Last night, ArchDaily indulged in building our very own LEGO® Architecture Villa Savoye. As one of the most influential buildings in the International style of architecture, it is no surprise that architecture and LEGO fanatics rejoiced last month when LEGO® announced Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye as the newest addition to their architecture series. Now, thanks to LEGO® Architecture, five of our readers will win their very own.

We want to know what building should be the next in the LEGO® Architecture series and why. All you have to do is become a registered user at ArchDaily and leave us your answer in the comments below by Sunday, September 23rd! (More information on LEGO® Architecture’s Villa Savoye, designed by architectural artist Michael Hepp, can be found here.)

Official rules:

The five winners will be chosen at random from entries received between Monday, September 17th and Sunday, September 23rd 11:59 EST. You must leave a comment as a registered user at ArchDaily. Open to anyone in the world. One entry per person. ArchDaily will enforce verification and remove duplicated ones before choosing the winner.

Good luck!

UPDATE: And, the winners are….

• Seth Ellsworth
• Wonyeop Seok
• Daniel Bollard
• Makoto Shibuya
• Mark Kitchens

Congrats! You can expect an email from us shortly.

Cannon Design recently announced that they are teaming up with Maya Lin and Toshiko Mori, FAIA to design a new, innovative research campus for Novartis, a global leader in the pharmaceutical industry. The new $600 million laboratory and office complex will serve as the centerpiece of the company’s worldwide research operations based in Cambridge, Massachusetts and change the way Novartis conducts research. Doing so will help in promoting increased collaboration, idea-sharing, and teamwork. The entire project is slated for completion in 2015. More images and architects’ description after the break.

Videos

In the frenzy leading up to the iphone 5′s anticipated release last week, we asked our Facebook Fans the best thing about their smartphone (when it comes to their professional lives at least).

The answer was overwhelmingly in favor of one key feature: the camera. From snapping shots on-site to taking photos for inspiration (or just to remember later), the ease of having a camera in your phone has made your lives that much easier (and Apple fans rejoice, as the new iPhone 5′s stand-out new feature is its souped-up camera, now with low-light and panorama modes). Many also mentioned the handiness of having email, maps, and a compass always at hand.

But apart from these standard features, we also got tipped to some really useful Apps that are changing the way you work. We’ve (not very scientifically, we’ll admit) compiled them into a top 10 list…check after the break to see which Apps made the cut!

To celebrate the reopening of the newly restored Alvar Aalto Pavilion, they are highlighting the work of young Finnish architects who have made use of wood in their recent works.

ALA Architects have created an undulating overhang made of massive oak to welcome the visitor to Kilden, their Performing Arts Center in Kristiansand, Norway. Avanto Architects project their public sauna to be constructed out of wood in order to create an easy-going undulating building that is more part of the future coastal park than a conventional building.

I have been looking at these photographs for over a month now. I’m not certain why but they draw me in and I keep coming back to them. They hold me. And by hold I’m thinking of what Roland Barthes may have been suggesting when, talking about another photograph, he says, “Bob Wilson holds me, but I cannot say why…” (1) That’s the exact feeling I get when I’m looking at these images Ray K. Metzker.

Inkjet reproductions rest on my bedside table. I have not known what to say about them or what exactly they might be saying to me. Something about extremes. Something about sidewalks and saturated shadows. Something about walking in, toward, and around. Something about fracturing, dancing apart, even. But there is also something about play, something wonderfully naïve about them, as if they were taken with the eye of a child. But there is more. After the child grows up he discovers the long-forgotten roll of film and develops it. But now, with more life behind him, the process of developing them results in something darker, heavier.

Continue reading after the break

“Spain used to be a sexy, fit and energetic country. Envy, inferiority complexes, greed, arrogance and pride soaked it in fat. It is currently suffering from moral obesity.” That was Architect Manuel Ocaña’s incendiary take on the current state of his home country, one of the hardest hit by the Recession due to its extraordinary pre-Crisis construction boom (a.k.a “the mother of all housing bubbles”).

