New York-based firm M Castedo Architects have unveiled their designs for the "Silver Pearl Hotel", a 1000-room luxury resort and conference facility for the Qatar 2022 World Cup located 1.5 kilometers off the Doha coastline. The $1.6 billion design consists of two 30-story semicircular towers connected by a full height, transparent climate controlled atrium, with unimpeded views of the sea beyond. Access to the hotel will be provided by a four lane elevated causeway over the sea - or alternatively by private yacht or helicopter, say the architects.

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Almost 50 years to the day after President Lyndon B Johnson broke ground on Edward Durell Stone's design for the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington DC, today Vice President Joe Biden will do the same for Steven Holl Architects' design of the Kennedy Center Expansion, a largely below-ground addition that will add an extra 60,000 square feet to the Center.

Update: Today Westminster Council approved the Garden Bridge proposals - the second of three required approvals - with councillors voting 3-1 in favour of the bridge. Though London Mayor Boris Johnson still has to officially rule on the plans, it is almost certain that he will ultimately give the go-ahead to the project as he has previously voiced his support for the idea. The following article was originally published on November 13th, after Lambeth Council granted the bridge its first approval.

Lambeth Council has awarded planning permission for the Garden Bridge, Thomas Heatherwick and Arup's planned crossing of the Thames which has been proposed and supported by actress Joanna Lumley. The approval is the first in a series that the bridge needs to become a reality, with Westminster City Council and London mayor Boris Johnson still needing to sign off on the project, according to the Architects' Journal.

On one of Qatar's many World Cup construction sites, another Nepalese worker dies. The worker is not named; their death does not make the news, and work resumes on the site as soon as possible in order to make the 2022 construction deadline. But, in the desert outside Doha, a crane driver solemnly prepares to add one more concrete module to what has rapidly, and tragically, become one of Qatar's tallest towers.

This is the vision presented by Axel de Stampa and Sylvain Macaux, of the Paris and Santiago-based practice 1week1project, with their "Qatar World Cup Memorial." Designed as one of their week-long "spontaneous architecture" projects, the monument memorializes each deceased worker in the run-up to the 2022 World Cup.

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It may or may not be the tallest building in North America, but one thing's for sure: when it comes to costs, no other skyscraper comes close to New York's One World Trade Center. This is the conclusion of Emporis, whose list of the world's top ten most expensive buildings puts 1WTC way out in front at $3.9 billion. Originally estimated at just half that cost, this sets a trend in the top ten list, with many of the featured buildings suffering staggering overruns. The second-place Shard, for example, overshot it's original £350 million ($550 million) budget nearly four times over (although this is to be expected in London).

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The Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) has announced a major retrospective of the work of celebrated Scottish architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh, with an exhibition to be held at the RIBA's Headquarters in London from February to May 2015. Having shown talent as a draughtsman from a young age, Mackintosh started his architectural apprenticeship at the age of just 16, and the exhibition features over 60 original drawings, watercolours and perspectives spanning his entire career from the late 19th century until his death in 1928.

Read on after the break for more on the contents of the exhibition

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Videos

Elevator manufacturer ThyssenKrupp has unveiled its latest technological advance, a cable free, multi-car, multi-directional elevator that has the potential to revolutionize the size and shape of future skyscrapers. Run using magnetic technology similar to that used by Maglev trains, with each cabin running its own individual motor, the "MULTI" elevator system opens up the potential for elevator cabins to move horizontally as well as vertically. This in turn offers the potential for multiple cabins to operate in a single system, with cabins going up one shaft and down an adjacent shaft.

The Guggenheim has announced the finalists in the competition to design Guggenheim Helsinki, whittling down the entrants from a record-breaking 1,715 submissions to just six. Representing both emerging and established practices with offices in seven countries, the shortlisted entries show a variety of responses to the challenge of creating a world-class museum.

The six finalists are:

• AGPS Architecture Ltd. (Zurich, Switzerland and Los Angeles, United States of America)
• Asif Khan Ltd. (London, United Kingdom)
• Fake Industries Architectural Agonism (Cristina Goberna, Urtzi Grau) , Jorge Lopez Conde, Carmen Blanco, Alvaro Carrillo (New York, United States of America; Barcelona, Spain; and Sydney, Australia)
• Haas Cook Zemmrich STUDIO2050 (Stuttgart, Germany)
• Moreau Kusunoki Architect (Paris, France)
• SMAR Architecture Studio (Madrid, Spain and Western Australia)

Read on after the break to see all six designs in detail, as well as the jury's comments on each.

BIG has unveiled the design for their addition to the development at Battersea Power Station, a public square that will link the power station itself with the Electric Boulevard development designed by Norman Foster and Frank Gehry. Called Malaysia Square after the Malaysian development consortium behind the plans, the design features cascading steps that link the main public space at the lower level with the entrance to the power station above. The split-level design also provides for two pedestrian bridges and a road bridge that cross above the "urban canyon" of the public square.

"Now is the time for us to create a new interface with the deep sea, the earth’s final frontier," says a brochure from Japanese development company Shimizu Corporation, presenting their outlandish proposal for the Ocean Spiral: a deep sea colony that can supposedly provide for up to 5,000 people in its 500m wide tethered sphere.

The proposal describes the Ocean Spiral as "safer and more comfortable" than existing land-based cities, thanks to the near constant temperature enabled by the ocean, the fact that it will be unaffected by typhoons or earthquakes, and the hope that the city's methods of oxygen generation will enable higher concentrations of oxygen then are found in the Earth's atmosphere.

