Asia’s leading annual event on design, innovation and brands, Business of Design Week 2016, will commence on 30 November 2016 and end on 3 December 2016 at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre. This year, the Business of Design Week brings to Hong Kong the distinctive minds in the profession of architecture to share their views on development of a future city. This is the first year BODW is partnering with a U.S. city – Chicago.

Completed in January 1977, Richard Rogers’s and Renzo Piano’s Centre Georges Pompidou was initially received skeptically by critics, but the public soon embraced Beaubourg as an essential—and well loved—Paris institution. Francesco Dal Co’s lively intellectual biography, Centre Pompidou: Renzo Piano, Richard Rogers, and the Making of a Modern Monument (Nov. 29, Yale University Press) explores the Pompidou’s history and the reasons for its success, from its genesis as a politically calculated response to the turbulent 1968 student protests to the role played by architects in its construction, as well as the historical influences and the engineering solutions that inform its design. As Dal Co reveals, a key reason for the Centre Pompidou’s lasting significance lies in its ability to channel architectural memory, connecting it powerfully to Paris’s historic urban fabric.

Transnational projects for resource extraction have motivated the development of massive infrastructural corridors. The strategic siting of mining towns, petrochemical encampments, and industrial developments aims to integrate vast geographical and political entities. These experiments promise to advance economic development on a national scale, but their influence on regional and urban constructs tests the agency of architecture and planning at smaller scales.

The International Mass Timber Conference is a leading conference and expo on the use of cross-laminated timber (CLT) and other mass timber in global design and construction and is one of the largest gatherings of CLT and mass timber experts in the world. The 2016 event drew 519 industry thought leaders and executives from 11 countries, and 56 exhibitors and 48 international speakers. Interest is high and the conference is expected to be even bigger in 2017.

Before Lumion rendering used to be really hard. Setting up and completing a render used to take days. With Lumion you can do it in hours. You can even make last minute changes before a meeting and update your renders in minutes. Anyone can sit down with Lumion and within 15 minutes learn how to create videos, images and 360 panoramas. As Scott Erdy, principal of Erdy Mc Henry puts it: "Lumion is really about the creativity of the architect being expressed in a way so other people can understand it."

Based on his experience in curating the 15th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia 2016 in Venice, the Chilean architect Alejandro Aravena inspired the LafargeHolcim Foundation for Sustainable Construction to organize a debate on sustainability and security. Framed as one of this year Architecture Biennale’s discussions, the event will foreground topics that were raised in the context of the exhibition “Reporting from the Front” and expose them to “real life reports” from the forefront of architecture and related disciplines.

The authority on prefabricated stainless steel railing systems offers an AIA-approved continuing education course for trade professionals.

Though railing systems are an integral part of building safety and add aesthetic value, they can often be overlooked in the grand scheme of a project. With budgets dwindling at the end of a build, project managers often shortchange the railings—only to incur other costs associated with hiring a local fabricator or using cheaper materials. Washington state’s AGS Stainless, Inc.,. has nearly three decades of experience in this field. Specializing in prefabricated stainless steel railings, the company’s sponsored Continuing Education Unit (CEU) educates architects, builders, and homeowners on the benefits of using a prefab system and the qualities of stainless steel. Hear what Kevin Harris, director of sales and marketing, has to say about prefab railing systems, and then head to the CEU for the full course and accreditation test.

Art Complex aims to contribute to the development of local community, maturity of cultural environment and communication between artistic activities by formation of a complex cultural space for combination of enjoyment of culture, research & development and learning with use of abundant local historical infrastructure and the art archive as the medium.

Also included is a comprehensive essay by the celebrated architectural writer and critic Robert McCarter entitled Crafting Space: Composition and Construction in the Architecture of Wendell Burnette that examines the “thinking and making” process behind the built and unbuilt work across 15 years of practice. The different typologies of the work explores authentic human experience through provocative spatial constructions—public and private in diverse locales—that attempt to promote an expansive dialogue with our places, our environment, our communities, ourselves, and our time. Through extensive research into the ‘art of building’ – the specificity of place and locally appropriate construction systems, materials, craft, and their infinite capacity to transcend mere construction, the work strives toward an architecture that is at once functional and poetic.

