Pezo von Ellrichshausen’s Vara Pavilion for the 2016 Venice Biennale is described by the architects as “a series of exteriors within other exteriors.” Breaking down this crypticness, what emerges is a maze-like complex of circles – ten of them – formed with steel, cement, and painted plaster, which collectively create a series of walls, but no roof, thus forming a pavilion that is open to the elements from above. The 324 square meter pavilion’s title, “vara,” refers to an imprecise and obsolete Spanish unit of measurement, that was employed during the country’s conquering of America to trace and measure cities. Each of circles of the Vara Pavilion is a diameter of the unit, ranging from two to eleven.

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OMA’s long-awaited conversion of the 16th century Fondaco dei Tedeschi as a department store is finally complete in Venice. The project was commissioned by Edizione S.r.l., the Benetton family's holding company, in 2009, and will bring comprehensive changes to one of the city’s largest and most recognizable buildings. The Fondaco was first begun in 1228 and is located at the foot of the Rialto Bridge, across from the fish market. With many past lives, it was first used as a trading post for German merchants, later as a customs house under Napoleon, and in the twentieth century, as a post office under Mussolini. Despite numerous and radical structural changes, the building was listed as a 'Monument' in 1987, restricting further alterations.

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Buffalo’s Albright-Knox Art Gallery has selected OMA to expand and refurbish the historic museum and its campus. The project team is being lead by OMA New York’s Principal, Shohei Shigematsu, who will spend the next year in partnership with the museum and in consultation with the community on how to renew and revitalize the august institution. Known as AK360, the building will be OMA’s first art museum project in the United States, and the Albright-Knox’s first expansion in more than a half-century. According to the museum, the project’s name is a reflection on this being the institution’s third expansion in its 154-year history, in addition, it establishes an embrace of public feedback and the acknowledges the condition of being encircled by parkland.

Videos

As part of ArchDaily's coverage of the 2016 Venice Biennale, we are presenting a series of articles written by the curators of the exhibitions and installations on show.

People wearing the huge sculptural head of a unicorn has become one of the most surreal images to be seen at this year’s  15th Venice Architectural Biennale.

Part of the Prospect North exhibition at the Scottish Pavilion, which is jointly produced by Lateral North, Dualchas Architects and Soluis, a design-visualization studio from Glasgow, the heads of the unicorn, moose and polar bear allows you to enter an immersive virtual reality world of the Highlands past, present and future.

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Volume #48: The Research Turn is comprised entirely of interviews and conversations. We wanted to learn from those who have been instrumental in shifting the boundaries and shaping today’s landscape of creative knowledge production. The issue also includes the catalogue for BLUE: Architecture of UN Peacekeeping Missions by Malkit Shoshan, the Dutch contribution to the 15th Venice Architecture Biennale.

Over the coming weeks Volume will share a curated selection of essays from this issue on ArchDaily. This represents the continuation of a partnership between two platforms with global agendas: in the case of ArchDaily to provide inspiration, knowledge and tools to architects across the world and, in the case of Volume, "to voice architecture any way, anywhere, anytime [by] represent[ing] the expansion of architectural territories and the new mandate for design."

Phyllis Lambert, architect and Founding Director Emeritus of the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA), has been announced as the winner of the 2016 Wolf Prize for the Arts. Awarded by the Wolf Foundation in Israel on June 2, the architect was cited for six decades of championing innovations in building design, for her preservation and regeneration efforts with significant historical works, and for her leadership the field of architectural research.

The design proposals of seven shortlisted finalists for the Latvian Museum of Contemporary Art Design Competition have been released by the competition’s organizer, Malcolm Reading Consultants. Located in the capital city of Riga, the funding for the €30 million project is a public private partnership with support from from the ABLV Charitable Foundation and the Boris and Ināra Teterev Foundation, which co-founded the Latvian Museum of Contemporary Art Foundation. The Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Latvia and the Museum’s Foundation signed a memorandum of intent regarding the museum and building on 30 October 2014. The competition, organized in 2015 with 25 first-stage participants, will announce a jury-selected winner in mid-June.

The Metropolitan Museum released a 360º video of their iconic Great Hall on their Facebook page, allowing user to immerse themselves in the building. Designed by Richard Morris Hunt in 1902, the Met’s Great Hall greets over 6 million visitors to the museum each year with its neo-classical design.

The video was shot with the use of two camera tracks: one from the main entrance to the balustrade above the staircase, and another set at 90º that follows the public up the stairs before lifting to an overhead view.

Over the past few decades, cities all around the world have undergone major changes as a part of global urbanization processes. More than fifty percent of the world’s population currently resides in cities, and by 2030, the world is anticipated to have 41 mega-cities with 10 million inhabitants or more.

With such large population growth, cities have likewise experienced unparalleled changes and development. In order to showcase the dramatic transformations of some of the world’s largest cities, like Paris, Sydney, Dubai, and Hong Kong, RENTCafe has compiled a series of Street View images that superimpose skylines of the past against what they look like today.

Find out how 42 skylines in 16 major cities have changed over time, after the break.

As part of ArchDaily's coverage of the 2016 Venice Biennale, we are presenting a series of articles written by the curators of the exhibitions and installations on show.

Against the tide presents the efforts of a generation of young architects who have conceived, designed, and constructed works of architecture, while also arranging their financial and contractual aspects as part of the requirements for their professional degree in architecture. All they have in common is that they belong to the Central Valley of Chile, where they have returned following their academic training to contribute to their communities, creating architectural projects which connect to a set of places where the region’s campesinos and their families can live and work.

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Beatriz Colomina, Professor of Architecture at Princeton, recently gave an interview to Architect Magazine on the current exhibition of her thesis—“Playboy Architecture 1953-1979”—at the Elmhurst Museum in Chicago. Her interest in the correlation between Playboy and architecture began nearly thirty years ago with her exploration on the role of gender and architecture in the work of Adolf Loos and Le Corbusier. From there, she began to observe numerous parallels between Playboy and the world of design.

Cat owners can now offer their cats a range of architectural landmarks to inhabit. The design studio, “Poopycat” has released a series of cardboard cat homes, modeled after iconic architectural landmarks. The series includes the Taj Mahal, the White House, the Eiffel Tower, as well as more monumental works like the Sphinx and a Mayan pyramid.

Videos

Have you ever wanted to decorate your walls with old-style maps but been discouraged because they don't fit your minimal and contemporary aesthetic? Enter Cut Maps, the Virginia-based company that creates cartographic representations of cities and states using laser technologies to precisely define borders and streets. The resultant maps offer the illusion of their paper precedents, but with an otherworldly precision only possible in the digital age.

“Immersed in reading a book it feels like [being] inside an architecture, a metaphysical space surrounded by the words,” says Federico Babina, discussing his latest series of illustrations, ARCHIWRITER. In the new series of 27 drawings, the illustrator has created “portraits” of authors by personifying their writing styles, periods, and locations as built environments made from architectural elements and words. Heightening this sense of individuality, Babina states that the resultant portraits can be “fluctuating, vernacular, itinerant, ephemeral, concentric, labyrinthine, surrealist, oneiric, and futuristic.”