With last year’s opening of the 9/11 Memorial at Ground Zero and the near-completion of the World Trade Center One, Daniel Libeskind’s vision for the World Trade Center site is close to presenting the future of NYC’s downtown financial center, 11 years after the attacks. Studio Daniel Libeskind was selected to develop the master plan for the site in 2003, and since has been coordinating with NYC’s numerous agencies and individual architects to rebuild the site. The project, in Libeskind’s words, is a “healing of New York”, a “site of memory” and “a space to witness the resilience of America”.

Follow us after the break for more on the elements and progress of the master plan.

3-D Printing technology is developing at quickening pace as both engineers and architects experiment with its technological and social potential. Consider Enrico Dini’s D-Shape printer that prints large scale stone structures out of sand and an inorganic binder or Neri Oxman’s research at MIT which involves a 3-D printing arm and nozzles that can print with a variety of different materials, from concrete to recycled plastic.

Dutch firm DUS Architects, in collaboration with Ultimaker Ltd, Fablab Protospace, and Open Coop, have added another 3-D printing machine to the list known as KamerMaker, the room builder. KamerMaker is the world’s first mobile 3d printer and has the ability to print “rooms” that are up to 11 feet high and 7 feet wide. The machine was unveiled at OFF PICNIC, a precursor to Amsterdam’s annual PICNIC technology festival.

Join us after the break for more.

Architects: Mestura Arquitectes Location: Lleida, Spain Project Year: 2010 Photographs: Jordi Clariana, David Capellas, Francesco Soppelsa

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As part of the masterplan, ‘Bassin a Flots’ designed by ANMA/Nicolas Michelin, Barcode Architects and Habiter Autrement recently presented the Pôle de Compétences (Center for New Businesses). The 7,000m2 project will be a part of the masterplan, which aims on a phased transformation of the present introvert industrial harbor area into a new lively precinct with an urban mixture of living, working, and recreation. The slender 90 meter long and 21 meter tall building presents itself as a pure monolith volume stretching out over the entire length of the site. More images and architects’ description after the break.

The Thailand Pavilion, titled “Common Collage”, presents 100 ideas that can provide people with a common ground. The exhibition, curated by Apiradee Kasemsook, Nuttinee Karnchanarporn and Tonkao Panin, presents 40 boxes of equal size, volume and weight. The boxes were designed by different Thai architecture firms, designers, lecturers and students. Each one intends to speak within its own logic.

See more pictures of the Thailand Pavilion after the break

Designed by Cannon Design, the expansion of the University of California Riverside (UCR) Recreation Center will provide additional fitness and activity spaces integrating with the existing building and site creating a unified recreation complex. Located at the north boundary of the main campus within the natural Arroyo Zone, the design also includes views to the Box Springs Mountains to the east. The building is scheduled to open in 2014. More images and architects’ description after the break.

Serving as a backstage area for artists who perform at the Olympic Hall in Munich, the business area can be booked for conferences, meetings, seminars and other events. In order to meet established requirements calling for variable use of the business area, pfarré lighting design created a system which is as effective when the area has no partitions as when it is subdivided into separate areas. More images and their description after the break.

The HARDWARE SOFTCORE Installation, designed by Gabriele Falconi, is directed to the interaction of the viewer, to his involvement, even physical, as an actor aware of choices and paths. Of monumental size, its modular installation was born from the idea of using the standard scaffolding system, which is made of shiny galvanized steel, repeating and assembling in vertical and horizontal direction.“The use of construction element, the simplest, declined to unusual, different, ambiguous shapes. For a skeleton of a large lizard, a cathedral with many naves, an interstellar starship. All that is involved here is multiple and transforms itself, starting from temporary basis to monumental forms, contradicting its premises. And finding its attractive side in construction hardware.” – Falconi. More images and architects’ description after the break.

The St. James’s Market development, designed by Make Architects, is a key area in central London that will be reinvigorated if the plans, on behalf of The Crown Estate, are approved. As one of The Crown Estate’s flagship sites, the St. James’s Market project entails the redevelopment of six buildings to the south of Piccadilly Circus bounded by Jermyn Street, Haymarket and Regent Street. With much of the newly configured site being ‘traffic free’, the site will be divided around significant public realm improvements to include a new public square. More images and architects’ description after the break.

C+S Architects‘ contribution, Facecity, for the 2012 Venice Biennale, gives form to the idea of the curator, Fulvio Irace, of continuity in architecture. The exhibition reconsiders the architecture of Milan in the 50s and 60s, where architects, belonging to different generations and with different positions, built the identity of the city without giving up their personal poetics.

The central topic of this thought is the facade, commented by Alberto Savinio in Ascolto il tuo cuore città, 1945: ” …On the facade of buildings is not only written their date of birth, but also written the moods, the manners, the most secret thoughts of their time…, together with the flat window, theorized by Gio Ponti as the way to shape modernity.”

Continue after the break for more. 

The Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) has announced the 2012 shortlist for the Stephen Lawrence Prize – an £5000 award that recognizes fresh talent with construction budgets of less than £1 million. The prize is sponsored by the Marco Goldschmied Foundation in memory of an aspiring young architect who tragically lost his life in 1993.

