Architecture News

The Chicago Architecture Foundation (CAF) has announced the creation of the Chicago Architecture Center, a new headquarters and experience center that will invite visitors to discover “Chicago’s architectural legacy and its role in shaping cities everywhere.”

Located within the Mies van der Rohe-designed 111 East Wacker Drive along the Chicago River, the 20,000-square-foot center will provide space for a variety of exhibitions and educational initiatives, including direct access to the Chicago Architecture Foundation River Cruise. The new interiors will be designed by Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture.

Henning Larsen Architects, in collaboration with landscape architects SLA and BuroHappold Engineering, has been selected as the winners of an international design competition to design a new iconic skyscraper for the city of Manila, Philippines. Located within the Bonifacio Global City business district, “ICONE” tower rises from a large public plaza as a dramatic spire, piercing the sky and becoming a new icon for the Manila Skyline.

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The Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) has announced the shortlist of 6 projects competing for the Stephen Lawrence Prize. Now in its 20th year, the prize is the highest honor in the UK awarded to projects with a construction budget of less than £1 million.

Previous winners of the award include House of Trace by Tsuruta Architects (2016); The Fishing Hut by Niall McLaughlin Architects (2015); House No 7 by Denizen Works (2014); Montpelier Community Nursery by AY Architects (2013); Kings Grove by Duggan Morris Architects (2012); and St Patrick's Primary School Library and Music Room by Coffey Architects (2011).

The 2017 shortlist is:

Andrés Duany (born September 7, 1949) is a founding partner of Miami firms Arquitectonica and Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company, and a co-founder of the Congress for New Urbanism. As an advocate of New Urbanism, since the 1980s Duany has been instrumental creating a renewed focus on walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods, in reaction against the sprawling, car-centric modernist urbanism of the previous decades.

CEMEX has announced the 61 finalist projects from 17 countries in the running for the 2017 International Building Awards.

The International Edition of the CEMEX Building Awards brings together the winning projects from each of the different CEMEX National Building Awards to compete head-to-head. This year, 17 countries launched a call for completed works to participate in one of five categories and four special awards.

Architecture’s most prestigious award, the Pritzker Architecture Prize, has announced the appointment of two new jurors to their distinguished jury: architect Wang Shu and Brazilian ambassador and architectural critic André Aranha Corrêa do Lago.

The 8-strong group will be tasked with selecting the upcoming 2018 laureate, who will become the 40th winner in the prize’s history.

“As we approach the 40th anniversary of the Pritzker Prize, the addition of André Corrêa do Lago and Wang Shu continues to embody the international range reflected by both present and past Laureates and Jury,” commented Tom Pritzker, Chairman of Hyatt Foundation. “The contributions of both individuals to the field of architecture, from different vantage points, makes them ideal members of the jury.”

Pritzker Prize laureate and 67th AIA Gold Medalist Fumihiko Maki (born September 6, 1928) is widely considered to be one of Japan's most distinguished architects. He had a unique style of Modernism that reflects his Japanese origin. Toshiko Mori has praised Maki's ability to create "ineffable atmospheres" using a simple palette of various types of metal, concrete, and glass. His consistent integration and adoption of new methods of construction as part of his design language contribute to his personal quest to create "unforgettable scenes."

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Currently on display outside the Zaha Hadid-designed Dongdaemum Design Plaza as part of the 2017 Seoul Biennale, the Groundscape eXPerience Pavilion is a 30-meter-long steel grid structure featuring a sequence of 28 experiments of underground architecture by 60 university students from Swiss Institute of Technology (EPFL) and EWHA Women's University (Seoul, South Korea).

Led by professor Dominique Perrault, the installation is a scale model of the 2.7 kilometer Seoul city central Euljiro underground gallery, an underutilized market space in the city center. The 28 “urban fossils” explore possibilities for the revitalization of the gallery, reimagining the structure as an urban link that is part of a larger “network of urban substance and material.”

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If you follow MAD Architects on social media, the chances are good that in recent months you've seen a number of updates regarding their Chaoyang Park Plaza project in Beijing. Located at the southern edge of the largest park in Beijing, the project comprises a complex of 5 buildings, including a pair of asymmetric towers that reach 120 meters tall. Now, with the building almost complete, photographer Khoo Guo Jie of Studio Periphery has provided us with this sneak peek of the project.

