Encouraging and valuing those who work to preserve the country's cultural heritage is also one of the core missions of the National Institute of Historic and Artistic Heritage (Iphan). With this in mind, one of Iphan's main initiatives to recognize efforts to preserve Brazilian Cultural Heritage is the Rodrigo Melo Franco de Andrade Award, which is now open for applications. Established in 1987 to recognize actions to protect, preserve, and promote Brazilian Cultural Heritage, the award is now in its 31st edition and was named in honor of the institution's first director.

"The Well" is set to be one of the most ambitious urban developments Toronto has seen. Estimated to host nearly 10,000 people living and working daily, "The Well" includes over 1.5 million square feet of retail, office space and food services, as well as 1,800 residential units all spread throughout seven buildings flanked by Front, Spadina and Wellington in downtown Toronto.

A lot of things are said about Smiljan Radic. Some say that he belongs to an architecture that borders on the sculptural. It is also said that both his aesthetic and his silence is admired by his peers. It is also said that he is so hermetic that he doesn’t even have a website to promote his work. All these things are said about the 52 years old Chilean architect, before he starts his talk "more or less a year," at the Puerto de Ideas Festival in Valparaíso (Chile), where he reviews his latest projects.

"Saying something -and saying something else- has always seemed impossible or very difficult for me. I always collect things from everywhere. And that's what I do. There isn’t much more to it than that: there is little invention. In spite of everything, one has to end up talking, saying things. And today we are going to talk about what I could and could not do in the past year", he says at the beginning of his talk at the Cousiño Palace in Valparaíso.

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This week we present a selection of the best images of brick houses published on our site. These 11 Mexican projects reveal the diversity of expression that architects in the country have achieved through creative arrangements of the brick modules. read on for a selection of images from prominent photographers such as Carlos Berdejo Mandujano, Onnis Luque, and Patrick Lopez.

In their latest video from the Time-Space-Existence series, PLANE—SITE features acclaimed conceptual artist Lawrence Weiner and his ideas regarding the relationship between people and material objects, language as a gesture, and making art accessible to the public. Lawrence Weiner is known for his typographical art applied onto elements of the built environment, and he describes how architecture itself can become an alternative space to present art.

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Arquitetura Soteropolitana is an open course of on-site architectural experiences led by the projects' designers, exploring the architectural production of the last 20 years in Salvador, Bahia. Organized by architectural photographer Manuel Sá, the course invites architects from the Bahian capital to discuss some of the city's most iconic and significant works built over the past two decades.

Japan-based Moriyuki Ochiai Architects have designed a cluster of tea rooms located in a rural area known as Bisei, in the Okayama Prefecture. This town is known as both the place where green tea was introduced to Japan and as a "sanctuary for stargazing", which inspired the firm's design to create a strong connection between the tea rooms and the surrounding scenery.

As part of our 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale coverage we present Public Without Rhetoric the proposal for the Portuguese Pavilion. Below, curators Nuno Brandão Costa and Sérgio Mah describe their contribution in their own words.

Public Without Rhetoric is the project selected to represent Portugal at the 16th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia. The curators Nuno Brandão Costa and Sérgio Mah propose a tour of the “Public Building” of Portuguese origin through 12 works created at a time when Western Europe is confronted with its limits and possibilities and as architecture manifests its nonconformist nature in reinforcing its role in political and social intervention.

Videos

This week, the latest edition of Concéntrico, the Logroño Architecture and Design Festival in Spain, came to a close. For the second consecutive year, we have participated in this initiative, which invites residents and visitors to discover and rediscover spaces of interest in the city's historic center. Over five days, a series of temporary installations by creators from around the world became resting places for pilgrims, urban stages for enjoying a glass of wine, and adventure playgrounds for local children.

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Conversatorio FA is a project born out of the desire to create a space for reflection on contemporary thought, aiming to foster a dialogue enriched by diverse perspectives within these very spaces. It seeks to reclaim various spaces and generate new questions and inquiries through critical and pluralistic thinking in open university areas, fostering democratic dialogue on topics chosen based on student interests.

The structure of Conversatorio FA seeks to bring external guests closer to the community, establishing connections and raising new questions about the future of the profession. Past guests have included renowned figures such as Alberto Pérez Gómez, Néstor García Canclini, and, most recently, Carlos Amorales. As part of its eighth edition, an event was held focusing on gender perspective in architecture. It featured Argentine architect Inés Moisset, coordinator of the project "Un día, una arquitecta," and Zaida Muxí, author of several publications on gender perspectives and co-director of the Master's Laboratory of 21st Century Housing at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia.

International master planning and architecture specialists, Benoy won the bid for Shanghai's 367,000 square meters Yuqiao Science Innovation Centre. This technological hub will work towards Shanghai's goal to be a world-class city by 2040.

Videos

This project emerged during the summer of 2015, when CHOPEkE Collective, together with Paúl Pérez, a seminarian and active member of the group, visited the community of Santa Luisa de Marillac, located in the central periphery of Ciudad Juárez. At the time, members of the community had an "unworthy" space -as they called it- for their meetings and spiritual activities.

IND Architects has plans to transform the symbolic Shcherbinka water tower in Moscow, Russia into a revitalized area for residents to socialize. Since the water tower has been only slightly altered over time with the overall form and silhouette remaining the same, the design team has decided to create a place that will both aim to recall old memories and create new ones.

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Videos

Andrés Arochi directed a video that portrays dancing bodies experiencing the space of the Luis Barragán House and Studio, a site in Mexico City famous for the introspective quality of its gardens and the characteristic mysticism of the Mexican architect. Regarding the video Dancing through the Architecture of Luis Barragán, Arochi comments:

When we started recording, the magic began to happen. Light burst through the window and the dancers' bodies began to flow in an unexpected way.