The MEXTRÓPOLI Pavilion will become a public space that is activated to promote reflection of key issues for the city, a pavilion with social vocation, which is recyclable and reusable, contemplating relocation and achieve incorporated as a recreational device, information carrier and knowledge to a space currently demands the city. Participants must design a structure that complies with the requirements that specify the rules of this competition in terms of time, cost and characteristics; considered as a fundamental part to evaluate the proposal on thematic approach should be discussions within the structure will be carried out, this way the MEXTRÓPOLI Pavilion will become a traveling purposeful device that every year open global space competition from generating ideas that revolve around the development process of architecture and the city, which in turn will become the benchmark per se of each edition of the Festival of Architecture and City.

Breaking down boundaries and creating truly sustainable architecture are Ferdinand Ludwig’s goals.

Ludwig’s everyday work requires a considerable amount of patience. The time it takes an architect to complete his projects depends largely on his materials, but Ludwig has a longer wait than usual: he constructs buildings from living trees combined with steel structures. These form bridges, towers, elements for city parks and more--structures with which the architect wants to tear down the boundaries between nature and technology.

Two months after the Finnish government vetoed funding for the Guggenheim Helsinki project, following an international competition won by Paris-based practice Moreau Kusunoki, it has been reported that supporters of the scheme have presented an updated proposal for the construction of the museum. According to The New York Times, "of its expected $144 million building costs, the City of Helsinki’s investment would cover a maximum of $89 million."

"When it comes to distinguished contests, Sub-Zero and Wolf’s Kitchen Design Contest is the crème de la crème", says Mikal Otten, owner of Exquisite Kitchen Design, Denver, CO. "Since winning the first place global award for Transitional styling, we’ve gained a tremendous amount of credibility."

Since its inception in 1993, the Sub-Zero and Wolf Kitchen Design Contest has become a coveted win in the industry recognizing kitchen designers, architects, interior designers, builders and remodelers for advancing outstanding kitchen design by celebrating their inspiring, innovative projects.

Urbanization is a system of power and knowledge, and today’s city functions through the expansive material infrastructures of the urban order. In The Urban Apparatus, Reinhold Martin analyzes urbanization and the contemporary city in aesthetic, socioeconomic, and mediapolitical terms. He argues that understanding the city as infrastructure reveals urbanization to be a way of imparting functional, aesthetic, and cognitive order to a contradictory, doubly bound neoliberal regime.

The October 2016 issue of a+u is a special issue devoted to Norwegian architect Carl-Viggo Hølmebakk. Since the establishment of his office in Oslo in 1992, Hølmebakk has worked closely with the natural landscape of the country. This issue features his latest National Tourist Route project "Vøringsfossen Waterfall Area", residential works "Summer House Addition Gravråk" and "Concrete House Holtet / Larsen", on-going projects such as "Bukkedauen Hotel and Coastal Culture Center" and "Torghatten Footbridge", as well as his earlier works from the very first built project "Private Library" for his parents.

Never Built New York shows us the visionary architectural ideas of the city's greatest dreamers across two centuries of New York City history. Nearly 200 proposals spanning 200 years encompass bridges, skyscrapers, master plans, parks, transit schemes, amusements, airports, plans to fill in rivers and extend Manhattan, and much more.

This volume presents the research and speculations produced by scholars, Loeb Fellows and graduate students at Harvard Graduate School of Design by looking at possibilities for the city of Agra in India and the agency of design between Architecture, Critical Conservation, Urban Planning & Design, and Landscape Architecture in heritage conservation, economic development, and the planning of medium-sized South Asian cities.

Paranoia Man In A Rat Fink Room will open in tandem with the 13th annual New York Comedy Festival, which takes place this week at venues throughout New York City.

From November 2nd to 6th, Caroline Hirsch, founder and owner of the New York Comedy Festival and Carolines on Broadway, will curate comedic programming inside the installation, bringing to the space a functioning nightclub and entertainment venue complete with live stand-up performances.