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Tourism: The Latest Architecture and News

Hidden Architectural Gems to Visit this Summer

Summer. Vacation. Two magic words that will certainly ease all the pain and exhaustion of working/studying full-time. Now that it is that time of year, most people are busy planning their travel itineraries. Whether it’s a city trip to Paris to see the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre, or a journey to walk on China’s Great Wall, the majority of travelers will choose to cross iconic landmarks off their bucket lists. However, there is a lot more to London than the London Bridge and Buckingham Palace, and there is a lot more to Barcelona than Gaudí. There are, in fact, hundreds of underrated, exquisite structures that go unnoticed.

If you are planning a getaway soon, here is a list of hidden architectural gems that are worth the visit.

Architecture City Guide: 15 Places Every Architect Should Visit in Córdoba, Argentina

Located in the central region of Argentina, the historic city of Córdoba is the second most populated city in the country; which means it can be considered an important center for culture, education, and finance. Its dense historic center is characterized by the presence of brick -a product of the work of Togo Díaz- and the particular landscape that links the urban with the natural, resulting in an exclusive atmosphere that invites us to walk its streets.

The characteristic culture of Córdoba is evident in its urban public spaces, its natural streams and its pedestrian areas; where one can appreciate the heterogeneity of classical, modern and contemporary architecture. Below is a list of 15 sites that every architect should visit.

Architecture City Guide: 10 Towns in Colombia That Every Architect Must Visit

Calm and silence prevail in many of the municipalities of Colombia, where the ochre colors intermingle with the green of the landscape to preserve the colonial styles that characterize some of the architectural typologies of the place. Small urban centers that hide an incomparable beauty are the main attraction for many tourists who today travel to know these obscure places, where one can go to learn a little of their traditions and their culture, creating an almost perfect adventure, where heritage value becomes a characteristic in common.

That is why we have chosen 10 Colombian towns that highlight both the physical-spatial value and the socio-cultural value.

This Curated List of Art Museums Showcases Buenos Aires’ Exhibition Architecture

Even in the age of instant information, museums enthrall us. Lining the tourist guidebooks of cities across the world, art museums are a must-see destination for visitors and locals alike. However, as our methods of communication and archiving change, driven by science and innovation, historic institutions such as art museums must keep up.

In cities around the world, art museums are redefining themselves to respond to the contemporary, experimental demands of the 21st-century. In Buenos Aires, the architecture of art museums showcases a diverse catalog of form, materiality and atmosphere, blending the instant, flexible demands of the modern age with a historic role of archiving some of humanity's most evocative works.

Below, we paint a picture of Buenos Aires' diverse art museums, showcasing the changing nature of exhibition architecture in one of the world’s most energetic cities.

Call for Papers: TAW 2018 International Scientific Conference

An integral and substantial component of TAW 2018, the International Scientific Conference aims at exploring contemporary research activities and design tactics that deal with the topic of co-habitation from different perspectives and within different fields of interest, directly or indirectly related to architecture, city, and landscape. Through the observation of different tactics adopted by researchers and professionals, the hope is to identify new research and design trajectories.

The World's Best Cities 2018

Ranking cities is a risky endeavor. How can one be objective and fair when this great earth and its 7.6 billion inhabitants would never come to anything close to a consensus? And yet global consulting firm Resonance Consultancy has taken on the challenge based on the opinions of the people they claim matter most: "a city's visitors and its residents."

Surveying the inhabitants and tourists about 23 different factors (that are then grouped into six key categories—Place, Product, Programming, People, Prosperity and Promotion), the methodology aims to be comprehensive in the ranking of quality of place and reputation. In the people category, for example, the surveyors looked at things like the immigration rate and diversity of a city, including number of Foreign-born Residents. Also taken into consideration was the amount of "stories" or "mentions" a city generates on web platforms like Facebook, Google and even TripAdvisor. And, most relevant to us architects, cities were scored on their quality of neighborhoods, landmarks and parks.

From Rio Londoneiro to Dubaris: 14 Iconic Destinations Reimagined As Hybrid Cities

From New York to Rome, London to Cape Town and beyond, these city mash-ups blend distinct architecture and attractions to create truly unique imagined destinations. Expedia recently launched a series of campaigns that would inspire travelers by showcasing destinations from different perspectives and unique angles. They took 14 famous cities and combined their architectural DNA into 7 unique hybrid, mash-up cities.

Reimagine the New York State Canal System

The New York Power Authority and the New York State Canal Corporation launched a competition seeking ideas to shape the future of the New York State Canal System, a 524-mile network composed of the Erie Canal, the Oswego Canal, the Cayuga-Seneca Canal, and the Champlain Canal. Selected ideas will be awarded a total of $2.5 million toward their implementation.

Architecture Guide to Montevideo: 15 Sites That Every Architect Should Visit

There are a number of reasons to visit the architecture of Montevideo: the coastal city is the result of a complex interaction of historical factors that provided multiple trends and architectural styles, currently coexisting at par. Its streets and buildings tell the story of its past.