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In 2018, Germany will be reunified for 28 years, the precise amount of time that the inner German border wall—which was active from between 1961 and 1989—stood between "East" and "West". With this in mind, the German State have announced "Unbuilding Walls" as the theme of the German Pavilion at the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale. Curated by GRAFT with Marianne Birthler, the exhibition will be designed to "respond to current debates on nations, protectionism, and division."

The Extreme Model Railroad and Contemporary Architecture Museum has selected Gehry Partners to replace Gluckman Tang as lead architects of their new museum planned for the town of North Adams, Massachusetts, reports the Berkshire Eagle.

Along with the change in designer comes a change in location to an 83,000-square-foot site on Christopher Columbus Drive (near contemporary art museum Mass MoCA) and a major increase in scope – while original plans called for a 45,000-square-foot museums, new figures project the building will total as much as 75,000 square feet.

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The Guinness Book of World Records has crowned a new world champion sandcastle in a surprising location: the landlocked city of Duisburg, Germany.

Rising 55 feet (16.68 meters) into the sky, the sandscraper is formed from more than 3,860 tons of sand sculptured by a team of designers from 10 countries over a three week period. Stylized as a magnificent medieval city, the design also incorporates familiar structures from around the world, including an appropriately leaning scale version of the Leaning Tower of Pisa.

The team of Foster + Partners and Branch Technology have been awarded first prize in the latest stage of NASA’s 3D-Printed Habitat Challenge, a $2.5 million multi-phase competition designed to generate ideas and advance technology for the construction of sustainable housing solutions “for Earth and beyond.”

After printing three cylinder and three beams the first two levels of Phase 2, Stage 3 asked teams to design and print a 1.5-meter dome using indigenous Martian soil and recyclable materials, envisioning how future habitats could be constructed on the Red Planet. Teams were required to develop the 3-D printing technology itself as well as the structural design for each dome. The competition also dictated each structure be built within a 22-hour time frame, using the specific materials, geometric tolerances and autonomous performance that would be demanded by the Martian landscape.

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McMurdo Station, the American Antarctic base, was never meant to be a permanent settlement when it was built in 1956, yet today it is home to 250 people full-time in addition to approximately 1,000 summer workers each year. Consisting now of over 100 buildings spread across 164 acres, the settlement acts as a logistical base for field science but is dysfunctional for the scientists and researchers who live and work there and inefficient in terms of meeting the demands of Antarctica’s harsh climate. OZ Architecture has recently unveiled a new master plan for McMurdo that aims to turn the station into a model of American leadership in science, engineering, sustainability, and architecture, condensing the current sprawl into a 300,000 square foot campus composed of 6 buildings.

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Following an open competition, the Australian Institute of Architects have announced "repair" as the theme of the Australian Pavilion at the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale. Baracco+Wright Architects, collaborating with artist Linda Tegg, will oversee the cultivation of "thousands of temperate grassland species" within the pavilion, alongside "large-scale architectural projections." According to the AIA, "visitors will enter a physical dialogue between architecture and endangered plant community, reminding us what is at stake when we occupy land."

Following an open competition, the Estonian Architecture Center have announced "Weak Monument" as the theme of the Estonian Pavilion at the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale. Laura Linsi, Roland Reemaa, and Tadeáš Říha will develop a project which views the "architectural environment as a layered and historically continuous system," focusing the exhibition on "projects from the recent and more distant past."

Undoubtedly, Virtual Reality has come to stay while offering very high contributions to Architecture and Design. The possibilities offered by allowing architects, collaborators, and customers to experiment within a virtual environment, is a design tool that allows better decision making.

While VR allows the viewer to experience what it is like to be inside an environment, the 360 rendering processes the idea mimicking it to real life experiences as much as possible, trying to match specifically what the eye sees.

No matter what software you prefer to render with, below you can find some common tips and concepts that you need to manage to get good results when creating three-dimensional panoramic images to be visualized on VR. 

Constructed as part of Agrikultura—a triennial of public artworks and urban interventions in Malmö, Sweden—this installation, described by the designers a "maquette of a monument to the honeybee", is in fact home to an entire colony. It references—by design—the mysterious elements of 'bee orientation': verticality (gravity), geometry (the cell structure of the beehive), and the position of the sun relative to the hive. The project is, on the one hand, "a potential memorial for the bees" while, on the other, "a celebration of the sun on which all life depends."

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