Until this Tuesday, May 3rd at 23:59 EST you can submit your work for the second edition of the ArchDaily Architectural Visualization Awards. For us, visualizations have become a powerful tool that has helped us to think without limits about the design of our future cities, buildings, and structures. This is one of the reasons why we decided to launch this competition: to find the best talent from around the world and discover who is setting trends with their work and aesthetics, helping us to visualize the future of architecture.

This week’s curated selection of Best Unbuilt Architecture highlights educational and cultural projects submitted by the ArchDaily community. Through examples from all around the world, the article explores how these spaces of knowledge and discovery are designed to inspire and inform.

Featuring a monolithic museum in Portugal, a digital heritage centre with a media facade in Korea and a mobility research centre in Turkey, the round-up spans various kinds of educational and cultural spaces, as well as different attitudes towards the built or natural environment. The following projects reveal the ideas that shape spaces of knowledge in different contexts, illustrating diverse approaches toward what constitutes an institution of culture.

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The 59th International Art Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia has officially opened its doors to the public on the 23rd of April, 2022. Titled "The Milk of Dreams”. the exhibition is welcoming more than 210 artists from 58 countries, to showcase over a thousand artworks and installations that promote art, science, research, and ecological transition from the environmental humanities. 

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The Art Gallery of New South Wales expansion designed by SANAA is set to open to the public on December 3rd, 2022. The project, dubbed Sydney Modern Project and first revealed in 2019, is the most significant cultural development in the city in almost five decades since the opening of the Sydney Opera house. The new building designed by SANAA, together with Australian practice Architectus as executive architect, features a series of pavilions of various sizes and gallery volumes cascading towards the harbour. The structure that opens toward its surroundings is designed to provide a backdrop for 21st-century art.

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African architect Diébédo Francis Kéré, known worldwide for work guided by a social vision of architecture and design practice as a tool for inclusion and transformation, was this year's Pritzker Prize laureate. To discuss the award, the jury's selection, and its implications for architectural culture as a whole, Arquicast invited Caio Dias and Bruno Sarmento.

Over the past few years, educational campuses around the world have been confronted with various trends and challenges of change, such as pandemic adaptation, climate crisis, the responsibility for sustainable design and online teaching. Sasaki Architecture, with offices in Boston, Denver and Shanghai, specialises in planning educational campuses around the world. With a broad portfolio of projects at various scales of intervention, recent projects in the United States, China, Mexico and Peru stand out.

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As Antoine Picon describes in Architecture and the Virtual Towards a new Materiality? : "An architectural project is indeed a virtual object. It is all the more virtual that it anticipates not a single built realization but an entire range of them. …Whereas the architect used to manipulate static forms, he can now play with geometric flows. Surface and volumes topological deformations acquire a kind of evidence that traditional means of representation did not allow.”

This article was originally published on Common Edge.

While Stephen Zacks’ new book, G.H. Hovagimyan: Situationist Funhouse, is ostensibly about the life and work of the artist, there’s an intriguing and seemingly topical subtext looming in the background: the role of art and culture on the development and redevelopment of cities. It’s a complicated and sometimes fraught issue, prone sometimes to simplistic, even binary thinking. Zacks, a friend and former colleague at Metropolis, has always had a more nuanced view of the issue. Last week I reached out to him to talk about the work of Hovagimyan, the historic lessons of 1970s New York, and why “gentrification” needs a new name.

After the first years of launching their architectural practice, Ben van Berkel and Caroline Bos renamed their practice to UNStudio. Short for United Network Studio, the change of name stands symbolic to the knowledge based, networked nature of the firm, which has grown to expand to 6 offices worldwide today.

They say you only really become aware of whether an architect has considered the acoustics of a space when she or he hasn't. Think archly Instagrammable, yet I-can't-hear-my-dining-partner-speak restaurant interiors.

For the longest time, the management of sound was given little, if no, thought in formal architectural training. Things might be changing, but – and luckily for companies like Swiss-based Impact Acoustic – there is still a need for architecturally minded solutions-providers who like nothing better than reducing noise.

Who do you design a city for? Your answer is unlikely to focus on a baby or a child under the age of six—the age bracket that defines early childhood. Yet, a wide range of guidelines and actions can be taken to integrate this demographic into urban planning. After all, this is when a citizen's first interactions with urban life begin, making it essential to provide the most welcoming environment possible. 

HP DesignJet large-format printers are designed to simplify the printing needs of professionals across the construction ecosystem—including architects, engineers, builders, and subcontractors—while delivering fast, high-quality prints at a low cost.

