This guide outlines how to implement structured templates effectively, maintain design quality, and support firm-wide governance.

Competition platform matterbetter has announced the winners of its Syria: Post-War Housing Competition for architectural students and professionals. The competition, initiated earlier this year, called for solutions to the housing scarcity crisis in Syria, “which will affect the country as more and more cities of the war-torn country will be freed and refugees will start to come back.”

With refugee camps around Europe and other countries in generally poor conditions, and Syrian towns in ruins, one solution to the housing crisis becomes the creation of living conditions that are attractive for once-displaced Syrians to return. The competition asked for a new housing concept that would be able to permanently accommodate people in need of a new home and new life in Syria.

Out of 245 submissions, matterbetter selected three winners, each of which was awarded a cash prize, there were also nine honorable mentions.

The winners of the Syria: Post-War Housing Competition are:

ODA New York has released plans for “West Half,” a mixed-use development for the Capitol Riverfront neighborhood of Washington, D.C., that will offer residents views into baseball games at the adjacent Nationals Park. The 11-story building will also feature two floors of retail space and community amenities as it becomes a new visual complement to the neighboring cultural landmark.

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The office of Peter Zumthor has released new renderings of their design for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s $600 million new home on Museum Row in Los Angeles. The images provide the first look into the museum interior and gallery spaces, and present the museum in its nearly-finalized design. From this point, Zumthor has stated, "it is only going to be small alterations."

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Videos

UPDATE: We have added new night photos of the i360 as the ‘breathing’ lighting has been switched on for the first time. The lights were designed by Do-Architecture and can be programmed to display a range of color and pattern options.

David Marks of Marks Barfield Architects, explains, “The concept for the lighting at the top of the tower is that it ‘breathes’, gently increasing and decreasing in intensity at the average rate of a human being breathing at rest.”

The world’s tallest moving observation tower, British Airways i360, will open to the public this Thursday, August 4th. Designed by Marks Barfield Architects, the firm behind the iconic London Eye, the i360 tower will transport 200 visitors at a time up 138 meters to take in views of the city of Brighton and Hove, the Sussex coast and the English Channel. With a height to width ratio of more than 40:1, the structure was also designated as the most slender tower in the world by the Guinness Book of World Records after topping out in February.

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JR is an anonymous artist who owns the biggest art gallery in the world. His exhibits are available on the streets, free of charge catching the attention of people who are not typical museum visitors. His work is thought provoking and mixes art and act.

JR is known worldwide for projects such as Portrait of a Generation (2006), Women Are Heroes (2008), and Face 2 Face (2007). The latter is a piece which through portraits of people made with a wide angle lens, printed in large scale and pasted on city walls was able to generate a reaction from the public.

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Getting new work is critical to an architecture firm’s success. Unfortunately, it is very difficult (if not impossible) to get new work with fees that are commensurate with the amount of time that the job would require, especially if you are in a small firm. To start, our clients don’t often value the services we provide, and we don’t help the situation by constantly lowering fees just to get the work. Sure, we can play the game of limiting the services provided, giving a long list of exclusions (with the hope of getting Additional Services later), and doing less drawing... we all do it. Not surprisingly, the product suffers, and this gives the client even more reason to devalue architectural services. Yes, we need the work, and we do what it takes—but to what end?

The second annual Z-Axis Conference, organised by the Charles Correa Foundation, will center on the notion of Buildings As Ideas. Held in the western Indian city of Goa at the Kala Academy, one of Correa's later projects, the conference is a tribute to his memory and belief that "buildings are ideas that manifest and take form." Jean Pierre Crousse, of Lima-based practice Barclay & Crousse, will open the conference with the keynote address; other international speakers include Camilo Rebelo, Ilze Wolff, Yung Ho Chang, Dick van Gameren and ArchDaily's James Taylor-Foster.

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Videos

Online model sharing site Sketchfab last week announced three new features intended to solidify its position as one of the web's foremost platforms for sharing VR-viewable 3D models online. Originally launched in January of this year, the virtual reality features of Sketchfab's platform have proven to be popular and has even led to Sketchfab being referred to as "the Youtube of VR."

