Jurors:

• Karin Bjorkman - Nola | Van Puersem Architects
• Thomas Fisher - University of Minnesota
• Jeanne Gang - Studio Gang
• Ted Hyman - ZGF Architects

Introduction

Architects play a crucial role in addressing both the causes and effects of climate change through the design of the built environment. Innovative design thinking is key to producing architecture that meets human needs for both function and delight, adapts to climate change projections, continues to support the health and well being of inhabitants despite natural and human-caused disasters, and minimizes contributions to further climate change through greenhouse gas emissions. Preparing today’s architecture students to envision and create a climate adaptive, resilient, and carbon-neutral future must be an essential component and driving force for design discourse.

This year’s collaboration with Architecture 2030 – INNOVATION 2030 – is a design-and-ideas competition focused on addressing and designing for the future impacts of climate change.

Continuing a legacy of outstanding public architecture, the General Services Administration (GSA) Design Excellence Program seeks to commission our nation’s most talented designers and artists to design federal buildings of outstanding quality and value. These projects are to demonstrate the value of true integrated design that balances aesthetics, cost, constructability, and reliability; create environmentally responsible and superior workplaces for civilian federal employees; and give contemporary form and meaning to our democratic values.

ARCHITECTURE AFTER TERRORISM
Architecture has found a strange and unexpected enemy in ISIS, which has destroyed and looted countless religious buildings, monuments, archaeological sites and works of art from different cultures and religions, most of them considered World Heritage Sites by UNESCO.

The Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia is pleased to announce the 7th Advanced Architecture Contest, on the theme of RESPONSIVE CITY.

The aim of the competition is to promote discussion and research through which to generate insights and visions, ideas and proposals that help us envisage what the city and the habitat of the 21st century will be like.

The 2018 Better Philadelphia Challenge | $5,000 First Prize

This international urban design competition for university students is now open for registration. In celebration of the 100th anniversary of Philadelphia's iconic Benjamin Franklin Parkway, the Center / Architecture + Design seeks creative concepts for what a new 'Parkway' could be in a dense and developed 21st century city, connecting neighborhoods with nearby natural and cultural resources.

If you ask someone to define “fine jewelry” you’ll usually hear something about gold, platinum, diamonds, and other traditionally “precious” materials. But go to any high-end jewelry trade show today, and you’ll find that the term “fine jewelry” rarely matches this limiting definition. Designers no longer hesitate to mix non-traditional materials. The lines between “fine” jewelry and “fashion” jewelry are now blurred. The new generation of buyers doesn’t want to conform to traditional boundaries anymore. For them, “precious” and “non-precious” don’t matter as much as one thing: MAKING A PERSONAL STATEMENT.

The city of Los Angeles manufactures the myth of its own aspirational promise with cult-like fervor showcasing both spectacular virtuosity and deep social myopia - at once its glory and its menace, as Frank Lloyd Wright might have said. LA often stands apart as the urban sing-song of denial replete with clenched eyes and muffled ears. Thus, an illustration of homeless architecture which draws from the same artistic tools and idealism that typically supports the other end of the housing spectrum satirizes the ubiquity of the illusion machine and asks viewers to consider their place on the assembly line of fantasy.

The Danish Capital Copenhagen is World renowned for being the most happiest and livable city in the world. If you ask the locals regarding the reward they all will sum-up to one thing and that’s the hygge which generally means coziness, but encompasses far more. The city is well crafted with bike friendly streets, hued town houses and craft studios, Freetown Christiania aligned with Copenhagen is attracted by the concept of collective business, workshops and communal living.

Charles Square is a public space of city-wide importance and one of the pivotal sites in the Prague Heritage Reservation. However, it need a complete reconstruction. The city has decided to announce so called procedure with competition dialogue. This entails interactive collaboration between the city and architects, which will provide for continuous consensus between all stakeholders on the form of the project.

How long-term should urban planning be?

Munich’s Oktoberfest, the Kumbh Mela pilgrimage in India (or the largest gathering of humans on the planet), the Burning Man Festival in Nevada, and other major events demonstrate that flexible architectural configurations are temporarily deployed around the globe to provide medium-term shelter, often to enormous crowds. Such structures fulfill a range of functional tasks and are used in religious and cultural festivals or can take the form of military camps, refugee camps, or even temporary mining towns. This show traces a global phenomenon that has become increasingly topical given today’s current state of mass migration triggered by climate change, political strife, and natural disasters.

As a point of entry and exit, a threshold has a dual coding in society as both a physical and symbolic marker of separation and connection. Thresholds are often explicitly hard-edged or even brutal in their expression, demarcating rigid boundaries, as in the definitive lines of walls, barricades, and security checkpoints in buildings, around cities, or across larger territories. Too often, thresholds also divide human activity or communities according to social, ethnic, national, or economic characteristics. Architecture and planning can unwittingly contribute to these different forms of physical separation, especially in ways made visible through their practitioners’ interpretations of culture, religion, or legislation. As the academic disciplines that inform spatial practices, architecture and planning are themselves often similarly separated by disciplinary thresholds, inhibiting porosity between fields of research. By definition, an individual discipline necessarily is organized around a self-referential center of discursive production, but this often happens at the expense of the richness found at the intersection of multiple disciplinary perspectives. Is architecture, in its compulsive drive to create the autonomous object, inherently hardening the thresholds separating it from other disciplines and, by extension, reproducing those schisms within the built environment? Can architecture and planning intentionally construct soft thresholds―lines that are easily traversed, even temporarily erased―thereby allowing for multiple perspectives across different modes of research and practice and catalyzing disciplinary and social connections? What, then, is the physical expression of a soft threshold―a space that is visually and physically porous, plural in spirit, encompassing of its context, and yet rigorous in its expression?

The Chicago Chapter of The Architecture Lobby announces its second annual design competition, Kerning for a Cause, beginning July 17, 2017.

Videos

Today, half of the world’s population lives in cities. By 2045, six billion people will be crammed into urban centers, from small towns to sprawling megacities. In China alone, there are more than 100 cities with over a million inhabitants; the cramped metropolises of Manila and Jakarta are home to 13 million and 10 million people, respectively.

The aim of the competition is to rejuvenate the land on the other side of the Taj Mahal, across the river; on the site of the Mehtab Bagh.

Feature: Vann Molyvann 1926–2017

Paris and the entire country of France is world-famous for its cuisine, with a non-exhaustive list of delicacies and culinary systems. The culinary reputation of Paris is very rich, cultured and diverse. French food culture, according to UNESCO, is important for 'bringing people together to enjoy the art of good eating and drinking' and the power to create 'togetherness, the pleasure of taste, and the balance between human beings and the products of nature.'

Videos

CANactions School, the first school for urban studies in Ukraine, has launched an international call for applicants for Advanced Studies in Integrated Urban Development (ASIUD) 2017/18

The University of Warsaw (PL) has launched an architectural competition for a new Psychology Department Building which will be built in the hearth of the Ochota Campus in Warsaw – a science campus located in a dense city fabric close to the strict city centre.