Snøhetta was founded on the United Nations 1987 Brundtland Commission’s three main pillars of sustainable development: economic growth, environmental protection, and social equality. Their highly value and purpose-driven operations has since then expanded to 330 employees in 7 studios all over the world, from hometown Oslo to Adelaide, HongKong, Paris and Innsbrück, as well as their sister studios in New York and San Fransisco.

With a land area of over 8.5 million square kilometers, Brazil is a country of immense geographic diversity, with climates that vary from region to region. Consequently, natural ventilation strategies in architecture must be analyzed based on local specificities, requiring an analysis of topography, climate, surroundings, and wind patterns, alongside the study of the architectural design itself.

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A collaborative design team led by Allies and Morrison and Asif Khan Studio has been selected to renew the famed Barbican Centre in London, United Kingdom. The winning design proposal preserves the building’s original architectural language and provides new opportunities for the center's diverse community of artists, audiences, and partners, boosting the building’s accessibility and performance quality.

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San Diego is a city tied to the ocean. In turn, its architecture responds to a variety of cultural influences and natural conditions. Home to diverse and distinct architectural styles, San Diego has everything from Queen Anne Victorian homes and craftsman bungalows to Spanish colonial revival structures. Besides monumental works like the Salk Institute and Geisel Library, San Diego is also home to a range of contemporary cultural and residential projects.

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Textures can calm us, bring warmth or even guide us. They elicit our sense of touch and also affect us visually. This is because lights and shadows tend to form in relation to the irregularities and shapes that are present in some textures, which can in turn clearly differentiate these types of materials from other surfaces. For many, the idea of a space surrounded with white, smooth walls can be disturbing and monotonous. Embellishments such as paints, the inclusion of natural coatings or other elements can easily transform a space, emphasizing certain parts or creating new and attractive visuals. In interior design projects, textured walls have always been a popular way to add prominence to a space, either via the constructive system of building - such as brick or exposed concrete walls - or through different types of coatings that can be added later on.

Since the beginning of the war, over 7.1 million people have been internally displaced within Ukraine. In response to this growing humanitarian crisis, Kyiv-based practice Balbek Bureau has developed a modular temporary housing system that aims to provide a dignified dwelling to internally displaced Ukrainians. RE:Ukraine is designed to adapt to different types of terrain and settlement density while being deployed in a short time frame. While the project was intended for areas of Ukraine that are not under fire, the framework can also accommodate refugees abroad.

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The Power of Data is an exhibition created in a virtual building, conceived by three-dimensional geometries based on various artificial intelligence algorithms. The project was created by the OLA (Online Lab of Architecture) team of research architects formed by Jennifer Durand (Peru), Daniel Escobar (Colombia), Claudia Garcia (Spain), Giovanna Pillaca (Peru) and Jose Luis Vintimilla (Ecuador).

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Contemporary challenges and developments in technology inevitably trigger changes in the way we design and build our cities. SUMMARY, one of ArchDaily's Best New Practices of 2021, is a Portuguese architecture studio focused on the development of prefabricated and modular building systems. Striking a balance between pragmatism and experimentalism, the firm develops prefabricated solutions in order to respond to a driving challenge of contemporary architecture—to speed up and simplify the construction process. Founded in 2015 by the architect Samuel Gonçalves, a graduate of the School of Architecture of the University of Porto, the studio has presented at prominent events such as the 2016 Venice Biennale. We talked with Samuel about the firm's practical experience in prefabrication and modulation, as well as their experiments and forays into research.

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How can Universal Design bridge the divides that have left many Americans stranded in their own communities? In its latest exhibition, Manhattan’s Center for Architecture calls for a “reset.” On view until September 3, Reset: Towards a New Commons, displays projects that “encourage new modes of living collaboratively” and “more holistic approaches to inclusion.”

Sometimes in this business called design, you just need one smart idea to set you off. A light-bulb moment, if you will. A product that does something novel and timely, offering customers something they didn’t know they needed, but most definitely now want. This, however, is just the start of a journey. Once the noise dies down, how does your hit item evolve into a rounded, sustainable business with impact beyond its initial revolution?

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One of the defining features of cities is their undeniable capacity to bring together creative talent through multiculturalism and transdisciplinarity. Today, it is increasingly vital to generate spaces and platforms within these urban environments that serve as creative laboratories—places not only to share but, above all, to reflect on contemporary practice, viewing design not as a decontextualized entity, but as an integrated concept that bridges diverse disciplines.

From September 23 to 25, 2022, the eighth edition of the Open House Madrid Architecture Festival will take place, offering access to more than 100 historic and contemporary buildings that are generally closed to the public. José Antonio Corrales and Ramón Vázquez Molezún will be the featured architects of this new edition of the festival, which aims to bring architecture closer to citizens.