The city´s architectural sites are easily found walking around Ciudad Vieja (Old Town) or in the renowned Rambla. Below is a list of 15 sites that every architect should know of and visit.

Tourist Center of Anlong Limestone Resort / 3andwich Design / He Wei Studio

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Southwest Guizhou Autonomous Prefecture, China

Open Call: Sustainable Tourism is Possible - International Ideas for Guanajuato, Mexico

This competition wants to obtain international ideas proposed by students and profesionals (architects, designers, engineers, business planners and others) for the future of 3 contexts of the Mexican State of Guanajuato.

We are looking for local solution, but with an innovative and global vision about this strong topic of the Sustainable Tourism for Development.
The United Nations have declared the 2017 the year of the Sustainable Tourism for Developmen and the UN agency UNWTO (United Nation World Tourism Organization) is participating to the 10 YFP with the Sustainable Tourism Programe. But why all this importance to the topic of tourism?

"Faith Estates" Proposes a New Approach to Religious Pilgrimage by Excavating Holy Sites

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Machaerus religious development. Image © Akarachai Padlom, Eleftherios Sergios, Nasser Alamadi

In a time of what seems to be ever-increasing religious and political conflict, Bartlett students Akarachai Padlom, Eleftherios Sergios, and Nasser Alamadi instead chose to focus on collaboration between religions in their thesis project entitled “Faith Estates,” which outlines a new method of mass religious tourism. In an area around the Dead Sea characterized by disputed boundaries and conflicting ownership claims, the group aims to reimagine the relationship between the world’s three monotheistic religions, but also to rethink the relationship between religion, tourism, and the landscape. The design consists of large-scale excavation sites which form tourist resorts along a pilgrimage route with the goal of forming a mutually beneficial relationship.

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Riverside Urban Hackathon 2017

Influence the future of Riverside, CA by merging design & tech to positively impact tourism in the city.
#RUH17

10 Design Unveils Masterplan for Mediterranean Development Along Egypt’s Coast

International Architecture office 10 Design has released their first images of their Jefaira Seafront Development along Egypt’s North Coast. Spanning 550 hectares, the site stretches 3km along the Mediterranean coastline. The project is in collaboration with INERTIA, one of Egypt’s prominent real-estate developers leading various luxury residential and commercial developments across the country.

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Alvar Aalto Foundation Breaks All-Time Record for Number of Visitors in 2016

Last year saw the Alvar Aalto Foundation experience a record-breaking number of visitors at each of its four sites – a total of 42,755 as opposed to the 36,744 people that toured the sites in 2015.

Of those numbers, The Alvar Aalto Museum and the Muuratsalo Experimental House in Jyväskylä received a total of 20,005 visitors combined, half of which had arrived from outside of Finland to explore the Museum, while also continuing the recent trend of an increasing number of visits over the past five years.

The Noble Simplicity of Peter Zumthor's Allmannajuvet Zinc Mine Museum

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© Aldo Amoretti

After previously documenting the Bruder Klaus Field Chapel, photographer Aldo Amoretti once again captures the grounded simplicity of Peter Zumthor, this time with images of his Allmannajuvet Zinc Mine Museum in Sauda, Norway. The three-building campus calls upon the aesthetics of the country's abandoned zinc mines from the 1800s, evoking the toilsome labor of the workers in its rough stone and exposed joint work. The museum is situated on one of Norway's National Tourist Routes and was commissioned by the state as part of an effort to increase tourism in the region. As such, the buildings are poised in and above the landscape, providing views of the natural gorge that unfold as visitors move through Zumthor's dark, shaftlike interiors.

Amoretti's photos express the modesty of the project, from the blackness of the interior galleries to the thin stilts that support the buildings within their rocky surroundings. The museum structures are suspended in balance with the harsh, gray climate—a noble representation of the working conditions of the miners the project aims to memorialize.

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How Combining Social Housing with Tourism Could Help Solve Havana’s Housing Crisis

The largest of the Caribbean islands, Cuba is a cultural melting pot of over 11 million people, combining native Taíno and Ciboney people with descendants of Spanish colonists and African slaves. Since the 1959 revolution led by Fidel Castro, the country has been the only stable communist regime in the Western hemisphere, with close ties to the Soviet Union during the Cold War and frosty relationship with its nearby neighbor, the United States, that has only recently begun to thaw. While the architecture in the capital city of Havana reflects the dynamic and rich history of the area, after the revolution Havana lost its priority status and government focus shifted to rural areas, and the buildings of Havana have been left to ruin ever since. Iwo Borkowicz, one of three winners of the 2016 Young Talent Architecture Award, has developed a plan that could bring some vibrancy, and most importantly some sustainability, back to Havana, the historic core of the city.

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TEC Designs Artisanal Shopping and Cultural Center in Quito, Ecuador

Taller EC (TEC) has released the plans for the Plaza Artesanal Reina Victoria, a cultural project located in the northern, central part of Quito, Ecuador. Situated in front of a traditional artisan’s market, the new proposal consists of a set of autonomous pieces of different sizes connected by an interior plaza.