Not many architects will come across the challenge of building in outer space, but who knows what the future will hold... asteroid mining and space photobioreactors? In a recent article, Metropolis Magazine looks into the design of the International Space Station, examining how our conventional rules of architecture become obsolete in zero gravity. Walls, ceilings, and floors can be interchangeable, and "form follows function" is taken to the extreme.

2018 marks 20 years since construction first began on the International Space Station. The satellite is made up of 34 separate pieces, each of which was either delivered by space shuttle or self-propelled into space. With absolutely no room for error, the 13-year construction of the space station was perhaps one of the big success stories of the millennium, seeing 230 astronauts, cosmonauts and space-tourists visit over the past two decades.

The well-known saying “all roads lead to Rome” seems to be true--at least, that’s what Moovel Lab, a team from Stuttgart dedicated to urban mobility research, points out. Titled "Roads to Rome," the project has mapped out over-land routes across Europe that converge to the city.

From a grid of 26,503,452 square kilometers covering all of Europe, the researchers defined 486,713 starting points that were superimposed on the continent's street map. Then an algorithm was developed for the project that calculated the shortest route between each of the points and the Italian capital. 

The tragedy of the fire and collapse of the Wilton Paes de Almeida building in downtown São Paulo prompts this statement from the Council of Architecture and Urbanism of Brazil on the social and urban challenges affecting not only the state capital but most of the country's major cities.

At the core of this tragedy is the social drama of the victims' families and the thousands of people living in other occupied buildings under precarious conditions across major Brazilian urban centers. The loss of a modernist building of cultural value adds another layer of loss.      

By 2020, an innovation campus with offices and laboratories for young companies in the high-tech field will be developed in Suzhou, the eastern Chinese metropolis. The total of 330,000 square meters of gross floor area is provided in five building clusters of different sizes, which are arranged offset from each other around a park and lake landscape. In the spring of 2018, the design by Architects von Gerkan, Marg and Partners (gmp) and WES landscape architects won first prize in the competition for the project.

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Landmarks Illinois has released new images of a proposed radical extension to the James R, Thompson Center in Chicago. The images seek to portray the building’s versatility to be privately redeveloped as a mixed-use hub, featuring an eye-catching “super tower” at the southwest corner of the site, as proposed by the scheme’s original architect Helmut Jahn.

The new images follow on from a previous story we covered last year, detailing a 110-story tower proposed by Jahn in response to local plans to demolish the postmodern building. The latest images underlie a similar goal of demonstrating the potential for the Thompson Center to be protected and expanded, in response to its listing on the Most Endangered Historic Places in Illinois in 2017 and 2018. The Postmodernist piece lies in a precarious situation, with an administrative interest in selling the building and replacing it a high-rise development.

Last Thursday, Iphan—the National Institute of Historic and Artistic Heritage—announced the third public competition for permanent positions in the institution's history. Authorized by the Ministry of Planning, Budget, and Management, the competition will fill 411 permanent positions nationwide: 104 for Analyst I, 176 for Technician I, and 131 for Institutional Assistant I.

Amanda Levete is among one of four teams to be shortlisted for a competition to reimagine the visitor experience for the famous Eiffel Tower in Paris. The four teams, chosen from 42 entries, will be tasked with rethinking the ways in which people discover and interact with the tower, working in collaboration with the City of Paris government.

Titled “Discover, Approach, Visit,” the competition site covers 54 hectares of land on both sides of the River Seine, with the Eiffel Tower site located at the center. In preparation for Paris’ hosting of the 2024 Olympic Games, the competition asks teams to spend 10 months exploring how to enhance the visitor experience at the base of the tower, strengthen existing connections across the site, reconfigure public transport routes.

KTK-BELT Studio, a not-for-profit organization based in rural Nepal, is currently working with local communities to create a fascinating "Vertical University," which will teach students about biodiversity and environmental conservation in 6 "living classrooms" positioned along a vertical forest corridor that stretches from 67 meters above sea level to the top of an 8,856-meter peak. These 6 stops encapsulate the 5 climatic zones of Eastern Nepal: tropical, subtropical, temperate, subarctic and arctic.

The project explores the specific impacts of climate change in each climatic zone, creating “classrooms” where students can walk from Koshi Tappu to Mt. Kanchenjunga, the third tallest peak in the world, and learn onsite from indigenous farmers about the biological diversity of each area. By teaching place-based skills in these micro-conservation hubs, the project aims to conserve and activate local knowledge. Each of these “classrooms” responds to the visual and cultural cues of its unique landscape, with one campus focusing on a flood-proof design in a heavy monsoon area, and another mimicking the semi-nomadic lifestyle of local yak-herders.

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The Maison d'Architecture of Geneva is celebrating ten years of activity, and to mark the occasion, it has organized a lecture series titled "10 Years/10 Perspectives" running from 2017 to the present. Renowned architects such as Steven Holl, Kengo Kuma, and Elizabeth Diller were part of the select panel of speakers.

To conclude the celebrations, a previously unseen and exclusive exhibition of the work of Brazilian architect Paulo Mendes da Rocha will be held with the support of the Brazilian Consulate in Geneva.

Three award-winning architecture firms, Lemay, Perkins+Will, and Bisson Fortin, will design a new 67-km sustainable system of light-rail train stations for one of North America’s largest public transportation projects, the Réseau Express Métropolitain (REM) in Montreal. This system of train stations will be designed as part of NouvLR General Partnership’s recently won contract and will connect Montréal-Trudeau International Airport with the city’s downtown area, as well as the north and south shores of the region.