The Revit Importer converts families and building elements to SketchUp’s native tags and components. It optimizes geometry creating a lightweight and well-organized SketchUp file that is ready-to-use.

Since Zaha Hadid’s death two weeks ago, we’ve been thinking a lot about her legacy. Hadid’s accomplishments in architecture are impressive not only because of her innovative designs, but because she succeeded in a male-dominated profession, and undoubtedly experienced sexism along the way. In our webcomic, Architexts, we use humor to cope with various aspects and stereotypes of the architectural profession, including negative ones. With our forthcoming book, Architects, LOL, we hope to share the stories--your stories--that paint a more realistic picture of the profession, rather than an idealistic one that most of us can only dream of.

Pier 55, the floating park designed by Heatherwick Studio and landscape architecture firm, Signe Nielsen, received a green-light from the New York Supreme Court this past Friday, April 8, according to a report by the Architect’s Newspaper. Floating above the Hudson River on the Lower West Side of Manhattan, the park is anchored by an aggregation of enormous petal-like stilts that are submerged in the water below. The park is being funded by the philanthropy of Diane von Furstenberg and her husband Barry Diller.

Pier 55’s legal troubles began last spring when the non-profit, City Club of New York filed a lawsuit against Pier55 Inc. and Hudson River Park Trust (HRPT) to stop the project.

Herzog & de Meuron have released new images of their design for National Library of Israel. Located on a prominent site in West Jerusalem, the National Library is at the base of the Knesset (Israel’s parliament) and adjacent to the Israel Museum, Science Museum and Hebrew University.

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Rafael Moneo has unveiled the design of his first Miami project, a luxury high-rise at the north end of the city. Known as Apeiron at The Jockey Club, or simply Apeiron, the condo project features a pair of towers to be completed in separate stages and will include 240 serviced residential units, a 90-key boutique hotel, a deep-water marina, health and wellness facilities, and outdoor pools. With Apeiron, The Jockey Club hopes to hearken back to its 1970s heydey, when it was a center of Miami’s vibrant social and nightlife scenes. Apeiron, a Greek work meaning ‘limitless’, is at 11111 Biscayne Boulevard, a location with expansive views of the water and surrounding landscape.

LEAF International (Leading European Architecture Forum) has announced Santiago Calatrava as the recipient of its 2016 Lifetime Achievement Award. Recognized by a panel of industry experts around the world, he has been selected for his “unique vision and ability to transform cities through impactful design" as well as the breadth of his work, which includes projects like the World Trade Center Transportation Hub (New York City), Milwaukee Art Museum (Milwaukee, Wisconsin), Museum of Tomorrow (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil), Florida Polytechnic Building (Lakeland, Florida) and the Turning Torso Tower (Malmö, Sweden).

Few have ever considered what the Giardini—the park of national pavilions for the Art and Architecture Biennales in Venice—is like during the winter months. In light of the fact that, during their "off-season," the gardens are often left in a state of disrepair, RAAAF—a Dutch multidisciplinary studio based in Amsterdam, alongside architect Marcel Moonen—have proposed a series of installations in an attempt to "reclaim valuable public space" which sits at the heart of an often overcrowded city.

Next month, the AIA National Convention is heading to Philadelphia! As the premier architecture and design conference of the year, this is a can’t-miss event for those involved with the industry. If you haven’t yet purchased your pass, we’re offering a chance to attend free of charge!

reThink Wood is offering a full pre-paid pass to the 2016 AIA National Convention ($1,050 value) to one lucky ArchDaily reader. The winner will have the chance to meet with architects, engineers, academics and developers that are passionate about innovative design with wood.

To win, just answer the following question in the comments section before Friday, April 22 at 12:00 p.m. ET: Which mass timber building in the U.S. has most inspired you? 

A group of researchers from KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm has developed Optically Transparent Wood (TW), a new material that could greatly impact the way we develop our architectural projects. Published in the American Chemical Society's journal Biomacromolecules, the transparent timber is created through a process that removes the chemical lignin from a wood veneer, causing it to become very white. This white porous veneer is then impregnated with a transparent polymer, matching the optical properties of the individual cells and making the whole material translucent.

