Architects: Artau Architecture Location: Stavelot, Belgium Project Year: 2008 Photographs: Courtesy of Artau Architecture

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Taking place at SCI-Arc on Friday, September 14th from 7-9pm, Alexis Rochas and Eric Owen Moss will be discussing STEREO.BOT, a library gallery installation that documents the realization of the Coachella Gateway Pavilion, the largest customized structure in the US. Featuring interactive 3D projection mapping content, it was designed and built by design faculty, Alexis Rochas of I/O for the 2012 Coachella Music Festival in Indio, California. The exhibition in the SCI-Arc library features dynamic architectural models, 3D mapping projections and documentary material that follows the development of the project from inception to realization. For more information, please visit here.

Taking place September 29-30, Data Lab is a two-day workshop, put on my modeLab in Brooklyn, on advanced topics and data structures in Grasshopper for Rhinoceros. In a fast-paced and hands-on learning environment, they will cover the fundamental concepts of data structures as well as strategies for working with lists, sequences, and data trees in the newly released version of Grasshoppper 0.9. They will engage a series of design problems which highlight the limitations of standard parametric design workflows and serve as catalysts for discussions related to best practices, linear versus non-linear design processes, and the re-use of files. Each design problem will require either the specific use and manipulation of data structures or the extension of Grasshopper through add-ons. For more information, please visit here.

The AIA California Council Residential Design Awards 2012 competition will recognize the best in residential architecture and design in the state of California. The competition will highlight residential projects constructed in the state, and architects and firms who shape the landscape of architecture and design throughout the state and beyond. Entry is open to both members and nonmembers with projects in California or, California architects who have completed work elsewhere. Eligible projects include those completed after January 1, 2007. The deadline for submissions is September 19. For more detailed information, please visit here.

The Luxembourg Pavilion for the 2012 Venice Biennale, entitled Futura Bold? Post-City: Considering the Luxembourg case, is a speculative exploration of the future issues that cities of the 21st century will be facing. Using Luxembourg as a case study, Post-City seeks an attitude toward the forces of the urban environment instead of concluding with an urban proposal. Post-City poses pertinent questions that arise from Luxembourg’s urban conditions today. Posed as a platform for discussion, the pavilion will be on view at the Ca’ del Duca as part of the 2012 Venice Biennale until November 25th.

Join us after the break for more on this project.

Contemporary Athens is a city of strong contradictions: It is a city whose particular identity was shaped during post-World-War-II reconstruction. A city which has at its disposal an exceptionally talented cadre of young architects, international in orientation, well educated and with a wealth of professional experience. It is, however, the city that was most stricken by the current economic crisis. Currently the Athenian urban space is decomposing and there are increasingly frequent and greater disruptions of the social web. The younger generation of architects benefited from the positive aspects of globalization and today has come face-to-face with the harsh aspect of the global financial crisis, a plummeting standard of living and the need to redefine the priorities of architectural design.

These contradictions are shaping a particular dynamic in the city. Conditions are being created in Athens to expand the links between architecture and the city, both during the economic downturn, but also after it has passed; furthermore conditions are being created to bring to the forefront new ways of viewing the role of architecture, removed from the standards of well-being of the previous decade.

The Greek participation presents this idiosyncratic Athenian urbanism within two themes.

Architects: ARCO Arquitectura Contemporánea Location: México D.F., Mexico Design Team: José Lew Kirsch, Bernardo Lew Kirsch Project Year: 2011 Photographs: Jaime Navarro

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Deborah Berke, a New York City-based architect known for her design excellence, scholarly achievement and commitment to moving the practice of architecture forward in innovative ways, was selected as the first recipient of the University of California, Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design (CED) inaugural 2012 Berkeley-Rupp Architecture Professorship and Prize.

The Berkeley-Rupp Prize will be awarded biannually to a distinguished practitioner or academic who has made a significant contribution to promoting the advancement of women in the field of architecture, and whose work emphasizes a commitment to sustainability and the community.

The announcement was made by Jennifer Wolch, William W. Wurster Dean of the College of Environmental Design. Continue reading for the complete press release.

United Airlines Flight 93 was one of the four planes hijacked during the September 11, 2001, attacks in the United States. It was on this flight that 40 passengers and crew members courageously gave their lives to thwart a planned attack on the Nation’s Capital. Tragically, the plane crashed in Western Pennsylvania with no survivors.

To honor these heroes, Congress passed the Flight 93 National Memorial Act in 2002 and launched a two-stage, international design competition in 2005. A Jury of planners, landscape architects, architects, designers, government representatives, family members and community representatives chose Paul and Milena Murdoch’s proposal, which treated the 2,200 acre former coalmine as a memorialized national park where visitors embark on a sequence of experiences that leads them towards the crash site of Flight 93.

The British Pavilion presents the work of ten architectural teams who travelled the world in search of imaginative responses to universal issues. Venice Takeaway charts their course in Argentina, Brazil, China, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, Nigeria, Thailand, and the USA, and demonstrates the creative potential of sharing ideas across borders.

The exhibition presents the work of more than twenty-six practicing architects, curators, academics, filmmakers, and writers who were selected by a scientific committee following an open call for ideas.

The World Architecture Festival is around the corner! On October 3rd-5th, hundreds of architects will gather in Singapore for an intense dose of architecture, in the form of panels, lectures, live crits, and more. You can see all the shortlisted projects here.

