly using ink on paper, brings together a sequence of imagined places – each referencing a city imagined in the book.

Invisible Cities, which imagines fictional conversations between the (real-life) Venetian explorer Marco Polo and the aged Mongol ruler Kublai Khan, has been instrumental in framing approaches to urban discourse and the form of the city. According to Puente, "each illustration has a conceptual process, some of which take more time than others." Usually "I research, think, and ideate over each city for three weeks before making sketches." The final drawings and cut-outs take around a week to produce.

Puente’s work is set to go on display in the San Miguel de Allende, Mexico on the 2nd February 2019. You can learn more about the project from Puente’s official website here.

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We are pleased to partner with the World Architecture Festival to bring you live streaming of each day's keynote addresses. On Wednesday, tune in for lectures from Peter Cook, Li Xioadong and an impressive group of speakers. Follow us on Instagram at @archdaily to see more updates from our team on the ground.

Architect Gabriel Kozlowski has partnered with Gringo Cardia, Bárbara Graeff, and Tripper Arquitetura to design a structure of floating tree branches for the Brazil pavilion at Expo 2020 Dubai. The pavilion is inspired by one of the greatest technological achievements of Brazil: the improvement of the Direct Planting System over a straw. The design conceptually mimics this scheme through its layered arrangement - soil, an entanglement of protection, productivity - presenting itself as both a building and a symbolic image.

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UNESCO and the International Union of Architects (UIA) have announced the launch of a “World Capitals of Architecture” initiative, seeking to create a “synergy between culture and architecture in an increasingly urbanized world.”

Cities designated as World Capitals of Architecture will become a global forum for discussion on the world’s most pressing challenges “through the prism of culture, heritage, urban planning, and architecture.” UNESCO and UIA will collaborate with local city organizations to organize activities and events promoting buildings, architects, planners, and related sectors.

New photography by Hervé Hôte has been released, showcasing the Frank Gehry-designed Luma Arles complex as construction continues in the French town of Arles. The arts center, situated on a former SNCF rail yard, will offer exhibition, research, education, and archive space within a 46-meter-tall, aluminum tile-clad tower.

Constructed from a concrete core and steel frame, the scheme emerges from a circular glass atrium echoing the town’s Roman amphitheater. The distinctive jagged form above the atrium echoes the region’s rugged mountain ranges, with glass boxes extruding from reflective aluminum panels.