Architecture News: The Latest Architecture and News

The European Commission and the Mies van der Rohe Foundation has just announced the final five projects that will compete for the European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture, the Mies van der Rohe Award 2009. The winning building will be announced in May.

An amazing picture of the CCTV Building devastated by yesterdays fire was published in Gizmodo. Secrecy has sorrounded the whole event, but for now, the official story is that the Mandarin Oriental, located at the top of the building, caught fire from several fireworks set off to celebrate the Lantern Festival.

The Mandarin Hotel, adjacent to the CCTV building and part of the project, just got on fire today. The project, designed by OMA with facade studies by FRONT, looks to be completly affected as you can see on the above video. This supossedly started after fireworks during the last day of Chinese new year.

The hotel was used during the Olympics, but wasn´t officially opened yet, but was supossed to during 2009. This will definetely push dates back, as it seems like a complete loss to me.

Photos of the fire by Reuters here (very impressive, but can´t put them here because of copyright). More videos after the break.

UPDATE 5: Added 4 more videos

UPDATE 4: Statement from the Mandarin Hotel Group after the break

UPDATE 3: I replaced the first video with actual footage of the hotel starting to burn after the fireworks

UPDATE 2: Wonitata and other chinese blogs have impressive photos of the fire. See some more after the break.

UPDATE 1: Beijing police says the building could collapse

UPDATE: We just got the following statement from OMA:

An exhibition on the works of German architect Juergen Mayer H., entitled “Patterns of Speculation”, just opened at the SF MoMA. Mayer joins two modes of exhibiting architecture in a gallery – installation and documentation – to present a unique, hybrid environment.

Our dear friends over at CASE have been featured on Archinect´s Working out of the Box, a a series of features presenting architects who have applied their architecture backgrounds to alternative career paths. Personally, I don´t agree with this as I don´t feel that what they do is an “alternative” path, but something that should be into the core of any practice.

The Berlage Institute is offering, in conjunction with the Faculty of Architecture at the Delft University of Technology, a new three-year PhD Program in Architecture devoted to the study of how the form of the city can be theorized, represented, and projected. The program encourages speculations that take positions towards the city-at-large by questioning and using architectural knowledge itself. This knowledge of architectural forms and representations will be used to speculate about the city and its political, social, and cultural organization.

Schmidt hammer lassen architects (SHLA) has just received the MIPIM AR Future Project Award for their winning proposal for the Holbæk city harbour masterplan. The project includes a sports complex developed by the Danish Gymnastics and Sports Associations. The MIPIM AR prize is awarded once a year in various categories by the British magazine Architectural Review at the international property fair MIPIM in Cannes. The Holbæk project was nominated in the Mixed-use category. SHLA, were also awarded this prestigious prize in 2007 and 2008.

Our green friends at Inhabitat just featured a stunning new development set to break ground this month that will convert a desolate disused sand mine into a thriving environmental preserve and eco-resort. Replete with living walls and a five acre green roof, the development boasts an impressive list of green design elements and is working towards LEED Platinum certification. Now, saying that you’re the “Greenest Eco Resort” is quite a claim, but if the Resort builds out all that they have promised, it really will be the most environmentally friendly resort in the US, and possibly in the world.

The Open Architecture Challenge is an open, international design competition and is hosted every two years on the Open Architecture Network. This year, the challenge invites architects, designers, students, teachers and parents to propose the classroom of the future. Anyone can participate and the winner will receive $50,000 for their school.

The exhibition, that includes 120 architectural models, photographs, drawings, and videos, along with furniture and decorative arts enters its final weeks, and will end on April 5th.

Austria’s Federal Minister of Science and Research Johannes Hahn, City Councillor Rudolf Schicker (Department for Urban Development and Traffic) together with Vienna University and Budesimmobiliengesellschaft (BIG), have just announced the winning projects that will build the new campus of the Vienna University of Economics and Business.

We are architects, and during the last few years we have been reading and commenting on several architectural websites. As many of you do, we love to watch, learn and discuss about architecture online, with people from around the world. One day we decided to put all these sites together to get the whole picture on architectural sites, and then order them according to our likings. But in the meanwhile, we noticed it wasn’t that easy, because each one of us had different interests and approaches.  In our listings, several sites were repeated, but in different places.

So, we decided to find a way to make a standardized procedure to rank and order these sites. Then we noticed Michiel van Raaij at Eikonographia repeated the ranking he started in 2007, the MoPo (Most Popular Architectural Blogs). Although Michiel did a very accurate job, he restricted it to English blogs from individual authors, leaving out several of our favorite blogs from either foreign languages or multiple authors, and some other sitess that mix architecture with other related subjects (design, sustainability, trends, etc).

To expand this rank, we decided to put together some common criteria. The most logical criteria should be the amount of visitors, but this is almost impossible since most sites don’t publish these stats. But there are some other factors you can use to measure the relevance of a website: (a) Rank of websites based on an estimate of their traffic, by Alexa, (b) Google Page Rank and (c) and the frequency of the updates, an average of the entries published in the last 2 months (done by us). That´s how we came up with YAMoPo (Yet Another MoPo).