Yesterday, Michael Kimmelman, the architecture critic for The New York Times, unleashed his anticipated take on this year’s Biennale. Usually, we find ourselves almost perfectly aligned with Kimmelman’s socially-oriented perspective (in fact, we lauded his approach in “The Architect Critic is Dead“); this time, however, we found ourselves almost entirely at his opposite.

In our Editorial, “The Most Political Biennale Yet,” we contend that “Common Ground” represented a stepping stone in the Biennale’s evolution: it revealed an unprecedented engagement with reality and reflected, for the first time in any substantial way, architecture’s movement away from “starchitecture” and towards urbanist solutions. Was it perfect? No. But it was engaged.

However, Kimmelman’s take suggests that all that progress simply wasn’t enough. In fact, the exhibits we cite as evidence of the Biennale’s progress, Kimmelman cites as exceptions in a festival still overly obsessed with architecture’s big names.

What do you think? Was this Biennale very political, or not political enough? Was Kimmelman too harsh? Were we too forgiving? Or are we both off-base? Read on for a few select quotes from our Op-Eds, and give us your opinion in the comments below.

The subject of the grands ensembles (housing complexes) selected for the French Pavilion is a good example of the ambivalence of an architect’s role, which is often decried; once, the urban environment of towers and large housing complexes was even blamed for social unrest in the “schemes”, also known as “estates” or “projects”. On the contrary, the challenge raised by this exhibition aims to show that contemporary architects have things to say about the “suburban crisis,” by working on “transformation” rather than just “repairs”.

Designed by a team of graduate students, including Tabitha Nzilani, Obare Joash, Lomole Daniel, and Kuria Eric, their second prize winning proposal in the Kenya Judicial Architectural competition embraces the people coming to seek justice. The project invites visitors in through the adoption of a semi-circular form, which is inward curving to the entrance, and vertical elements which are also receding inwards. Anchoring on a central core that has two wings, these wings are representative of the scale of justice: on one side being the law and on the other the deed. More images and architects’ description after the break.

Conceived by Mexican architect Ivan Juárez from X-Studio, the Lightweave Palm Observatory consists of a dialogue with the natural landscape context of Bahia de Todos os Santos, Brazil. The project explores a local artisanal textile technique using the coconut palm leaf found in the island as raw material. It then forms an interior space for personal reflection which creates a visual dialogue between the interior and exterior landscape that it delimits. More images and architects’ description after the break.

Todd Saunders, founder of Saunders Architecture, will be delivering a lecture at Cornell University on the topic of ‘Architecture in Northern Landscapes’ on October 15. Bringing together dynamic building and material experimentation with traditional methods of craft, the Bergen, Norway–based practice has worked on cultural and residential projects in Norway, as well as England, Denmark, Italy, Sweden, and Canada. Led by a strong contemporary design sensibility, the studio believes that architecture plays an important role in creating place, using form, materials, and texture to help evoke and shape memory and human interaction. Fore more information on the event, please visit here.

The competition winning proposal for the Jiaxing College Library & Media Center, designed by LYCS Architecture, seeks to break antiquated design conventions by intelligently negotiating contemporary architectural design into the traditional Chinese campus. Surrounded by rich woods and luscious water, the 42000m2 library plays with hierarchy – the hierarchy of multiple, increasingly private spaces; the hierarchy of the pace of spatial experience; and the hierarchy of introversion and extroversion. More images and architects’ description after the break.

Presenting six cities built between the World War II and the present day, the installation sets their extraordinary diversity against the spatial, demographic, and economic formulas that lay behind their development. Displayed through a mix of bold typography, architectural elements, models, and painted canvases, this installation evokes the mix of complexity and control common to modern cities.

MoMA‘s new installation 9 + 1 Ways of Being Political will exhibit works from the museum’s collection that offer fresh perspectives on the last 50 years of architecture that is a signature of the evolving conditions of our political context. The exhibit is in response to the general perspectives of today that consider architecture as having been overwhelmed by our economic realities. Through a range of media, including a performance piece by Andrés Jaque Arquitectos (at MoMA PS1 on September 16 and 23), 9 + 1 Ways of Being Political argues that architecture maintains its political influence with a variety of critiques that span decades. The exhibit is divided into nine sections and examines the blurs between social, political and public space in which architecture resides. 9 + 1 Ways of Being Political: 50 Years of Political Stances in Architecture and Urban Design opens tomorrow, September 12th, and will run through March 25, 2013.

Through this installation, Swiss architect Valerio Olgiati explores the ambiguous and complex “common ground” of inspiration and imagination in architecture. Images, selected by architects from around the world, represent the infinitely varied forms of visual material that are collected in their imaginations and subsequently transformed through the creative process.

During the opening of the 13th Venice Biennale, we had the chance to talk with Sergei Tchoban and Sergey Kuznetsov, partners at SPEECH and curators of i-City, the Russian pavilion, awarded with a Special Mention at the Biennale.

To honor the memory of those who tragically lost their lives in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, New York-based Davis Brody Bond has been commissioned to design the National September 11 Memorial Museum at the heart of the former World Trade Center site in New York. Serving as a complement to the National September 11 Memorial, the museum will tell the story of 9/11 through multimedia displays, archives, narratives and a collection of monumental artifacts, while commemorating the life of every victim of the 2001 and 1993 terrorists attacks.

Continue after the break to learn more.