The 2012 Stephen Lawrence Prize shortlist is:

• Hill Top House, Oxford (private house) / Adrian James Architects
• Kings Grove, London SE15 (private house) / Duggan Morris Architects
• Hill House, Kent (private house) / Hampson Williams Architects
• The Dellow Day Centre, London E1 / Featherstone Young
• The Marquis Hotel & Restaurant, Dover / Guy Hollaway Architects

The winner will be announced at the RIBA Stirling Prize Dinner on October 13, 2012, in Manchester. The 2012 judges include architects Phil Coffey, Marco Goldschmied and Doreen Lawrence.

Continue after the break to learn more about each project.

Presented in an “interwoven tangle”, Japanese architect Akihisa Hirata has revealed his view of architecture and ecology, along with form and function, in his first ever international solo exhibition at the The Architecture Foundation in London. Now on view, the immersive 1:1 scale installation – “a contorted loop” – display’s over a hundred study models and conceptual sketches, an interview with the architect, and intimate films of based on his projects.

The exhibition opened shortly after Hirata’s receipt of the Golden Lion award at the 13th Venice Architecture Biennale for his contribution, with Kumiko Inui, Sou Fujimoto and Naoya Hatakeyama, to the Japanese Pavilion, curated by Toyo Ito.

Continue after the break for more. 

Designed and built by a very talented student team at Arizona State University, the Peritoneum shade structure reflects their collaboration and interdisciplinary skills as they employed their respective talents for this temporary shade structure. Originally built on a plaza space on the university campus, the project was recently moved to be displayed in a major art district in downtown Phoenix along Roosevelt Row. The design, which won the ASLA Student Award of Excellence 2012, is an undulating blue structure that evokes a calming, cooling environment, and captivates others by its daring interpretation of typical shade structures. More images and the students’ description after the break.

Designed and built by Dániel Baló, Dániel Eke, and Zoltán Kalászi, the concert hall installation in the Archabbey of Pannonhalma was intended for the classical concerts of the Arcus Temporum Festival. Fitted for the gym of the abbey’s boarding school, the installation uses just two elements as the artwork’s clear but complex structure still engulfed the spacious dimensions of the gym. The light bulbs’ strict geometrical grid and the parallel waving layers of the translucent textile, which also improved the gym’s acoustics, were dropped from the ceiling into the space below. More images and architects’ description after the break.

Architects: Mierta & Kurt Lazzarini Architekten Location: Samedan, Switzerland Design Team: Sandra Kaupp, Gunilla Klemp, Lena-Maria Philipp Project Year: 2012 Project Area: 1,270 sqm Photographs: Courtesy of Mierta & Kurt Lazzarini Architekten

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The initiative by h2o Architectes for the renovation of the first cinema for art house film follows the tradition of innovation and evolution that have been a part of this establishment’s history. The main project for the Studio des Ursulines in Paris was concentrated on the lobby, as the existing theatre has been simply refurbished. Founded in 1925, by the actors Armand Tallier and Laurence Myrga, this theater continues it’s tradition today by catering to the younger Parisian public by providing a locale to discover cinema in it’s many facets. The small theater offers selective programming as well as the opportunity to meet those who make films. More images and architects’ description after the break.

Architects: White Arkitekter + Sprunt Location: Southend Pier, United Kingdom Photographs: Luke Hayes

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From 2008 to 2010, Madrid based architects Luis M. Mansilla and Emilio Tuñón held the Jean Labatut Visiting Professorship at the Princeton School of Architecture. More than a collection of student work, From Rules to Constraints is a wide ranging reflection on teaching, design practice, history and the city. Focusing on three sites at three distinct scales, this book examines the constraints of the architectural project—social, political, historical, and environmental in order to create new rules for working. Examining both their teaching methods and Mansilla + Tuñón’s own design work, the book presents the design process as an ongoing conversation between the building and the environment, between freedom and limits, and between the decided and undecided.

Twenty-four years after the inauguration of I.M. Pei’s glass pyramid, the Musée du Louvre will introduce its second piece of contemporary architecture to the public, tomorrow, on September 22.

The new Department of Islamic Arts is designed by Milanese architect Mario Bellini and his French colleague Rudy Ricciotti, who won the commission through an international competition in 2005. Similar to I.M. Pei, the pair created a naturally lit, subterranean gallery space beneath an undulating, glass roof within the courtyard of the historic Cour Visconti. Continue after the break to learn more.

Before even stepping out of the car, residents of the Porsche Design Tower will experience extravagant luxury. It features a one-of-a-kind robotic parking system that allows owners to park their vehicles in sky garages directly next to their units. Miami, Florida based Archiform 3D used ArchiCAD to initially create the tower from the architect’s sketches. They shaped the building and its features in cooperation with Porsche to pursue and receive initial city approvals.

Design Corps and SEED (Social Economic Environmental Design) have released the latest installment of SEEDocs, their series of awesome, mini-documentaries that highlight inspirational stories of award-winning public interest design projects.

While June’s doc featured an incredible community garden in New Orleans, designed/built with help from the Tulane School of Architecture’s Tulane City Center, this month focuses on the revitalization of an abandoned, abestos-ridden school in Manheim Park, a low-income, neglected neighborhood in Kansas City, Missouri.

Check out more images and info about this empowering project, after the break…

Located in the “Albufera de Valencia”, one of the national territory´s most singular natural areas, the winning proposal for the Inspiration Hotel is formed as a huge ring shaped wooden pier 160 meters in diameter that rises above the Albufera´s water surface. Designed by Paul Dieterlen Architecture, the building is resolved with two main rings, one with an eight meter section which contains the architectural program and the public areas, and another one, with a three meters section turn to the interior that works a continuous circular path. More images and architects’ description after the break.