For this week’s edition of our Recessionary Interviews series – in which we talk to Architects across the globe surviving the Recession - we decided to get one final perspective from the Iberian Peninsula. We chatted with Spain’s Josep Ferrando, of Josep Ferrando Bramona Architecture, who told us how the economic bust has shifted focus from public works towards an architecture of “re”: rehabilitating, re-structuring, re-inhabiting.

Get Ferrando’s take on the state of Architecture in Spain today, after the break…

The International New Town Institute is organizing the ‘New Towns New Territories: New Players in Urban Planning’ conference taking place September 27th from 9am-7pm. The event, which will be held at the NAi in Rotterdam, will explore the latest innovations in global urbanization, privatization and new organizational models of urban development as well as the impact and challenges for professional practice. Global urbanization is moving at a faster pace than ever before and it is showing a fundamental shift in its structure and organization. Hundreds of economic, eco and satellite cities are being developed by private companies. Not only in Asia, but also in Europe. Who are the new players in the field of urban development? What visions, ambitions and strategies do they have? What innovations and financial models make these cities possible? These are just a few of the questions that will be answered and discussed. For more information, please visit here.

Built to enable 24 couples to be married free of charge in July 2011 in celebration of the Marriage Equality Act of New York, the KISS Pop-Up Chapel by Z-A Studio won the Architizer + Pop Up Chapel competition. As a literal gesture, the structure is composed of two separate parts, made of the same DNA, but layered differently. Essentially, two unique individuals that when joined together create a stable entity that is more than the sum of its parts. More images and architects’ description after the break.

The Japan Art Association has named Danish architect Henning Larsen the 2012 Praemium Imperiale laureate for architecture.

Created in 1988 to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Japan Art Association and to honor the late Prince Takamatsu, the prestigious Praemium Imperiale awards recognize outstanding, lifetime achievements in the arts categories not covered by the Nobel Prizes: architecture, painting, sculpture, music and theatre/film.

The 2012 Praemium Imperiale laureates:

The Research and Documentation Centre in Technology, Architecture and City in Developing Countries (CRD-PVS) at the Politecnico di Torino (Italy) has launched an international Student Design Competition tur(i)ntogreen – Farms in A Town. Sponsored by the UN-HABITAT within the “I’m a City Changer” campaign, participants are invited to apply their creative talents in developing new multidisciplinary solutions for a sustainable and inclusive city reflecting new forms of urban management and regeneration through agro-housing and urban-farming models.

Architects: Johnsen Schmaling Architects Location: Greenfield, Wisconsin, United States Project Year: 2011 Project Area: 200 sq ft Photographs: John J. Macaulay

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Hay Festival Segovia just announced that UK designer Thomas Heatherwick will be the keynote speaker for the architecture and design sessions at the Spanish edition of Hay Festival set to take place in Segovia September 27-30. In an hour-long conversation entitled The Truffle Pig Process, Thomas Heatherwick will be talking to Martha Thorne, executive director of the Pritzker Architecture Prize and associate dean of external relations at IE School of Architecture & Design (IE University), about his studio’s creative process and the increasingly blurred borders between design, architecture and society. More information on the event after the break.

Located in Cordoda’s downtown area, the second prize winning design for the Veracruz Architects Association’s new headquarters takes advantage of the existing topography. Designed by lab07 + JMV Architects, one of the main features of the project is to break the scheme of close institutional buildings to its immediate context, to become a built space that opens to the city, creating public space between the building and the urban grid. More images and architects’ description after the break.

With a capacity of 3600 places, and an alternative to its ‘grand sister’, the small olympic hall, is embedded carefully in the protected Olympic Park ensemble as it almost disappears. With pfarré lighting design working closely with the architects, the attic has been detailed to house a linear, dimmable lighting system. The huge notch, cut into the hill, which covers the building, was underlined with light on both sides. More images and their description after the break.

