With Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in attendance, Frank Gehry presented the model for the future National Center for Social Action Through Music building in Lara state. The project is Gehry’s second in Latin America, following the recently inaugurated Biomuseo in Panamá.

To be located in Barquisimeto, Venezuela’s fourth most populated city, the National Center for Social Action Through Music forms part of the National Network of Youth and Children’s Orchestras and Choirs of Venezuela, more commonly known as “El Sistema.” Founded in 1975 by orchestra director José Antonio Abreu, El Sistema is now funded by the government and provides musical training and education for children from impoverished backgrounds. The Adjkm-designed Simon Bolivar Complex for Social Action is also part of El Sistema.

Learn more about the project after the break. 

Tired of seeing Nordic families in representations of Colombian markets and New York hipsters drinking coffee in Mexican cultural centers, a group of self-described “young latinos” have created Escalalatina, a collection of high-resolution images of “people on the road to development” to be used for renderings.

Inspired by Teodor Javanaud Emdén's SKALGUBBAR - a virtual library of people for renders - Escalatina aims to provide a way for Latin American architects to fill their renders with images of local people.

All of the images are available in .png format and users can also submit their own images for the site as well. 

Check out some of the Escalalatina images after the break.

Argentine President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner has announced the winning proposal for the Cinematography and Audiovisual Tower that will be built in capital Buenos Aires.

Out of five competing proposals, MRA+A Álvarez| Bernabó | Sabatini’s design was selected. At 335 meters, the skyscraper will become the tallest building in Latin America, surpassing the 300-meter Costanera tower in Santiago, Chile and a 330-meter tower under development in Monterrery, Mexico. To be used mainly for Argentina's film and television industry, the tower will have 67 floors and 216,000 square meters of space. A hotel will occupy the top 13 floors.

More details after the break...

Curated and commissioned by German Architect / Urbanist Oliver Schütte and Dutch Anthropologist / Economist Marije van Lidth de Jeude, Costa Rica's first pavilion at the Venice Biennale focuses on a competition-winning project for the new Costa Rican Legislative Assembly, a project which illustrates the "vicious circle of social segregation and spatial fragmentation in the Greater Metropolitan Area of Costa Rica (GAM)."

Read the curators' description and take a virtual tour of the Costa Rica Pavilion after the break.

Monday night began the relocation process of thousands of inhabitants living in Venezuela’s Torre de David (Tower of David), the world’s tallest slum, according to reports by Venezuelan newspaper Últimas Noticias, BBC Mundo and tweets from journalists following the coverage. The relocation initiative is being carried out by the Interior and Justice Ministry, and comes just five days after the announcement that the Venezuelan government is in negotiations with Chinese banks interested in purchasing the building.

Torre de David (the Tower of David) - the world's tallest slum and the subject of Urban-Think Tank, Justin McGuirk, and Iwan Baan's Golden Lion-winning Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2012 - is once again making headlines. Venezuelan newspaper TalCual reports that the Venezuelan government is in negotiations with Chinese banks interested in purchasing the building.

Tower of David is an unfinished financial skyscraper in downtown Caracas. Construction began on the tower in 1990, but the death of the principal investor in 1993 and the subsequent banking crisis that hit the country in 1994 froze construction; by the end of the year, the tower was in the hands of the state. Nevertheless, in 2007 two thousand homeless citizens took over and inhabited the skyscraper, making it the tallest vertical slum in the world.

Under the direction of Laboratorio de Arquitectura Dominicana (LAD), the Dominican Republic's first Pavilion at the Venice Biennale explored the intersection of architecture, urbanism, and politics through the lens of the Feria de la Paz y Confraternidad del Mundo Libre (The Fair of Peace and Brotherhood of the Free World), celebrated in 1955 in Santo Domingo. The fair was an attempt by the dictator Rafael Trujillo to project to the outside world a vision of a modern country firmly under his dictatorial control.

The Fair - today the site of governmental institutions - was a turning point for Santo Domingo and modern architecture, forever altering the city and its urban limits.

Read the curators' description and take a virtual tour of the pavilion after the break.