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With their latest cover, The New Yorker is addressing the tragic unrest in Ferguson which has followed Monday's decision not to indict the officer who shot Michael Brown in August, using an image of Eero Saarinen's iconic Gateway Arch. The image, designed by Bob Staake, shows the arch divided, black on one side and white on the other in reference to the racial tensions that underpin the dispute. "At first glance, one might see a representation of the Gateway Arch as split and divided," says Staake, "but my hope is that the events in Ferguson will provide a bridge and an opportunity for the city." To read more about the ideas behind Staake's design, visit The New Yorker's website.

The 2015 Milan Expo has been keeping architecture fans in the loop with "Belvedere in Città," its continuing series of videos filmed with the help of a drone. Since our update last month, two new videos have been released - and now that the recognizable forms of the pavilions are starting to emerge, the videos include labels for each feature of the expo site. With the help of these new videos it is easy to see the forms of highly-touted pavilions such as Libeskind's Vanke Pavilion, or Nemesi & Partners' smog-eating pavilion for Italy, gradually taking shape around the twin axes of the "cardo" and "decumanus," an ancient Roman planning tool borrowed for the site's masterplan by Jacques Herzog, Mark Rylander, Ricky Burdett, Stefano Boeri, and William McDonough. Read on after the break for the second video, and screenshots of the construction works.

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The 2014 Media Architecture Biennale has drawn to a close in Aarhus, Denmark, and with it five projects have been awarded for "outstanding accomplishments in the intersection between architecture and technology." Representing five different categories (Animated Architecture, Spatial Media Art, Money Architecture, Participatory Architecture, and Trends & Prototypes), these five projects are the ones that most represent the Media Architecture Biennale's goal to advance the understanding and capabilities of media architecture.

The winners include a power plant with a shimmering chimney tower, an installation that creates "phantoms" with light, an interactive LED facade, a crowdsourced mapping system for transit in the developing world, and a kinetic "selfie facade." See videos of all five winners after the break.

Last week, Thomas Heatherwick unveiled his fairytale-like designs for what will hopefully be New York's latest and most ambitious park, Pier 55 (with apologies to the High Line, New York's last "next big thing" in the public park arena). Envisaged as an undulating artificial landscape on a cloud of mushroom-like supports, Pier 55 has the internet buzzing. In this interview with FastCo Design, Heatherwick discusses the inspirations behind his latest project, explaining how everything including New York's street grid, the ruins of Pier 54 and yes, even the city's other recent global green space phenomenon, have manifested themselves in his latest madcap creation. Read the full article here for more.

For its annual Charity Christmas Auction, this year London's Anise Gallery is planning to raise money for Maggie's, the cancer care charity which has commissioned high profile buildings from architects such as Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, OMA, Richard Rogers and Snøhetta. The Anise Gallery's auction features works by both artists and architects, including four architects who have contributed Maggie's Centres themselves: Ted Cullinan, Chris Wilkinson of Wilkinson Eyre, and Piers Gough of CZWG, responsible for the Newcastle, Oxford, and Nottingham Centres respectively.

Others featured in the auction include architects Alison Brooks, Peter Murray, Jack Pringle, Christophe Egret, Rab Bennetts Je Ahn and Stuart Piercy, alongside artists including Ben Johnson, Norman Ackroyd and Jeanette Barnes. Until the auction on December 6th, all the works are on display at the Anise Gallery, however online bidding opens on November 26th here - alternatively, check out a selection of the available lots after the break.

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In this video from Crane TV, writer, poet, artist, and architect Vito Acconci discusses why his goal is not always to have his projects realized. Beginning his career with an education in creative writing from the University of Iowa, Acconci expresses his longtime desire as an artist for art to become “part of the world,” explaining that this eventually led him to extend his creativity beyond words and artworks. Architecture was the perfect vehicle for this because, unlike art, it is inescapable: "there isn't any place you can be where you aren't in the middle of architecture," he says.

However, unlike many architects, his projects push beyond the constraints of realistic structures, and he estimates that only 10 percent of Acconci Studio’s proposals are realized. To some architects this would seem like a failure, but to Acconci it means that his creative ideas are unprecedented, perhaps paving the way for what architecture could be in the distant future.

With the opening of the Harvard Art Museums a week ago today, Renzo Piano was able to finally complete on a project which, in various guises, has been in progress for seventeen years. The relationship between Piano and Harvard began with a 1997 plan to build a new branch of the Fogg Museum on the Charles River and ended, after objections from locals and then the 2008 recession, in the decision to consolidate the university's three museums (The Fogg, Busch-Reisinger and Arthur M Sackler Museums) under one roof.

With its long history, restricted space, the listed facade of the original Fogg Museum and the ultimate difficult neighbor in Le Corbusier's Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, the Harvard Art Museums project was inevitably going to cause a fuss on completion. So how did Piano do? Find out what the critics said after the break.

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After gaining the first in a series of required planning approvals last week, Thomas Heatherwick's highly controversial Garden Bridge proposal has once again come under fire from a variety of opponents, with campaign group Thames Central Open Space (TCOS) dubbing it a "luvvies' folly," and the Guardian's architecture critic Oliver Wainwright saying that it is "not in fact a bridge – in the sense of being a public right of way across the river – but another privately managed tourist attraction, on which £60m of public money is to be lavished."

Much of this new assault is the result of the 46 conditions which came with Lambeth Council's recommendation to grant the bridge planning approval, which as BD Online uncovered, include closing the bridge between 12 and 6am, a ban on cycling, and a restriction of group sizes to 8 people or fewer, unless booked in advance.