Architecture News

To start at the end: last Saturday, September 8, 2018, the award ceremony was held for the XVIII National Biennial of Architecture and Reconciliation “Rethinking the Territory”, an event co-organized by the Architects' Association of Peru - La Libertad Region, and the Architects' Association of Peru. This concluded a three-day series of events designed to foster reflection and showcase the work produced in Peruvian architecture over the last two years. We attended the biennial in the city of Trujillo, where its decentralization, return to long-forgotten values, and rethinking of the territory invite deep reflection—points we will return to later. For now, we focus on presenting the results.

SHoP Architects' super-slender tower at 111 West 57th Street has reached supertall height, but the tower has begun missing pieces of its façade. As New York YIMBY revealed, sales have already started for the Manhattan skyscraper as new photographs show missing fragments of the terracotta façade. Located in Billionaire's Row just south of Central Park, the supertall is being created by JDS Development and Property Markets Group. The project aims to become an iconic terracotta skyscraper in Midtown as it passes its third setback.

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Zaha Hadid Architects have released images of their latest project, a sculptural billboard named for its location in Kensington, London. The project, a collaboration between the late Zaha Hadid and partner Patrik Schumacher, marks the firm’s first direct foray into advertising.

Grimshaw can claim their horticultural Eden Project in Devon, South West England as being among their most iconic works. Nestled in a disused quarry, simultaneously acting as an embedded landscape feature and an alien spacecraft holding precious specimens and plants, the scheme has been celebrated as a successful modern interpretation of Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome concept.

Having been speculated upon both in Qingdao, China, and loosely on the Planet Mars, the Architects Journal reports that Grimshaw has begun work on a new £100 million Eden Centre in Morecambe, on England’s north-west coast.

Cube Design has won the international design competition for the Dalang Sports Center and Culture and Art Center, securing the first-place bid. The winning proposal focuses on the relationship between architecture and the city, exploring everyday user scenarios to create a public space integrated into community life. With a clear strategy and a clean, concise design language, the scheme successfully balances the building's various urban interfaces while organizing and distributing diverse public activity areas under high-density requirements. Spanning an area of 58,500 square meters, the project is set to become an influential civic hub and landmark in Shenzhen's Longhua District, representing a key cultural milestone for the area.

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British architect David Adjaye has been selected to receive the 2018 International Humanities Prize from Washington University in St. Louis. Granted biennially, the prize honors the lifetime work of a noted scholar, writer or artist who has made a significant and sustained contribution to the world of letters or the arts. His work is noted for its ability to reveal stories and identities while embodying the human experience.

The Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) in Beijing, China, has tapped award-winning Chinese architect Zhu Pei as its next dean of the School of Architecture. Zhu Pei founded his firm Studio Zhu-Pei in 2005 known for its cutting-edge integration of cultural roots and contemporary innovation in design. Zhu Pei has taught at Harvard GSD and Columbia University GSAPP, two of the leading graduate programs in the world.

Next month, American architect Denise Scott Brown will receive the 2018 Soane Medal, an award given to "architects who have made a major contribution to their field, through their built work, through education, history and theory." A powerhouse jury that included Sir David Chipperfield, Paul Goldberger, Farshid Moussavi, Alice Rawsthorn, Oliver Wainwright selected Scott Brown for the second edition of the award. The 2017 Soane Medal was given to Rafael Moneo.

Sir David Chipperfield, Trustee of Sir John Soane’s Museum, said: ‘The jury considered many outstanding candidates; however Denise Scott Brown stood apart and was the jury’s unanimous choice. Scott Brown’s contribution across architecture, urbanism, theory and education over the last fifty years has been profound and far-reaching. Her example has been an inspiration to many, and we are delighted to honour her with the awarding of the Soane Medal.’

UNStudio was selected by the Hilversum Municipality and Media Park Enterprise to develop an urban vision which could offer a roadmap for the transformation of Hilversum’s Media Park into a vibrant and leading destination for future media content creation. The urban vision was born out of the need to adapt to new technologies and shifting consumer demands and includes potential programmatic, spatial and infrastructural development models that will fully prepare the Hilversum Media Park for the future.