OMA has revealed the design for its first skyscraper in Tokyo. A tower with a torqued front-facade, the building incorporates an elevated park and access to a new Hibiya Line subway station in a project that mixes hotel, office, and retail components.

Videos

Photographer Laurian Ghinitoiu has captured the collaboration of the Swedish fashion retailer COS and Japanese architect Sou Fujimoto for this year's Salone del Mobile in Milan.

"In this installation for COS, I envisage to make a forest of light," said Fujimoto. "A forest which consists of countless light cones made from spotlights above. These lights pulsate and constantly undergo transience of state and flow. People meander through this forest, as if lured by the charm of the light. Light and people interact with one another, its existence defining the transition of the other."

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The curators of the Spanish Pavilion have revealed the selected material which will be exhibited at the 2016 Venice Biennale. The content is a response to Alejandro Aravena's thematic directive for the Biennale, entitled "Reporting from the Front," in which he invites each country to share experiences and moments of crisis that architecture has experienced in recent years.

Under the title "Unfinished," the projects selected by Iñaqui Carnicero and Carlos Quintans reveal the architects’ response to the economic and construction crisis in Spain over recent years, through virtues that can either become strategies or creative speculations, capable of "subverting the past condition into a positive contemporary action."

The following article was first published by Volume Magazine in their 47th issue, The System*. You can read the Editorial of this issue, How Much Does Your System Weigh?, here.

For the United Parcel Service (UPS), space is valued insofar as it grounds the socio-technical assemblages that secure the company’s economy of speed. Holding one of the largest airline fleets in the United States, UPS’s services range from delivering cargo for the US Air Force and e-commerce packages to relocating endangered animal species and partaking in disaster relief. It operationalizes logistics in the space between military and civilian domains and from the scale of cargo for large corporations to small packages for individuals. UPS runs a global logistics network that crosses more than 200 countries and territories and delivers about 17 million packages every day through its planetary ring of Shanghai-Shenzhen-Anchorage-Louisville-Cologne-Dubai.[1] It participates in the making of trans-border infrastructural systems and influences national politics towards the lifting of legal barriers to transnational trade. Yet what makes UPS significant is not its volume of shipment, infrastructural capacity, or magnitude of operational precision, but rather its resiliency and acute performance within the tides of uncertainty.

Created for the 2016 Milan Design Week, MAD Architects’ “Invisible Borders” installation is part of the “Open Borders” exhibition curated by Italian magazine Interni. Taking place in the traditional Cortile d’Onore courtyard of Università degli Studi di Milano, the installation is a canopy made from ribbons of ETFE in gradient colors, which has a lightness and flexibility that allows it to rustle in the wind and generate a subtle whistling sound. According to MAD, “The installation reflects the hues of the sky during the day, leaving glimpses of the columns and loggias. In the evening it becomes a luminous surface that brings the courtyard to live with new colors.”

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On April 2^nd, the jury of the 10^th Ibero-American Architecture and Urbanism Biennial DESPLAZAMIENTOS / DESLOCAMIENTOS met in Madrid to select the winner of the Ibero-American Award for Architecture and Urbanism.

ArchDaily is looking for motivated architecture lovers to join our team of interns for Summer 2016! An ArchDaily internship is a great opportunity to learn about our site and get exposed to some of the latest and most interesting ideas shaping architecture today.

Interested? Then check out the requirements below.

The Russian contribution to the 2016 Venice Biennale has been revealed to be "an account of how the V.D.N.H. (the 'Exhibition of Attainments of the National Economy’)—a unique complex in both scale and architecture—is being transformed into a multi-format cultural and educational space, accessible to all." Entitled V.D.N.H. Urban Phenomenon, the show will examine the park's global significance "given that the whole world is concerned by the question of how to develop society’s intellectual potential and how to create effective mechanisms for cultural assimilation." Following the Biennale, the exhibition will be permanently relocated to the V.D.N.H. in Moscow.

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