News: The Latest Architecture and News

China has become home to some of the world’s most outlandish architectural landmarks of the 21st century. Hangzhou is home to a replica of the Eiffel Tower, located in a luxury real estate development, and Shanghai’s World Financial Center is often referred to as “The World’s Largest Bottle Opener.” However, all of these zany designs may soon come to a halt following a directive issued by the State Council, China’s cabinet, and the Communist Party’s Central Committee on Sunday, reports the New York Times.

The directive says “no” to any architecture considered “oversized, xenocentric, weird, and devoid of cultural tradition.” In their place should be buildings designed as “suitable, economic, green, and pleasing to the eye.”

British Airways i360, in Brighton, England, has been awarded the Guinness World Record for the most slender tower in the world, with an impressive height to width aspect ratio of 41.15 to 1. The tower stands 160.469 meters tall with a diameter of 3.9 meters. The tower was designed by Marks Barfield Architects, the same team who built the famous London Eye, and is set to open to the public this summer.

Gregory Kloehn, an artist, construction contractor, and plumber based in Oakland, California, has created miniature homes for the homeless in his community. Inspired by a book he compiled of pictures of the structures that homeless people had constructed on the streets, Kloehn used his creative skills to build them miniature homes. He told NationSwell, “I really just ripped a page out of the homeless peoples’ book, their own game plan.” His first completed home was given to a couple he had become friendly with while photographing for his book. The home came complete with a bottle of champagne to celebrate.

Jestico + Whiles, in collaboration with developer Carillion, has won planning consent from the Leeds City Council for the Tower Works redevelopment, a competition they won in March of last year. The site is located in the Holbeck Urban Village, which is situated near the Leeds-Liverpool canal. The design incorporates the styles of surrounding buildings, particularly the three Italianate towers, which date back to the industrial revolution.

Moon Hoon, an architect based in Seoul’s Gangnam district, created a series of fantastical, detailed “doodles” for the Chicago Architecture Biennial. Titled Doodle Constructivism, his installation is a powerful display of architectural illustration that merges widely contrasting ideas such as peaceful urbanism with mayhem. In his Shelfish Architecture drawing, he creates a sort of housing structure, which looks like a cross between an apartment building, a mushroom, and an alien.

Fashion and architecture often intersect, with OMA/AMO designing runways for Prada, and architects, such as Zaha Hadid, designing swimwear and shoes. This time, we’ve rounded up four designers who have created jewelry lines inspired by the built world around them. From cityscape and protractor rings to wearable sculptures, check out the collections after the break.

Réinventer.paris has announced the 23 winners chosen to develop architectural projects in Paris, including designs by Sou Fujimoto, David Chipperfield, and DGT Architects. Réinventer.paris is an urban initiative launched to give designers the power to rethink and reshape the way that Parisians live, work, and play. Located on various sites chosen by Mayor Anne Hidalgo, each project successfully creates a sense of liveliness and embodies what the future of Paris might be. The call for submissions was answered with ideas about innovation, cutting edge-solutions to environmental problems, and intelligent design.

DIY wooden pallet creations are an increasingly popular trend, with projects ranging from building pieces of furniture to even making an outdoor pool. In their latest how-to, Interesting Engineering brings the DIY trend to a much larger scale with a video showing how to build a house using wooden pallets. Watch the video above to learn how to make a wooden pallet house and check out some tips from the video after the break.

Strelka KB has announced two Russia-based design teams, Timur Bashkayev Architectural Bureau and BuroMoscow, as the winners of the design competition for two Moscow metro stations. The stations, Nizhniye Mnevnik and Terekhovo, are both located to the northwest of the capital. These two new stations, which include designs for an outdoor pavilion, a street underpass, a ticket booth and a street underpass, will extend the Moscow Metro network and are expected to be fully functioning in 2018.

The Miami Design District, a neighborhood dedicated to innovative art and architecture, has commissioned The Museum Garage to be built as a part of Phase III of development. Curated by Terence Riley of K/R Architects, the garage will feature six different facades each designed by a different firm: Work Architecture Company (WORKac); J. Mayer H.; Clavel Arquitectos; Nicolas Buffe; K/R Architects; and Sagmeister & Walsh.

