The London 2012 Olympic Stadium is one of several landmark international sports venues to feature in a fully-updated and redesigned fifth edition of Stadia, the essential and long-established guide to stadia design.

Almost 20 years since it was first published in 1994, Stadia remains the most comprehensive guide to all aspects stadium design, from local club buildings to iconic international venues.

According to renowned Japanese architect Kengo Kuma, "this book aims to establish the interrelation between patterns and layering within architecture. These two previously detached notions can now be integrated into one methodology mediated by structural concepts. Patterns and Layering is the first book to introduce this new interrelationship, which has the potential to begin a new architectural and design revolution.” More information + full content after the break.

We are over the 100,000 photos in our Flickr Pool, so keep them coming! Remember you can submit your own photo here, and don’t forget to follow us through Twitter and our Facebook Fan Page to find many more features.

The photo above is the great Zollverein School of Management and Design by japanese practice SANAA and was taken by Burçin YILDIRIM. Check the other four after the break.

What better place to explore inventive homes and innovative architects than a country with a housing crisis? Mark #42 head to Poland, where theylook at an architecture scene in transition, checking in on a 152 cm wide house by Centrala and a drive-in home by Robert Konieczny. Elsewhere, Shintaro Fujiwara and Yoshio Muro discuss the challenges of the Japanese architect, and we visit ‘weird Austin’ to discover a house by Bercy Chen that literally emerges from the bush.

First, we have to get something straight. This is not the VERY Large Array. This is the RATHER Large Array, the Very Large Array’s much smaller, distant—and inexpensive—cousin and the flagship piece for Art Center College of Design’s 2011 exhibition, MADE UP: Design’s Fictions (curated by Tim Durfee with Haelim Paek).

The other thing is that while the Very Large Array still exists out in its Dune-like remote setting, spread across a giant “Y” configuration in the New Mexico desert, the Rather Large Array (RLA) has all but vaporized back into the production streams from whence its PVC tubing and hardware store components came from.

It’s time for another Flickr Round Up! Remember you can submit your own photo here, and don’t forget to follow us through Twitter and our Facebook Fan Page to find many more features.

The photo above was taken by Klaas Vermaas in Amsterdam, Netherlands. Check the other four after the break.

We are near to the 110,000 photos in our Flickr Pool, so keep them coming! Remember you can submit your own photo here, and don’t forget to follow us through Twitter and our Facebook Fan Page to find many more features.

The photo above is the amazing Andalucia’s Museum of Memory by Alberto Campo Baeza and was taken by DSJohnson84. Check the other four after the break.

A 108-meter high Eiffel Tower rises above Champs Elysées Square in Hangzhou. A Chengdu residential complex for 200,000 recreates Dorchester, England. An ersatz Queen’s Guard patrols Shanghai’s Thames Town, where pubs and statues of Winston Churchill abound. Gleaming replicas of the White House dot Chinese cities from Fuyang to Shenzhen. These examples are but a sampling of China’s most popular and startling architectural movement: the construction of monumental themed communities that replicate towns and cities in the West.

Swiss architecture and design publisher Birkhäuser has released a monograph of Todd Saunders’ work. Based in Bergen, Norway, award-winning Canadian architect Todd Saunders has built work in Norway, Finland and Canada. Todd Saunders: Architecture in Northern Landscapes covers his work over the last decade. The simple yet powerful aesthetic of the book mirrors the elegance of Saunders’ own architectural style and compliments the potency of the natural settings in which his work is often situated.

Human Experience and Place: Sustaining Identity is the latest title in the successful and prestigious Architectural Design (AD) series. Officially launched at the Sustaining Identity Symposium in London’s Victoria & Albert Museum at the end of November, this issue features both well-known and emerging practices worldwide.

By drawing on examples from across the world, this issue of AD demonstrates that, in a time of commercial globalisation, it is possible for architects, designers and engineers to create outstanding buildings that retain a sense of local identity, both in terms of cultural heritage and the conservation of the environment.

Torre David, a 45-story skyscraper in Caracas, has remained uncompleted since the Venezuelan economy collapsed in 1994. Today, it is the improvised home to more than 750 families living in an extra-legal and tenuous squat, that some have called a “vertical slum.”

Urban-Think Tank, the authors of Torre David: Informal Vertical Communities, spent a year studying the physical and social organization of this ruin-become home. Richly illustrated with photographs by Iwan Baan, the book documents the residents’ occupation of the tower and how, in the absence of formal infrastructure, they organize themselves to provide for daily needs, with a hair salon, a gym, grocery shops, and more.