RIBA Competitions recently announced their two-stage design ideas competition for the Great Fen Visitor Centre in Cambridgeshire. Great Fen is an internationally acclaimed vision, one of sweeping scale and ambition. Over the next 50-100 years, more than 3,000ha of largely arable land will be transformed into a mosaic of habitat: open water, lakes, ponds and ditches; reedbed; fen, bog and marsh; wet grassland; dry grassland; woodland and scrub. The competition seeks to to create around and between a restored fenland landscape which provides a living landscape for wildlife and people. Registrations will close on December 19. The deadline for Stage 1 design submissions is 2pm on January 10. To register, and for more information, please visit here.

MONU – magazine on urbanism is a unique bi-annual international forum for artists, writers and designers that are working on topics of urban culture, development and politics.

This new issue of MONU is dedicated entirely to the topic of “Next Urbanism” – meaning the urbanism of the cities of the so-called “Next Eleven” or “N-11″, which include eleven countries: Bangladesh, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines, Turkey, South Korea, and Vietnam. These countries have been identified as growing into, along with the BRICs – Brazil, Russia, India, and China – the world’s largest economies in the 21st century. Next to interviews with Saskia Sassen and with the Nigerian-born architect Kunlé Adeyemi, and a series of contributions that discuss Next Urbanism in general, we feature eleven articles that focus specifically on the cities of each of the Next Eleven countries.

You can see more about the articles on their official website. Also, you can browse the entire issue break.

Loisos + Ubbelohde just received the highest award at the 2012 Architecture at Zero competition for their proposal, ‘Silver Streak’. The contest, sponsored by PG&E and AIA San Francisco, was conceived as a response to the lofty zero net energy targets set out by the California Public Utility Commission. As the recipient of one of two honor awards, their design for the University of California, Merced campus features an administration building that acts as both a threshold to campus and an energy field in the large plane of the agricultural valley. More images and architects’ description after the break.

Focused on ‘Cambodian Sustainable Housing’, the new Building Trust International Open International Design Competition looks into designing affordable, flood resistant housing in the South-east Asian country. In partnership with Karuna Cambodia, Habitat for Humanity & the Cambodian Society of Architects (CSA), proposals will have to keep below a budget of $2000 and deal with the yearly flooding that effects most residential areas. The winning design will be built by Habitat for Humanity Cambodia and will influence the way they build housing in the region. This competition is a real chance to make a difference to a large group of working Cambodians lives. Submissions are due January 15. To register, and for more information, please visit here.

Designed by PAR (Platform for Architecture + Research) and SES (Sériès et Sériès), their stage two finalist entry for the Keelung Harbor competition adopts a form that resists easy classification to free-associate with successive symbols of the utilitarian, the industrial, the poetic. Becoming a landmark in the harbor city, it combines maximum artistry with maximum efficiency. The new harbor project is only one piece in a larger green network that links public open space with waterfront amenities throughout the city. More images and architects’ description after the break.

The interactive artwork ‘Lotus Dome’, by artist and architect Daan Roosegaarde of Studio Roosegaarde, was opened in Sainte Marie Madeleine Church in Lille, France. The project, which will be on view until January 13, 2013, is a living dome made out of hundreds of ultra-light aluminium flowers that fold open in response to human behavior. When approached, the big silver dome lights up and opens its flowers. Its behavior moves from soft breathing to a more dynamic mood when more people interact. The light slowly follows people, creating an interactive play of light and shadow. More images and architect’s description after the break.

RUA Arquitetos shared with us their design for the Olympic Golf Course Clubhouse in Rio de Janeiro which is organized like a comfortable veranda, dissolving the limits between the landscape, the building, and the users. As Rio citizens, the architects wanted an architecture that expressed the city’s lifestyle, one that was tropical, open and generous, like a big varanda leaning over the golf course. They reconfigured the concept of ‘veranda’ with a large, extremely light roofing around which the clubhouse’s activities are organized. More images and architects’ description after the break.

Designed as a social landmark, the proposal for the Daegu Gosan Public Library by Group8 is to be seen as an open entity, welcoming and willing to share its content. Located in a district with high educational standards, the library will become one of the main cultural facilities of the neighborhood, open to everyone. It will offer all the classic functions of a library but with a strong community identity and convenient amenities. More images and architects’ description after the break.