The facades will include a wall of recycled cars, a wall of traffic barriers repurposed as screens, a mural of cartoon characters mixed in with baroque details, a corner design of interlocking puzzle pieces, façade cutouts that serve as an “ant farm” which expose the activity inside, and a painting of a candle being burned at both ends.

Scheduled for completion this year, the garage will serve as a seven story mixed-use building with ground-floor retail and a garage for 800 vehicles.

Learn more about each of the facade designs after the break.

The Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA)’s Future Trends Survey for December 2015 showed a dip in UK architects’ confidence, reflecting the low number of new inquiries received by practices at the end of the year. The Future Trends workload index dropped substantially to +15 in December from +27 in November, showing a decrease in expected new projects. However, all regions in the UK, with the exception of Wales and the West (balance figure -3) and Scotland (balance figure -50), showed positive balance figures, with Scotland’s low numbers possibly related to the impact of oil price changes. The South of England was the most optimistic region with a balance figure of +30.

WoodWorks, an initiative of the Wood Products Council, has announced the winners of the 2016 Wood Design Awards. Honoring projects that “showcase the innovative use of wood as both a structural and finish material,” this year’s awards highlight the many uses and attributes of wood, “from structural performance and design versatility to sustainability and cost effectiveness.”

The Wood Design Awards are both National and Regional, with regional awards being presented at Wood Solutions Fairs across the country starting in late March.

The winners of the Wood Design Awards are:

Sweden based visual artist, Anastasia Savinova, has created a series of collages that seek to capture the spirit of cities. Titled “Genius Loci,” her collages form a big house that is composed of many buildings characteristic of each city, visualizing the way of life, the atmosphere, and the feeling of each place. Photographs of architecture are the foundational components of her art work, representing the feeling as a whole.

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Nike has unveiled plans to expand their World Headquarters, located near Beaverton, Oregon. Their campus first opened in 1990 and has undergone three waves of construction, doubling its size. Now, Nike will expand the facility again, adding 3.2 million square feet of office, mixed-use and parking facilities.

Bee Breeders has announced the winners of their Baltic Way Memorial architecture competition. The competition sought to create a reminder of the impact of the 1989 Baltic Way, a peaceful demonstration that occurred when people across three Baltic countries joined hands to form a human chain stretching more than 600 kilometers. Each entry was judged on how successfully it both drew on the seriousness of the Baltic Way event, while simultaneously representing a hope for the future. The jury evaluated all entries on a number of criteria including clarity and strength of concept, originality, quality of work, appropriateness to context and scale, and its strength as a public symbol to memorialize the event.

Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates and Leslie E. Robertson Associates have joined forces to propose a vision for a new city in Tokyo Bay. “Next Tokyo” imagines a mega-city that is adapted to climate change in the year 2045. Rising sea levels, seismic activity, and the threat of typhoons have drawn attention to the vulnerability of low-elevation coastal zones in the bay. This design proposes a development strategy that improves the bay’s preparedness for these natural disasters, while also creating a mile-high residential tower and a new transit-oriented district.

Throughout Syria’s four-year war, many of the country’s ancient monuments and artifacts have been demolished by ISIS and Syrian bombs targeted at Islamic militants. In August, ISIS destroyed Palmyra, one of the most important cultural centers in the world.

Yet a group of Syrian refugee artists in Jordan, with the support of the United Nations and Internal Relief and Development, have been salvaging some memories of their country’s destroyed artifacts. Since November 2014, these artists have been constructing miniature models of Syria’s ancient architecture through a project called Syria History and Civilization, according to a reporty by Buzzfeed News.

Sydney-based firm Stewart Hollenstein has been awarded an Honorable Mention in the international design competition for a new 17,000 square-meter library in Varna, Bulgaria. Their design scheme focuses on Varna's rich history as a city known for its public gardens, and seeks to make the library a cultural center of the city.