Earth’s ecosystem besides resourcing human needs and habituating many culture ethos, is home to a variety of living beings. It is a ground for a complex network of interdependence between plants and animals. The mutually beneficial interactions between them have been paramount in the generation of the Earth’s ecosystem.

The paranoia stemming from war, especially nuclear, pandemics and natural disasters is at an all-time high and rising by the day. According to polls commissioned polls conducted by YouGov, 22-23% of people in the UK and US feel that the world would end in their lifetime, or that they would at least see the occurrence of a doomsday level event. Among those, 60% of the people, especially in the US, feel that it would be through a nuclear war. Only a minuscule percentage among these people hope to survive such an event, and even fewer have the means for it.

The MIT India Initiative is a not-for-profit effort of students and alumni from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to delve into pressing problems in novel, challenging contexts, and tackle these with technology and design. This is a first of its kind workshop where mentors from multiple departments of MIT and Harvard will work with talented participants chosen from all across India to design solutions to some of today's most pressing challenges.

Call for entries now open for the biennial New Practices New York 2020 Awards.

New Practices Committee of the New York AIA Chapter invite you to submit your portfolio to the 8th biennial juried portfolio competition and exhibition known as New Practices New York. The selected winner will have their work showcased in an exhibition at the Center for Architecture, a symposium to discuss their practice, and will hold a lecture series in New York to present their work.

Contemporary Art Room Gallery is proud to announce their 1st “Landscapes” Online Art Competition for the month of January 2020. This is an international competition and artists from around the world are welcome to submit their work. The gallery invites all artists and photographers from around the world to submit their best representational and non-representational art related to the Landscapes theme. The Landscapes theme is considered to be any art with interpretation of natural elements such as mountains, hills, valleys, deserts, forests, farmland, trees, rivers, lakes, polar regions, rainforests, islands and tropical landscapes. All visual art mediums are acceptable (painting, photography, drawing, sculpture, digital, prints, fiber art, collage or installation art) except sound and video art.

The connection between architecture and installation art has long been a topic worthy of exploration. Installation transforms space and interacts with the audience; it must be designed, constructed and installed and therefore relies on architectural components. The conceptual artists Ilya and Emilia Kabakov create fantastical spaces that the artists call ‘total’ installations inviting viewers to immerse themselves into stories about utopian dreams. The use of objects – things which help to create an atmosphere of memory – is a key instrument in their work and they incorporate them in the artists’ walkable room installations as something like a personal museum for “little man”.

EARTH is a doomed planet and if humans do not act fast, humanity faces going down with the ship, Professor Stephen Hawking warned in his last book.

The oil and oil-gas platforms, more than 8000 present all over the planet until a few decades ago, have gradually been dismantled to free the seas from the strong pollution they cause. The so-called decommissioning process of fixed platforms is usually carried out by removing them entirely from the marine environment in which they are located, bringing them to the ground and then demolishing or disassembling them to sell valuable equipment or, in some cases, revamping the best pieces for later reuse in other fields.

For centuries, earthquakes have been an inevitable phenomenon that bring destruction and devastation all around the world and we aren’t any more prepared or equipped to deal with them than we used to be. This is a worldwide issue and although some countries like Japan are better prepared with the proper infrastructure to deal with these disasters, still many countries remain that are powerless in the face of these disasters. Countries like Iran, Indonesia and Turkey which are some of the countries that are most prone to earthquakes but don’t have the necessary infrastructure to minimize the damages.

We are living at a moment of great promise. Humanity’s breakout into space is underway. Yet success is not inevitable. The Internet or Digital Economy that began in the last two decades, has been on an exponential growth ever since. Falling costs, new technologies, and a new generation of entrepreneurs are charting out a bold era of space development and space economy.

Population aging - an increase in the proportion of older people in a population.
As one of the most significant social changes of the 21st century, it is predicted to impact all sectors including labor and financial markets, housing, health care and social protection.

Penelope Haralambidou's project 'City of Ladies' studies 'The Book of the City of Ladies', 1405, by Italian/French medieval author Christine de Pizan (1364 – c.1430). The text is part of a compilation assembled for Queen Isabeau of Bavaria between 1410 – 1414 (Harley MS 4431) the largest surviving collected manuscript of her works and one of the foundation manuscripts at the British Library. In the book, de Pizan describes her visitation by three female Virtues, Reason, Rectitude and Justice, who commission her with the construction of an imaginary city inhabited solely by women. Conflating the act of writing a book and the construction of an imaginary city with building a thesis against misogyny, her work has been seen as a proto–feminist manifesto.

Since the integration of Cheongju City and Cheongwon County, a regeneration project to restore the core functions of the original city center has been promoted. By linking the project with the new City Hall, which will be constructed by 2025, it is aimed to achieve balanced regional development through revitalization

Public Play Space (PPS) is launching a Call for Best Practices for projects and concepts focusing on innovative and creative practices for the co-design of inclusive, cohesive, and sustainable public spaces and cities, through the use of games and digital technologies.

“Rethink the City: New Approaches to Global and Local Urban Challenges” is a free online course offered by the Faculty of Architecture at Delft University of Technology (the Netherlands). Following two editions with over 17,000 students, the third edition begins on February 19, 2020. The course was awarded the 2017 Excellence in Teaching Award by the Association of European Schools of Planning (AESOP).

This theoretical and practical course focuses on Green Infrastructure Urban Design. Through case studies and group project development, participants will learn the core concepts and tools required to implement Green Infrastructure.

The Arquitetas II Exhibition, organized at the University of Beira Interior (UBI) within the Integrated Master’s in Architecture program at the Department of Civil Engineering and Architecture, seeks to highlight academic work produced for the History of Architecture III course, as well as the women architects studied within those projects.

The Call for Papers is now open for the international conference Critic|all IV, which is dedicated to themes related to architectural and urban criticism and theory. Critic|all is organized by ETSAM-UPM (Madrid), and its fourth edition will be held in partnership with FAUUSP and the PC3 Research Group.