Woods Bagot’s Shenzhen Hazens Longgang Longteng Mixed-Use project has been rated by the Shenzhen Government as one of the city’s most important projects of 2016. Located in Shenzhen’s Longgang District, the 393,000 square meter site will feature 1,500,000 square meters of gross floor area subdivided into office space, retail space, a shopping mall, residential communities and facilities, and over 90,000 square meters of green and public space.

As a part of the design, the development will rejuvenate a river park area running through the existing site, with the northern bank becoming a commercial and leisure focal point, and the southern bank featuring a community of residential towers connected by retail podiums and green spaces.

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LOHA (Lorcan O’Herlihy Architects) has recently released Amplified Urbanism, a book about its design methodology, which is “rooted in creating fluid interaction between public and private spaces, emphasizing social and civic connections, and harnessing existing ecological and infrastructural patterns.”

Through this publication, LOHA aims to present projects it has developed based on these principles, as well as to provoke discussion about issues in Los Angeles and the wider architectural field.

In order to highlight the book “as a creative process that begins in the studio, and when implemented in the built environment, catalyzes positive connections,” LOHA has collaborated with filmmakers Spirit of Space on a short film.

WXY architecture + urban design has unveiled its design for The Peninsula, a five-acre mixed use development for New York City that aims to “create [an] instant [community] with jobs, training, education, and hundreds of affordable apartments.”

Created in conjunction with Body Lawson Associates (BLA) for the New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC) and the Department of Housing and Preservation Development (HPD), the project will feature retail, light industrial, recreational, and residential space—all of which will be affordable—in the Hunts Point neighborhood of the Bronx.

Tadao Ando’s first residential building in New York City—152 Elizabeth—has topped out in Manhattan’s Nolita neighborhood. A collaboration with architect and designer Michael Gabellini of Gabellini Sheppard Associates, as well as developer Sumaida + Khurana, the project will feature Ando’s hallmarks, poured-in-place concrete, burnished, metal, voluminous glass, and a living green wall.

Conceived as an inner sanctuary within downtown Manhattan, the building highlights acoustics as a key consideration, with a façade system and exterior glass enabling a high OITC rating to “ensure a tranquil home environment in the center of this vibrant neighborhood.”

HHF Architects, in collaboration with landscape architects from Westpol, have won a competition with their design for Jardin Métropole, a 30-meter-tall apartment tower and neighboring green space. Located in Biel, Switzerland, the project is expected to become the symbol of the city and contribute to the area’s general enhancement through its angled cube massing and public element.

Based on the theme of a “city garden,” the building will constitute the beginning of a new, park-like passage to Rue du Moulin, and will feature access to gardens with private planting beds, a shared roof terrace, and landscaped loggains.

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BAD. Built by Associative Data, in collaboration with MARZ Studio, has released the plans for its newest project, No. 5, a mixed-use space in the heart of Jonah in Beirut City, Lebanon. Designed with parametric studies in mind, the project takes into account view orientations, solar radiation, wind infiltration, and program through its various levels of massing.

Sited next to the prominent Camille Chamoun Sports City Stadium on one of the busiest corners in the area, the building is “very present and visible from the street level, hence the proposal’s pixelated massing.”

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Australia-based Bates Smart has released the plans for 5 King, a high-performance commercial space and the tallest engineered timber building in Australia. At 52 meters tall, the building will additionally feature the largest gross floor area (GFA) for an engineered timber office building worldwide.

Based on the concepts of connecting with nature and preserving the environment, 5 King will utilize a combination of cross-laminated timber (CLT) and glue-laminated timber (Glulam) to achieve “the structural strength of concrete and steel with a low carbon footprint.”

AART Architects have won the competition to transform the Aarhus Municipal Hospital into a new campus for Aarhus University in Denmark.

In an effort to renew and enhance the original qualities of the site—like its red tile façades and consistent compositions of public space—as well as to support academic and urban life of the future, the project will uphold “the site’s historical potential by paving the way for new prospects to create a forward-looking transformation of this unique spot.”

Artist Rachel Whiteread has won the 2017 Ada Louise Huxtable Prize, which recognizes individuals working in the wider architectural industry who have made a significant contribution to architecture and the built environment. Whiteread was selected by respondents to the Architectural Review’s Women In Architecture: Working in Architecture survey.

Some of Whiteread’s notable work includes her 1993 Turner Prize-winning House, her collaboration with architects like Caruso St John on the UK Holocaust Memorial International Design Competition, and her participation on the RIBA Stirling Prize 2016 jury.

Denise Scott Brown has won the 2017 Jane Drew Prize, an award that recognizes an architectural designer who has “raised the profile of women in architecture” through their work and commitment to design excellence, as a part of The Architectural Review’s (AR) Women in Architecture Awards.

