Awarded Competitions: The Latest Architecture and News

After an international design competition, sports venue specialists HOK and Barcelona-based TAC Arquitectes have been selected to design the new 10,000 seat arena for FC Barcelona, the New Palau Blaugrana. Replacing the old arena which was built in 1971, the building is estimated to open for the 2019-2020 FC Barcelona Lassa basketball season. The redevelopment of the Palau Blaugrana is part of a larger scheme by the football team to refresh their entire campus - including the famous Camp Nou stadium for which a shortlist including BIG, Populous and HKS was announced in September, with a winner expected to be announced in March. Read on for the architects' description of their Palau Blaugrana design.

Santiago Calatrava has won an international competition to design a "landmark" observation tower in Dubai Creek Harbor. Selected over five other proposals, the design was inspired by Islamic architecture with the intention to "fuse modern, sustainable design with the rich culture and heritage of the United Arab Emirates."

“This architectural wonder will be as great as the Burj Khalifa and the Eiffel Tower,” said Sheikh Mohammed, Vice President and Prime Minister of the United Arab Emirates.

The Boston Society of Architects/AIA (BSA) has announced the winners of the 2015 BSA Design Awards. Awards were presented in eight categories for accomplishments in interior design, campus and urban panning, and unbuilt projects, among others.

The winners of the 2015 BSA Design Awards are:

Parisian architect Clément Blanchet of cBA has revealed his shortlisted proposal for the Pershing site in the Réinventer.paris competition. The competition sought designs to revive 23 sites throughout the city of Paris, giving designers the power to rethink and reshape the way Parisians live, work and play. All 23 winning projects were announced last week, with a design by Sou Fujimoto selected for the Pershing plot.

The overall strategy of the Pershing area involves linking La Défense with the central business district of Greater Paris, utilizing the under-used space between Porte Maillot and the Porte des Ternes next to the Palais des Congrès de Paris. cBA’s proposal involves covering the Parisian ring, creating a metropolitan space next to the convention centre at Pershing Square. The proposal, titled “Re-Invention”, creates urbanity, using the project’s size to reveal and discover the layers of history present in the city. From this history, the city is reborn, creating a new “cultural center of production”.

“In “réinventer paris” I was thinking about reinventing something which has vanished,” said Clément Blanchet.

Réinventer.paris has announced the 23 winners chosen to develop architectural projects in Paris, including designs by Sou Fujimoto, David Chipperfield, and DGT Architects. Réinventer.paris is an urban initiative launched to give designers the power to rethink and reshape the way that Parisians live, work, and play. Located on various sites chosen by Mayor Anne Hidalgo, each project successfully creates a sense of liveliness and embodies what the future of Paris might be. The call for submissions was answered with ideas about innovation, cutting edge-solutions to environmental problems, and intelligent design.

Strelka KB has announced two Russia-based design teams, Timur Bashkayev Architectural Bureau and BuroMoscow, as the winners of the design competition for two Moscow metro stations. The stations, Nizhniye Mnevnik and Terekhovo, are both located to the northwest of the capital. These two new stations, which include designs for an outdoor pavilion, a street underpass, a ticket booth and a street underpass, will extend the Moscow Metro network and are expected to be fully functioning in 2018.

Moscow’s Chief Architect Sergey Kuznetsov has announced the winners of the Open All-Russia Competition for a Concept of Redevelopment of two modernist cinema theaters: Varshava and Voskhod. An initiative of ADG Group, in collaboration with the Committee on Architecture and Urban Planning of Moscow City, the competition awarded one winner for the Voskhod theater, and two winners for the Varshava theater. The organizer of the competition is the agency for strategic development "CENTER."

Mexico City-based Escobedo Soliz Studio has been named the winner of MoMA and MoMA PS1's annual Young Architects Program (YAP) in New York - now in its 17th edition. Selected over four other finalists, the winning project, Weaving the Courtyard is “neither an object nor a sculpture standing in the courtyard, but a series of simple, powerful actions that generate new and different atmospheres," says the architect. It will serve as a "temporary urban landscape" for the 2016 Warm Up summer music series in MoMA PS1’s outdoor courtyard.

"Weaving the Courtyard is a site-specific architectural intervention using the courtyard’s concrete walls to generate both sky and landscape, with embankments in which platforms of soil and water suggest the appearance of a unique topography," says MoMA.

A group of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) engineering students has won the first round of a competition to design transport "pods" for Elon Musk's ultra-fast Hyperloop. Selected from more than 100 other university teams, the top teams will now have the opportunity to build their pods for a trial run on the Hyperloop Test Track (now under construction) by April 2016. If successful, the pods will be able to transport up to 30 people at speeds of 700 miles-per-hour through the Hyperloop's 12-foot diameter tube.

Bee Breeders has announced the winners of their Baltic Way Memorial architecture competition. The competition sought to create a reminder of the impact of the 1989 Baltic Way, a peaceful demonstration that occurred when people across three Baltic countries joined hands to form a human chain stretching more than 600 kilometers. Each entry was judged on how successfully it both drew on the seriousness of the Baltic Way event, while simultaneously representing a hope for the future. The jury evaluated all entries on a number of criteria including clarity and strength of concept, originality, quality of work, appropriateness to context and scale, and its strength as a public symbol to memorialize the event.

A design for a pavilion constructed out of recycled clothes hangers has been selected as the winner of the sixth annual City of Dreams Pavilion Competition. The temporary structure will be built on Governors Island and available to the public for summer 2016, pending final approval and fundraising.

Hosted by FIGMENT, the Emerging New York Architects Committee (ENYA) of the American Institute of Architects New York Chapter (AIANY), and the Structural Engineers Association of New York (SEAoNY), the competition speculates on possible futures with solutions to the current strain on economic and natural resources. Designers are required to consider their materials from sourcing to disposal, or ideally, reuse, promoting sustainable thinking.

Over 100 design proposals were submitted, and the jury selected four finalists who were each given a month to further develop their designs in response to jury comments. See the winning design and the three finalists after the break.

The Library of Congress has announced the winners of the 2015 Holland Prize, which recognizes the best single-sheet, measured drawing of a historic building, site, or structure, completed to the standards of the Historic American Building Survey (HABS), Historic American Engineering Record (HAER), or the Historic American Landscapes Survey (HALS).

MOBO Architects has won the Colombian Society of Architects’ (SCA) public competition to design an institutional building for the department for social integration in the city of Bogotá.

Dublin-based heneghan peng Architects has won a competition to design the Canadian Canoe Museum in Peterborough, Ontario. Chosen over four other shortlisted proposals, heneghan peng's winning design "embraces aboriginal wisdom to live and build lightly on the land," says the Museum, by "organically" integrating an elongated glass pavilion topped with a two-acre rooftop garden alongside the Trent-Severn waterway.

The practice will work with local firm Kearns Mancini Architects to realize the $45-million building. It is planned to rise on the city's 1904 Peterborough Lift Lock National Historic Site by 2020 and house the world's largest collection of canoes and kayaks.

According to the jury, the heneghan peng/Kearns Mancini team "stood out from the other submissions as the design works organically with the land rather than overwhelming it."

HENN has won first place in the competition to design Kingdee Tower, the headquarters for software company Kingdee in Shenzhen, China. The 44-story glazed tower will be the central building for the new headquarters, rising from an irregular pentagon plan situated between two existing nine-story blocks.

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