Completed July 2012 in Stuttgart, Germany, the winners of the 72 Hour Urban Action competition were recently announced. With only three days and nights to design and build interventions in public space, 120 creative people, working in 10 international teams stormed sites along the Wagenhallen area and Nordbahnhof street in the center of the city, where the much debated redevelopment plan of Stuttgart 21 has its most immediate and significant effect. The first prize went to team TÜFTLER, for creating a non-judgemental courtyard in response to their Toy Parking mission. More images and information on the winning teams after the break.

Inspired by the great potential of advanced information technology providing architectural solutions, the Russian pavilion of the 2012 Venice Biennale will feature the innovation city of Skolkovo. Skolkovo is one of the largest, most innovative Russian projects of today and has been worked on by many international architects, including Biennale director David Chipperfield. The exhibition will allow visitors to enter into the world of innovation city and use the newest IT-technologies to contribute to the research. Over the Biennale’s three month period, participants will be able to watch the exhibit’s virtual city of Skolkovo evolve as each international visitor leaves their mark.

Continue reading for more.

Roca London Gallery, together with design collective FLOCK, will be presenting ‘FLOCK Talks’ September 18th from 6pm-8pm. The event will consist of short presentations with designers from the fields of architecture, products, jewelery and fashion design. Speakers will include Zaha Hadid Architects, Naomi Filmer, and Flock co-founders Pernilla Ohrstedt and Simone Brewster who will each present a snapshot of their portfolio of work. For more information, please visit here.

With their early work inspired by Russian Suprematism, Zaha Hadid Architects’ pays homage to the historical lineages of collective research that has led to the major works of today’s contemporary architecture at the 2012 Venice Biennale with the installation ‘Arum’. The pleated metal structure is derived from the work of German architect Frei Otto, who paved the way for material-structural form-finding processes. This installation is a response to David Chipperfield’s belief that the theme of ‘Common Ground’ is meant to “reassert the existence of an architectural culture, made up not just of singular talents but a rich continuity of diverse ideas united in a common history.”

Continue after the break for the architect’s project description.

In its seventh year, the Shaw Contract Group recently announced the winners in their Design Is… Award program, which honors architecture and design firms that are changing the very idea of what design is. Through these winning projects, selected from commercial spaces from around the globe, we see how design is redefining the way we work, play and organize our lives. Out of 285 entries from 19 countries, the following five winning firms that won the Design Is… Award for 2012 can be viewed after the break and seen in the video above.

A few months ago, Deborah Sheehan, a Principal and Healthcare Leader at Cannon Design, was given the task of designing a prototype healthcare facility in Afghanistan, a country averaging about one hospital bed for every 2,400 people.

The challenges that Sheehan and her colleagues faced were considerable: limited construction materials, few skilled tradesmen, political corruption, tribal rivalries. But the resultant design solutions were smart, low-cost, and high-quality – they had to be, after all.

To a certain extent, Sheehan was expecting her team to come up with an innovative design; what she didn’t consider, however, was how applicable the design strategies would be to our own troubled system. In her article for HealthCare Design, “Beautiful, Broken, and Broke,” Sheehan outlines the 4 things the Afghanistan healthcare system does well, frankly better than the American, and what we could gain by applying them here…

Read after the break to find out the 4 design strategies employed in Afghanistan that could help our Healthcare System…

The Siberian Center for Contemporary Art and Siberian Center for the Promotion of Architecture is inviting all to participate in the open international competition for the architectural concept of the symbolic object of city environment dedicated to Russian avant-garde (or to El Lissitzky). In Russia there are no monuments either to the Russian avant-garde movement or to Russian avant-gardist. That is why this project is unique. The realization of this project will be significant for the city and Russia and it will underline the importance of Novosibirsk as one of the centers of Russian constructivist architecture. The deadline to register is October 1 and the deadline for submissions is no later than October 2. For more information, please visit here.

Pracownia Architektoniczna Poznań Projekt, in collaboration with mode:lina Architekci, shared with us their design for the main entrance to the Voivodeship Police Headquarters in Poznań, Poland. The building, which is part of a historic urban structure, aims to adjust the entrance for disabled users as well as set a new standard for Police interiors. More images and architects’ description after the break.

As previously announced, the Portuguese architects behind “OCO – Ocean & Coastline Observatory” have won Habitat for Humanity’s Open Architecture Challenge: RESTRICTED ACCESS 2011. Over 500 teams from 74 countries submitted innovative solutions for the recovery and reuse of disabled and abandoned military sites. These submissions were filtered down to 13 finalists by a jury of 33 esteemed professionals. The Lisbon-based architects of OCO claimed grand prized with their vision to redevelop a desolate military site, that once defended the coast of Trafaria in Portugal, into a civic space that promotes coastal preservation.

Continue after the break for more. 

The Poland Pavilion at the 2012 Venice Biennale will feature a design exploration into the interaction between sound and architecture in creating our environment. The project, by Katarzyna Krakowiak, is a sound sculpture that presents architecture as a primary system of listening. The sculpture collaborates with neighboring pavilions and echos the sounds that reach the Polish Pavilion, highlighting its acoustic qualities. The exhibit will be on view from August 29th through November 29th.

More on the exhibit after the break.

The proposal for the National Library of Israel by ODA takes on special significance as a site where past, present, and future converge. Unlike traditional libraries, often closed fortresses of knowledge, the new library is organized around a variety of platforms of activity that enhance interaction between the users, enabling the library to become a forum for cross-disciplinary conversations. Through the form of a floating monolith that visually connects to the foundations of Parliament, the library underscores the idea that education and learning are the bedrock of democracy. More images and architects’ description after the break.