Scott Brown’s receipt of the prize is a culmination of the grassroots drive to see her contribution to the profession adequately recognized – a movement that sprung from the Women in Architecture campaign in 2013–a quarter of a century after her partner Robert Venturi was awarded the Pritzker.

“Things have happened which have made me very happy in my old age and one of those is this prize,” said Scott Brown.

Previous winners of the Drew prize, named after advocate Jane Drew, include Odile Decq, Yvonne Farrell, Shelley McNamara, and Zaha Hadid.

Design Forum International has unveiled Dakshineswar Sky Walk, a 380-meter long pedestrian intervention designed to improve traffic and movement leading to the Dakshineswar Kali temple in Kolkata, India.

Located on the banks of the Ganges River at the northern tip of the city, the Dakshineswar Kali temple is one “of the most revered places of worship in Hinduism, the seat of divine female power, Shakti,” and draws in a large number of devotees year-round. Because of its popularity, the roads leading to the site have become congested due to increased vehicle traffic, foot traffic, and the appearance of small shops and kiosks.

Taking these existing conditions into account, Dakshineswar Sky Walk aims to become a dynamic solution to the site’s problems. At 10.5 meters wide, the skywalk will connect a nearby traffic rotary with the gates of the temple compound, with 12 escalators, four elevators, and eight staircases to allow users to embark and disembark.

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Videos

The team at TwoEyes Tech made up of HunJoo Song, SeonAh Kim, and Vivek Soni has launched a kickstarter campaign for its TwoEyes VR 360 camera, which is the first binocular 360-degree VR, 4K camera that mirrors human eye sight.

Using two pairs of 180-degree lenses that are placed 65 millimeters apart—the average distance between a person’s eyes—the camera captures 360-degree footage, “just like your natural eyes would view the world.” This footage can be uploaded to 360-degree-compatible social media platforms like YouTube 360, Facebook 360, and Twitter 360, or enjoyed through virtual reality binoculars or 3D television.

Russian artist Nikolay Polissky has unveiled his latest project, a large tower for the upcoming traditional holiday of Maslenitsa, a coming of spring celebration that ceremonially burns a symbol of winter.

Currently in the construction phase, the project is made from recycled wood pallets and the tops of logs, which typically are only used as cheap firewood. Additionally, the tower will be covered with hay rolls that cannot be used as animal feed, before being burned at a ceremony on February 25.

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Jungwoo Ji (of EUS+ Architects), Bosuk Hur (of Folio:), and Suk Lee (a fourth-year student at Iowa State University) have won the Liberty Museum / New York competition with their speculative design for a museum at the site of the Statue of Liberty National Monument in New York City.

Inspired by the concept of civil candlelight marches against social injustice in Korea—the designers’ home country—the proposal is designed to be an architectural device that reflects human rights and social justice disparity in real time. When visitors send messages, namely tweets, about dire events in their cities to the museum with their phones, each unit of the proposal receives electronic signals and changes its position to point towards the region in question.

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Fine arts and commercial photographer Balint Alovits has released Time Machine, his latest photo series documenting Art Deco and Bauhaus staircases throughout Budapest, Hungary.

Shown from the same central perspective, the photographs “create a new dimension by splitting space and time, staying within the visual limits of the project’s concept, while the perception of the architectural details evokes the idea of infinity.”

“I have always liked Art Deco and Bauhaus buildings,” said Alovits. “Whenever I step into one of these caracoles, I feel a certain pulling energy looking up from the bottom or down from the top. I wanted to collect and showcase all the different shapes and colors that these stairways feature.”

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The American Institute of Architects (AIA) has announced the winners of the 2017 Thomas Jefferson Award for service to public architecture, and the 2017 Collaborative Achievement Award for distinguished achievements of those who have had a beneficial influence on or advanced the architectural profession.

ANSKA has unveiled Spots, a series of temporary floating platforms to host micro-events for the Paris Olympic Games of 2024. Intended as an alternative to classic river typologies like barges or heavy structures, Spots are modular systems that can easily be assembled or disassembled, allowing them to become durable programmatic solutions.

While Spots was designed for the Paris Olympics, where modules would be hooked to the riverbanks to create a complimentary route for the Games, facilitating a greater exploration of the city, the micro-typology of the project could be applied “to any river and city,” as well as to Parisian suburbs and industrial areas.

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ADEPT Architects has won the commission to design a new masterplan for the Budapart neighborhood of Budapest, a project that will become the largest singular urban development in the city for nearly 30 years. Based on a distorted grid structure, the design will reference both historic and modern parts of the city, and will encompass 54 hectares of mixed-use space.

Located on the [‘Buda’] bank of the Danube River, the Budapart masterplan aims to create a green and human scaled neighborhood rather than just another new modern development. The fantastic location on the waterfront, the existing characteristic landscape qualities and the close vicinity to the central city are the main attractions that each generate huge potential to make the new neighborhood an epicenter of its own, described the architects in a recent press release.

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