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Safdie Architects have released their design for ‘Quorner’, a new residential tower to be built in Quito, Ecuador. The 24-storey structure, a collaboration with Ecuadorean construction firm Uribe & Schwarzkopf, is to be one of Quito’s tallest buildings and Safdie’s first in Ecuador.

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Emily Rauh Pulitzer, curator of the St. Louis Museum of Art and Steve Trampe of Owen Development, are spearheading a plan to transform a block near St. Louis's theater and museum district in the area of Grand Center. This project, (according to a story published on a local news site in St. Louis) is "a blank palette” and "an opportunity to take an entire block and make it different.”

The project is currently led by local architects Axi: Ome. Tatiana Bilbao has also confirmed her participation, in what should be an interesting addition to St. Louis's local architectural heritage. In an interview with Vladimir Belogolovsky, she explained that she considers that the legacy of Mexican architecture should expand to other sites:

Rem Koolhaas, Dutch architect and founder of the Rotterdam-based firm OMA, has been announced as the closing keynote speaker at the World Architecture Festival. The event will take place in Amsterdam at the RAI Exhibition and Convention Centre on from 28-30 November.

As part of our 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale coverage, we present the completed Kosovo Pavilion. Below, curator Eliza Hoxha describes the exhibition in her own words.

The ‘90s in Kosovo under the Milošević regime are known as times of repression, a time when ethnic Albanians were expelled from all state-run institutions and thereby removed from public life. Funded by the 3 percent income tax mainly from Albanian Diaspora, Albanians created a parallel system of education, culture and healthcare in their private houses, which citizens offered for free. These private houses provided space for public life for almost ten years in Pristina, the capital and other cities in Kosovo. In the ‘90s, life that the city center provided for everyone ended for Albanians, and all activity was dislocated to the periphery. The entire Albanian community shrank into private houses. The house became a school, a restaurant, a promotional activity space, an office, an art gallery, a hospital and a home at the same time.

Grimshaw Architects have created a prefabricated tiny house to address Australia's housing crisis. Made to raise money for the not-for-profit organization Kids Under Cover and support homeless youth, The Peak project provides an affordable option for young people priced out of the housing market in Australia's cities. Designed to go completely off grid or integrate with city infrastructure mains, the project was formed around IKEA furniture within a double-height volume. All profits from The Peak support Kids Under Cover in Melbourne and the state of Victoria.

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Work has started on Stefano Boeri Architetti's multifunctional building Blloku Cube, the first element of a larger masterplan in Tirana. Located at the intersection of Pjeter Bogdani and Vaso Pasha streets, the project is sited in a up-and-coming center of city life in Blloku district. Taking cues from the Albanese capital, the design combines a multifunctional program of commercial, office and rooftop garden space. The project features an anodized aluminum double-skin cladding, a pattern facade that becomes a signature piece of architecture within the surrounding post-communist developments.

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The international design competition to create a new high-rise tower in central Auckland has announced five finalists. The five teams include Warren and Mahoney, Cox Architecture, Zaha Hadid Architects, Elenberg Fraser and Woods Bagot. The landmark tower competition is run by Melbourne-based property development company ICD Property. Each of the teams were asked to complete two versions of their design, one following current city Unitary Plan rules and one version that could be built given more open planning parameters.

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At a ceremony held on Monday, September 3, the Valparaíso Cultural Park, located in the Chilean city of the same name, was named the winner of the 3rd Rogelio Salmona Award. Organized by the Rogelio Salmona Foundation, the Latin American competition recognizes works whose architecture "clearly generates significant, open public spaces that are embraced and enjoyed by their community within a context of local and global communities."

Designed by the firm HLPS (Martín Labbé, Carolina Portugueis, Osvaldo Spichiger, and Jonathan Holmes), the Valparaíso Cultural Park is the result of rehabilitating the former Valparaíso prison, constructing a new cultural center, and converting the surrounding grounds into a public park.

Gehry Partners recently completed Facebook's new MPK 21 building in Menlo Park, California. Expanding the company's existing footprint, the design was built in less than 18 months as a highly sustainable building. Formed to bring the outdoors into the office space, the project centers on a sheltered green space with 40-foot-tall redwood trees and an amphitheater-style courtyard that connects to the original Gehry-designed MPK 20 building.