In continuation of their exhibition program on architectural photography taking place in New Delhi, Photoink is currently presenting Chandigarh: Portrait of a City by French photographer, Manuel Bougot until October 27th. Bougot’s interest in Le Corbusier’s architecture began in the 1980s when he worked on Caroline Maniaque’s thesis in architecture–on the Jaoul Houses built in 1954 in Neuilly, France. Since 2006, Bougot renewed his interest in Le Corbusier, attending talks on Chandigarh and photographed the only building the architect ever built for himself – a cabanon (a summer cabin) in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin. Photographing Chandigarh was therefore necessary to further any understanding of Le Corbusier, the urban designer and his philosophy about architecture and modernism. More images and information on the exhibition after the break.

Space is a basic resource. Architecture has the capacity to essentially affect the overall management of space. As a result, it is incumbent upon it to be aware of the elementary politics inherent in every architectural activity.

SCI-Arc graduate Harris Silver has shared his experience passing through the Kalandia Checkpoint during his quest for “an uncanny truth” that would lead him to develop an architecture project in the city of Jerusalem.

The Kalandia Checkpoint is an opening in what Israel calls “The Security Fence” and what Palestinians call “The Apartheid Wall”. Regardless of what you call the separation infrastructure, the checkpoint acts a modern gate to the city of Jerusalem.

After experiencing Kalendia first hand, I came away realizing that until I personally walked through the checkpoint, I was ignorant of the mechanism and tactics employed to humiliate and dehumanize everyone who passes through it. Which means I was not fully capable of participating in the Israeli-Palestinian discourse.

Continue reading for the full Op-Ed.

Construction for the Summer International Shopping Mall in Zhuhai, China has begun. The project is a mixed-use, 360,000 sqm development is designed by 10 Design and led by partner Gordon Affleck. The client challenged the design to move beyond the “black box” retail model, resulting in the diverse arrangement of forms and spaces of the final design. Follow us after the break for more on this project.

Steven Holl Architects just celebrated the pre-opening of the Sliced Porosity Block-CapitaLand Raffles City in Chengdu, China with a visit of the Prime Minister of Singapore. Creating a metropolitan public space instead of object-icon skyscrapers, this three million sq ft. project takes its shape from its distribution of natural light. The required minimum sunlight exposures to the surrounding urban fabric prescribe precise geometric angles that slice the exoskeletal concrete frame of the structure. The full expected completion is set for this fall. More images and architects’ description after the break.

The above video is an update to the Department for Architecture Design and Media Technology‘s Aero Pavilion which was completed just last year. An environmental condition of wind combined with the penetration of light through the structure is utilized as means for architectural articulation. Emphasizing the immediate understanding of the airflow, which defines the perceptive characteristics of internal space, the simplicity of the form consists of planar plywood plates in digital parametric models for simple and fast production and assembly.

Designed by Hadi Teherani Office + Design Core , the second prize winning proposal for the Tehran Stock Exchange competition is an elegant and simple two-part structure. While the lower main structure is ten storeys high and hovers above the piazza, the 66-meter high building stands as a dominant design motif in the city. The cubature, as well as the ecological and building services concept, is based on the historic Iranian ‘wind-catcher’ which forms a traditional, Persian architectural element to support the natural ventilation of buildings to convey an optimized state of the art technology. More images and architects’ description after the break.

This year’s Portland State Department of Architecture lecture series, which starts October 4 and runs until May 2, focuses on the theme of ‘Placing’. Six internationally renowned leaders from the fields of architecture, landscape architecture, art, planning, and anthropology will tackle this once-controversial idea and discuss the ways in which the active processes of siting, locating, positioning and placing things and people in the world are conceived and embodied in their work. Dan Wood of WORKac will start off the lecture series, followed by Sheila O’Donnell and John Tuomey of O’Donnell+Tuomey Architects, Kevin Daly of Daly Genik Architects, Fuensanta Nieto and Enrique Sobejano of Nieto Sobejano Arquitectos, Tim Ingold of the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen, and Julie Bargmann of D.I.R.T. Studio. For more information, please visit here.

Part I – Part II – Part III