However, with its initial launch Sketchfab's VR capabilities clearly privileged simplicity and a low barrier for entry—the platform was viewable using just a smartphone web browser and basic VR headset such as Google Cardboard, and models required no extra work to make them VR compatible. As a result, Sketchfab's VR platform lacked the features of more high-end systems of viewing VR. With their latest update, Sketchfab has added useful features while keeping barriers to entry low.

Photographer and filmmaker Joe Capra, known for Scientifantastic, filmed and produced the video '10328x7760 - The 10K Demo', which is exactly what the title implies, a timelapse video resolution in 10K of the city of Rio de Janeiro. For those who are not familiar with the technical specifications, this resolution is about 10 times higher than the traditional Full HD (1920 x 1080px), which is the maximum resolution of most monitors sold today.

Czech-Republic-based firm Zavoral Architekt (ZA) has unveiled its proposal for Palach Museum, a museum and memorial to Jan Palach in Vsetaty, Czech Republic.

Videos

The notion of the "Primitive Hut" has been part of the architectural discourse for decades; indeed, history suggests that it provided the Ancient Greeks with direct inspiration for Doric Order. But how do you build a wattle and daub hut, or create tiled roof, or develop primitive underfloor heating—all from scratch—today?

A few years ago, Chinese company Shenzhen Huashi Future Parking Equipment envisioned a unique solution to address congestion issues spurred by rapid population growth in many of China’s cities: a straddling bus that would bypass traffic by simply driving over top of it. The design captured the attention of people worldwide, though many were skeptical the idea could ever come to fruition. But now, that pipe dream has become a reality.

In this interview, presented in collaboration with PLANE—SITE, Frédéric Bonnet of Obras Architecture and Grichka Martinetti of PNG, curators of the French contribution to the 2016 Venice Biennale, discuss their commitment to celebrating meaningful architecture in various contexts, and the ways in which this passion was translated into their exhibition. The duo explains the concepts driving the exhibition design, including their choice to exhibit small-scale work from throughout France rather than focusing on the large, high-profile architecture found in the major cities.

International firm Benoy has unveiled Kavanagh Street, its competition proposal for a mixed-use tower development in Melbourne, Australia.

Set back on the banks of the Yarra River in the Southbank precinct, Benoy’s design is a five-building set or a “family of towers” on a shared nine-story mixed-use podium, all of which would host 315,000 square meters of residential, hospitality, commercial and retail space.

In the past few weeks, the fates of two classic Brutalist buildings by architect Marcel Breuer were determined – with differing results. For the Atlanta Central Library, it was good news, as the Fulton County Board of Commissioners voted unanimously to support the renovation of the building, saving it from the wrecking ball. Meanwhile, the American Press Institute in Reston, Virginia, was not so lucky, as Fairfax County’s board of supervisors voted to tear down the building to make room for a new a townhouse development project.

Architectural Record has released the latest edition of its annual list of the “Top 300 Architecture Firms” in the United States, based on architectural revenue from the previous year (2015). Gensler, which became the first firm to surpass $1 billion in revenue in 2014, held on to the top spot with earnings of $1,181,030,000 in 2015. Los Angeles-based AECOM maintained its number 2 position after a revenue increase of more than 30 percent, making it the largest publicly traded company in the LA area. Perkins+Will continued their steady climb up the list, finishing at number 3.

See the top 50 after the break.

Since 2015, Gramazio Kohler Research has been in the process of developing "Mesh Mould Metal," a project that studies the unification of concrete reinforcement and formwork into a single, robotically fabricated material system. The project is based on their first phase of research, Mesh Mould, which spanned from 2012 to 2014, and developed a robotic extrusion process for a polymer mesh.

Now, as a second phase, Mesh Mould Metal “focuses on the translation of the structurally weak polymer-based extrusion process into a fully load-bearing construction system” by replicating the process in metal. Specifically, the current research delves into the development of "a fully automated bending and welding process for meshes fabricated from 3-millimeter steel wire."

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