Junichiro Tanizaki, in his book In Praise of Shadows writes, “In darkness, immutable tranquility holds sway.” Designers integrate this interplay of light, color, and shadow in the spaces they imagine — navigating the clarity that light brings alongside the ephemeral mystery of the shadows.

Architecture map publisher, Blue Crow Media has just released its latest publication, a celebration of the unique architecture of Pyongyang, North Korea. With travel curtailed due to the pandemic, a peak inside the Hermit Kingdom could be just what we all need.

The Department of Canadian Heritage, on behalf of the Government of Canada and the LGBT Purge Fund, is inviting teams of professional artists, landscape architects, architects, and other urban design professionals to submit their credentials and examples of prior work for the first part of a two-phase design competition to create the LGBTQ2+ National Monument.

YAF CON 2020: The Empathic Architect convenes a series of engaging conversations about designing with empathy and practicing with intentionality. Join your fellow emerging professionals the week of Oct. 26–Oct. 30 for a daily series of peer-led discussions over lunch and presentations by purposeful — sometimes unconventional — leaders each evening.

The name Morphosis already describes the philosophy of the architectural practice: different elements are morphed together to form something new. With this idea in mind, Thom Mayne, its founding partner, has since its establishment in 1972 realised projects like the “Caltrans District 7 Headquarters” in Los Angeles, new academic building of the “41 Cooper Square” for The Cooper Union in New York, “Bill and Melinda Gates Hall” for Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and the “Hypo Alpe-Adria Center” in Klagenfurt, all of which are architectural icons.

A virtual event for architects and designers seeking inspiration and insight. Breakthroughs in technologies, research, and thinking are dramatically transforming the industry at an unprecedented pace. Come together to envision what the future holds for the profession.

Inoltre, a new project by Unipol Group, aims to revive Milan's suburbs with art and beauty. Three suburban areas, belonging to the municipalities number 5, 8, and 9 of Milan, will be the focus of the project. Unipol will conduct research, host events and interventions to begin the rehabilitation, in a context which can typically be complex and of difficult management. The project will have an international scope, with coordination by the University of Pavia and interventions led by YAC. These will include the realization of 3 micro-architectural and tactical urbanism interventions, intended to bring authorial architecture where it is not usually seen; quality where there are economically-led decisions; and beauty where it is not usually searched for.

Call for international workshop Metaform is now officially open till October 1st, 2020. The event will take place from 19th till the 30th of October 2020 in Tbilisi, Georgia.

Big data, smart systems, machine learning – it is inevitable that these new technologies will change the way we study, build and manage our cities. At the same time resurgent interest in consensus and contributive action seems to oppose an exclusively data-driven urbanism. Is the opposition of machine intelligence and democracy inevitable, or are shared trajectories possible?

Registration to the International student teams' competition on the virtual design and construction - VDC Roasting is open!

The SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, better known as COVID-19, has fundamentally altered our reality as a society—both in our daily lives and in the future we will build as we adapt to the current situation. Our public spaces are the first to prompt us to question how interaction and community will function within our cities and living environments. For this eighth edition of the Abierto, we seek to understand how the pandemic will transform our public spaces, how our social, economic, and political relationships will be redefined in light of the current global situation, and how creators, managers, authorities, and citizens perceive these spaces and this relationship.

On Monday, September 14, PENSARQ_, the architectural dissemination project by TAQ Arquitectura, will premiere a video Masterclass featuring architect Luis Othón Villegas, founder of LVS Architecture, a design studio that seeks to explore and transform sensory experiences through design and architecture. Villegas has collaborated with Harvard University and on MoMA New York exhibitions such as Design and the Elastic Mind and Safe: Design Takes on Risk.

The second Housing Dialogue: "Housing and Roots" will explore the case of Pacífico 223. The discussion will cover life before the earthquake, the meaning of housing for individuals and communities, the emotional bonds born from memories associated with a home, the grief that follows its loss, and the collectives that emerge and strengthen through reconstruction efforts.

The 'Ideas en Pandemia' and 'Proyecto Perú' initiatives, in collaboration with the Municipality of Lima, have launched a significant effort to bring together diverse civil society actors and local government to address the current challenges facing food markets in the country, specifically in the La Victoria district. This effort promotes formal dialogue between civil society, public agencies, the private sector, and academic institutions in Peru and Latin America to reflect on and resolve shared regional issues.

Videos

The Latin American Virtual Meeting: Liquid Utopias will be held in a decentralized manner via digital platforms and channels between September 19 and November 7, 2020. From a multidisciplinary perspective, it will feature various activities organized into five weekly blocks, such as conferences, panels, discussions, PechaKuchas, workshops, and remote actions. These aim to problematize, reflect on, and conceive of alternative ideas and visions that allow for the construction of other worlds where all people and living beings can see themselves reflected.

In these times of change, AOA proposes an optimistic approach to the challenges facing cities and their citizens in both local and global contexts. By identifying existing opportunities for positive change in the wake of a crisis, we aim to promote more resilient cities, both in the immediate term and for the future.

5 sessions | 7:00 PM – 8:30 PM | Thursdays
October 1, 8, 22, 29 + November 5

This course uses the Bauhaus as a lens to examine the broader historical trajectory from the 20th century to the present, ultimately returning to our own practice to better understand the school and its lasting impact. It shifts between viewing the Bauhaus from the outside in and observing the world through its perspective. The course emphasizes the relationship between behaviors, objects, and their respective eras, spanning from the dawn of industrial consumer society to our current hyper-consumerist age. In doing so, we will cultivate a multidisciplinary, open, and relational perspective—perhaps the Bauhaus’s most significant contribution to our time.

4 sessions | 6:30 PM – 8:00 PM | Thursdays
September 24 + October 1, 8, 15

This course on color in architecture guides the observer through significant architectural works, focusing on chromaticity.