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Shigeru Ban (born August 5th 1957) is a Japanese architect who won the 2014 Pritzker Prize for his significant contributions in architectural innovation and philanthropy. His ability to re-apply conventional knowledge in differing contexts has resulted in a breadth of work that is characterized by structural sophistication and unconventional techniques and materials. Ban has used these innovations not only to create beautiful architecture but as a tool to help those in need, by creating fast, economical, and sustainable housing solutions for the homeless and the displaced. As the Pritzker jury cites: “Shigeru Ban is a tireless architect whose work exudes optimism.”

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The American Institute of Architects (AIA) announced the winners of their 18th annual Housing Awards, which recognize the best in housing design for new constructions, restorations, and renovations. This year the five-person jury selected eleven projects to receive awards in four categories: one- and two-family custom residences; one- and two-family production homes; multifamily housing; and specialized housing.

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With its Mies Crown Hall Americas Prize, the Illinois Institute of Technology College of Architecture seeks to recognize the most distinguished works of architecture in the Americas. Every two years, the Prize is awarded at an event that takes place in the masterpiece of Mies van der Rohe, the S.R. Crown Hall, the home of the Chicago-based school.

The jury, comprising Ricky Burdett, Jose Castillo, Ron Henderson, Rodrigo Pérez de Arce, and Claire Weisz, has announced four finalists in the prize's latest version of the MCHAP.emerge award, which covers architecture built in 2016 and 2017. MCHAP.emerge award aims to recognize outstanding built work by emerging practices, offering a prize of $25,000 to the winner.

The American Institute of Architects (AIA) has announced the names of the 152 member-architects who have been elevated to its prestigious College of Fellows for 2018. Limited to members who have made “a significant contribution to architecture and society and who have achieved a standard of excellence in the profession,” approximately 3 percent of the AIA’s total membership of 90,000 are recognized as fellows.

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AIA New York has announced the winners of their 2017 AIA New York Design Awards, highlighting the best new projects located in the Empire State or completed by AIA NY registered architects across categories of architecture, projects, interior design and urban planning.

Within the four categories, winning projects have been granted either an “Honor” or “Merit” distinction. Each project has been chosen for its “design quality, response to its context and community, program resolution, innovation, thoughtfulness, and technique.” The winners scale in scale from temporary exhibitions to large-scale urban interventions.

This year 22 of the 35 winners were New York City-located projects, including the grand prize winner, Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s striking Roy and Diana Vagelos Education Center at Columbia University’s medical campus. Continue reading to see the full list of winners.

The American Institute of Architects (AIA) have named 18 architectural and interior projects as recipients of the 2017 Institute Honor Awards, the profession’s highest recognition for excellence in design.

According to the AIA, “the 2017 Architecture program celebrates the best contemporary architecture regardless of budget, size, style, or type. These stunning projects show the world the range of outstanding work architects create and highlight the many ways buildings and spaces can improve our lives.”

The awarded projects were selected from nearly 700 submissions. The winners will be honored at the 2017 AIA National Convention in Orlando.

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The American Institute of Architects (AIA) has selected seven recipients of the 2016 AIA National Healthcare Design Awards, given to the year’s best projects in healthcare building design and healthcare design-oriented research. Projects were selected for displaying “conceptual strengths that solve aesthetic, civic, urban, and social concerns as well as the requisite functional and sustainability concerns of a hospital.”

The award is given in four categories: Category A: Built, Less than $25 million in construction cost; Category B: Built, More than $25 million in construction cost; Category C: Unbuilt, Must be commissioned for compensation by a client with the authority and intention to build (No projects were selected in this category this year); and Category D: Innovations in Planning and Design Research, Built and Unbuilt.

Read on for the list of winners.

As a Japanese immigrant who has spent much of her life in the United States, the architecture of Toshiko Mori occupies an interesting space: on one hand, the material and tectonic culture of Japan is, as she puts it, her “DNA.” On the other hand, her work clearly draws inspiration from the Modernists of 20th century America, and most notably from Mies van der Rohe. In this interview from his “City of Ideas” series, Vladimir Belogolovsky speaks with Mori (his former architecture professor) about materials, details, and the inspiration behind her work.

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A boathouse by Studio Gang, the Smithsonian's BIG plan, and a new Baltimore school by Rogers Partners' are some of 18 projects selected for the 2016 American Institute of Architects (AIA) Honor Awards. The awarded projects were chosen from 500 submissions as the US' best new architecture, interiors and urban design projects. Each recipient will be honored at the AIA 2016 National Convention in Philadelphia.

The 2016 Institute Honor Awards for Architecture are...

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In the mid-1980s, after literature had long been held hostage by postmodernist irony and cynicism, a new wave of authors called for an end to negativity, promoting a "new sincerity" for fiction. Gaining momentum into the 1990s, the movement reached a pinnacle in 1993 when, in his essay E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction, pop-culture seer David Foster Wallace, a proponent of this "new sincerity," made the following call to action: “The next real literary ‘rebels’ in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles... These anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they even started. Dead on the page. Too sincere. Clearly repressed. Backward, quaint, naive, anachronistic. Maybe that’ll be the point. Maybe that’s why they’ll be the next real rebels. Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval. The old postmodern insurgents risked the gasp and squeal: shock, disgust, outrage, censorship, accusations of socialism, anarchism, nihilism. Today’s risks are different. The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the ‘Oh how banal.'"

Architecture, ever in debt to the styles and ideas of other art forms, could learn a thing or two now from the resuscitation of American fiction at the turn of the millennium. It too is enduring an identity crisis, mired by pessimism and uncertainty - a reality made painfully clear this past January when a New York Times Op-Ed by Steven Bingler and Martin C. Pedersen, How to Rebuild Architecture, divided camps and made the design world fume. In the editorial, the authors spoke vehemently of an architectural profession that has become mired by egos and been disconnected from public needs. Things quickly got ugly, critics wrestled with critics and subsequently the public got involved. What no one seemed to take into account is that this type of hounding is at the core of the problem. In its current landscape the discipline has struggled with its past, been deferential to its present, and wrestled with the uncertainty of its future. In a moment when we have become addicted to despondency, can anyone win?