With the library as one of the most ancient architectural types that symbolizes human strive to fixate, collect and preserve knowledge, this proposal for the Daegu Gosan Public Library is based on the concept of a stone monolith as storage of the most important cultural knowledge and historical heritage. Designed by Viktor Kopeikin, Pavel Zabotin, Anna Kosharnaya, and Andrian Sokolovsky, the building of the library is synthesized due to symbiosis of the traditional (identical) and transnational (globalistic). More images and architects’ description after the break.

The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU) chose world-renowned architect, Zaha Hadid, as Chief Architect of its new “Innovation Tower”. The project, located at the northeast side of the university campus, will serve as a driving force in the development of Hong Kong as a design hub in Asia. The tower will also provide additional space to facilitate inter-disciplinary research and education in the field of design. The topping-out ceremony was held on September 24. On completion, it will be home to PolyU School of Design (SD) and the newly established Jockey Club Design Institute for Social Innovation. More images and architects’ description after the break.

The proposal by Aétrangère for the Bangalore International Center Complex Open House seeks to show a unique path to allow a soft transition of values from urban to nature and from modernity to local culture. Hybridizing the urban space with landscape and ecology, their design introduces and enhances new ways of urban, cultural and natural dialogue and fosters a shared sense of belonging and a strong sense of place and ‘ownership’. More images and architects’ description after the break.

Designed by Studiomobile, the ‘Networking Nature’ installation is on display until November 25th as part of the Venice Architecture Biennale 2012, within the exhibition, “Traces of Century and Future Steps”. Their project is a living machine where it is impossible to see the dividing line between naturalized architecture and artificial organism. It deals with the issue of desalination of seawater and its integration into a Smart Water Network. More images and architects’ description after the break.

Taking place 6:30pm-8:00pm on Tuesday, October 30, the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C. will be presenting a lecture by Madrid-based studio Ábalos + Sentkiewicz arquitectos. The event, which is part of the ‘Spotlight on Design’ series, focuses on their integration between architecture, environment, and landscape. This “thermodynamic beauty” is seen in a variety of international projects, including the Highspeed Rail Station in Logrono, Spain; Atelier Albert Oehlen in Bühler, Switzerland; and plans for a performing arts center in Taipei. Presented with the Embassy of Spain as part of Preview: Spain Art and Culture. The ‘Spotlight on Design’ speaker series is sponsored by Lafarge, the world leader in building materials, with additional support from the American Institute of Architects. For more information on the event, please visit here.

The construction of the National Museum of Afghanistan aims to celebrate the richness of the country’s cultural heritage and the spirit of its people. The “Timeless Cube” design proposal by Matteo Cainer Architects awakens the nation’s cultural heritage through powerful symbolic references, where physical fragments and traces inform us of its past. This concept is well illustrated in the ‘negative spaces’ of the artist and sculptor Rachel Whiteread that highlight the memory of an object, rendering the invisible visible through a reversal of solid and void. More images and architects’ description after the break.

To enhance its belonging to the green world the new Olympic Golf Camp Headquarters aims to become a landscape icon merging with the nature of the site. Designed by Group8, the buildings are made by cutting the ground at different points and then by lifting it up at some corners. The newly created landscape is oriented according to the context and the program offering good protection from the ‘superblocks’ complex next to them. More images and architects’ description after the break.

The driving force in the proposal for the Daegu Gosan Public Library Competition was how new technologies can apply to libraries. Gillot + Givry Architectes, therefore, created a library that would mainly use virtual components. As thinking about South Korea as a world technology leader, could these skills change the way to design architecture? Since use of tabs is a common thing in Korean urban population, it is possible to create a library based on a wireless network. More images and architects’ description after the break.

The second prize winning proposal for the Busan Opera House, designed by designcamp moonpark dmp, aims at resolving the issue of a lack of much needed public space where people can stroll and enjoy the waterfront activity. The Opera House is an opportunity to give this luxury of space, this water’s edge back to the citizens. Inspired by opera itself and its dramatic scenographies, the facility is designed to create dramatic vignettes of the harbor, the city and the mountains. More images and architects’ description after the break.