Taking place September 1-2, the two-day ‘PROTO/E/CO/LOGICS 002: The Field is Open’ Symposium, put on by the Mediterranean Laboratory for Architecture and Urban Strategies (MLAUS), is envisioned as an open platform for rethinking increasingly complex landscape of architecture and asymptotic cultures. Through expansion in material science, cloud computing, transformations in constructability and manufacturing (such as ongoing revolution with 3d printing) and internet of things, boundaries of architecture are becoming fuzzy and the Field is increasingly Open. In recognizing the active participation of nonhuman forces in events and understanding that the agency spawns beyond human, provides a new ground for addressing design ecology. For more information, please visit their official website here.

In conjunction with its current exhibition The Landmarks of New York, the Parrish Art Museum will host an illustrated presentation by multi-talented, award winning architect David Rockwell titled “Untold Stories from an Eclectic, Exceptional Practice.” A brief discussion between Rockwell, who founded Rockwell Group in 1984 to focus on a diverse array of projects that range from hotels to hospitals, restaurants to airport terminals, and Broadway set designs to consumer products, and exhibition curator Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel will follow the talk. The program will take place Thursday, August 23, at 6:30 pm. Tickets are $5 for Parrish members, $10 for nonmembers. Reservations are strongly recommended. For more information on the event, please visit here.

The OpenAEC Challenge is an architectural competition where the criteria for winning is based on how well you collaborate with others and not on how well you design in isolation. In that sense, it’s less a competition, and more a challenge. The sole purpose of this Challenge is to abolish a pervasive myth undoubtedly shared by a vast majority of architectural students around the world: That real-world buildings are designed by a sole, mastermind architect, working in isolation. This Challenge will be centered around a real project—a 48 acre (19.5 ha) sustainable, agro-tourism farm, called Flocktown Farm, located an hour outside of New York City. It will be broken down into eight, two-week long phases or charrettes, over the length of the Fall semester, 2012. For more information, please visit their website here.

In January of 1975, Buckminster Fuller sat down to deliver twelve lectures that made up the 42-hour series Everything I Know. The entire event was captured on video, with the most advanced, bluescreen technology of the time. Fuller discusses an array of topics, from “architecture, design, philosophy, education, mathematics, geometry, cartography, economics, history, structure, industry, housing and engineering”, to all his major inventions and discoveries, along with “his own personal history in the context of the history of science and industrialization”.

The embedded video above is recompiled and edited version of the series. You may download the entire 42-hours (for free!) from the Internet Archive. The Buckminster Fuller archive has also made transcripts of Everything I Know - “minimally edited and maximally Fuller” – freely available.

Continue after the break for links to the remaining lectures.

After controversy struck when critics blamed “bad design” for inconvenient ticket refunds, the success of Zaha Hadid’s design for the London Olympic’s Aquatics Center was validated by the overwhelming approval from spectators. According to a survey conducted by the University of Westminster, 95% of the Aquatics Center spectators were satisfied with their experience and 85% thought the venue captured the “true spirit” of the Olympics.

With ‘Revitalizing Cities’ as the theme, New Jersey Institute of Technology will be hosting the upcoming semi-annual AIAS Northeast Fall Quad Conference in Newark. As current architecture students, they have an invested interest in what the world will become in 5, 10, even 20 years from now. It is our mission to showcase the potential of urban environments, like Newark, and look forward to a progressive future.

The proposal for the Chilean Pavilion at Guadalajara’s International Book Fair, designed by DAW, consists in generating a great container that permits a greater presence within the exhibition center and the easy recognition as an icon. As a grand “open house” being the principal concept, the thematic exposition of Chile is prepared in outdoor spaces, consisting primarily in a furnished base and a wooden deck. More images and architects’ description after the break.

This time last year, Bill Gates made a claim. He would give $100,000 to anyone who could reinvent the toilet. 

Designed by Atelier Seraji Architectes & Associés, in collaboration with Mehdi Bakhshizadeh and Tadbir Omran lranian, their questioning started with the debate on what is the most distinguishable aspect of Persian Architecture in trade, bank and stock exchange buildings? The other urgent question was regarding the main difference between western and Persian thought in contemporary cultural debates.

They came to the conclusion that one of the main differences is the description and perception of the idea of complexity and its structure in our culture. The result is a new public space through this new building in Tehran through building an innovative structure that sits intelligently with the site and proves the capacity of Persian engineering. More images and architects’ description after the break.

“Open City: London, 1500-1700″, an exhibit running at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC, explores the two hundred year period in which London was transformed from a medieval capital to an early modern metropolis. During this period the city suffered a series of traumatic events including plagues, religious disputes, civil wars, the Great Fire, political instability and economic upheaval. This exhibit allows the audience to witness that despite these drawbacks in its history, London came out on top as the capital of a global empire. Looking at the city as places of gathering: churches, theaters and markets, “Open City” explores ways in which citizens dealt with the changes in their political, economic and social systems. The exhibit is curated by Kathleen Lynch and will be running through September 30th.

More after the break.

Architects: Chiaki Arai Urban and Architecture Design Location: Tama city, Tokyo, Japan Architect In Charge: Chiaki Arai Design Team: Chiaki Arai, Ryoichi Yoshizaki, Tomonori Niimi, Chiaki Hamamatsu Project Year: 2011 Photographs: Taisuke Ogawa

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