Vo Trong Nghia Architects (VTNA) has unveiled a proposal for a Green City Hall in Vietnam’s Bac Ninh City. Designed as a vertical park, the 36,000 square meter proposal is meant to serve as a new symbol for a traditionally agricultural, but rapidly industrializing area of Northern Vietnam. The VTNA proposal is part of a larger plan to develop a new urban area on the edge of the old city, and is designed to be a catalyst for future green developments in the area.

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Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA) has announced a new project in Moscow, winning a competition to design the Sberbank Technopark at the Skolkovo Innovation Centre. This is the firm’s first announcement of new work since the untimely death of Zaha Hadid late last month. As the market leader of the Russian banking and economic circulatory system since 1841, Sberbank’s new 131,000 square meter facility will accommodate 10,000 to 12,000 workers in the sectors of marketing and information technology.

To mark the conclusion of the 55th Milan Design Week (also known as Salone del Mobile), ArchDaily has compiled a list of the best architect designed products unveiled at the event. This year’s notable items include works by Zaha Hadid, BIG, Herzog & de Meuron, MAD, David Adjaye, and Daniel Libeskind, among others.

Jean-Paul Viguier et Associés, in partnership with Eiffage and Woodeum, have won the competition for a 57 meter timber tower in the Saint-Jean Belcier district of Bordeaux, France. A tower and two shorter buildings, the 17,000 square meter mixed-use project contains housing, offices, and retail space, and is part of a larger master plan intent on spurring development in the vicinity of the Bordeaux-Saint-Jean railway station. The project name “Hyperion” is a reference to the world’s tallest living tree (a Sequoia sempervirens in Northern California) and emphasizes the proposal’s vanguard use of timber materials.

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With the 2016 Salone del Mobile now behind us, Romanian photographer Laurian Ghinitoiu has shared his photos from Milan Design Week, along with his ranking of the top five architectural installations. Read on to see his exceptional collection of images accompanied by short descriptions of each project.

The World Architecture Festival (WAF), the largest international gathering of architects, has announced its judges for 2016. The annual event, consisting of awards, a conference, and an exhibition, recognizes outstanding projects in a variety of categories, and is attended by over 2,000 visitors from 65 countries. This year's festival will be held from November 16-18, 2016 at Arena Berlin in Germany.

Snøhetta’s MAX IV Laboratory Landscape Design will open in June on the edge of Lund, Sweden. Selected for the project in 2011, Snøhetta’s design fills 47-acres (19 hectares) of formerly agricultural lands northeast of the city, and is the first project in a larger masterplan to transform the Brunnshög area into a “Science City.” The MAX IV national laboratory is a synchrotron facility with two electron storage rings, and is jointly operated by the Swedish Research Council and Lund University.

SHoP has won Landmarks Preservation Commission approval to build Brooklyn’s tallest tower at 340 Flatbush Avenue Extension, reports New York Yimby. Located on the same block of the former Dime Savings Bank, an individual and interior landmark, SHoP’s proposal calls for a 73-story, 1,066 foot-tall mixed-use tower. The proposal required LPC-approval because the architects want to merge the tower’s lobby with the bank and convert the atrium into a new retail component. The site’s relationship to the bank building encouraged the architects to develop a design and material choices that are heavily influenced by the proposed tower’s smaller, but no less grand, neighbor.

OMA’s Pierre Lassonde Pavilion of the Musée National des Beaux-Arts du Québec (MNBAQ) will open to the public on June 24, 2016. Increasing the museum’s space by 90 percent, the 14,900 square-meter pavilion faces Québec City’s Grande Alléee and seeks to fuse the energy of street life with the idyllic landscapes of the adjacent Parc des Champs-de-Bataille.

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Bjarke Ingels has been named one of TIME's 100 Most Influential People in the magazine's annual list of groundbreakers in five categories: Pioneers, Titans, Artists, Leaders, and Icons. Other giants of the same field endorse the authority of each selected figure and, in Ingels case, former boss Rem Koolhaas offers poignant words of praise. “Bjarke is the first major architect who disconnected the profession completely from angst,” says Koolhaas. “He threw out the ballast and soared. With that, he is completely in tune with the thinkers of Silicon Valley, who want to make the world a better place without the existential hand-wringing that previous generations felt was crucial to earn utopianist credibility.” You can review the full profile and TIME’s complete list of people here.

Qatar Museums has announced a shortlist of eight finalists that will move on to the third and final stage of the Art Mill International Design Competition in Doha. On a site extending into the Arabian Sea that was only recently occupied by Qatar Flour Mills, Art Mill will integrate gallery and exhibition space with facilities for education, events, conservation, art handling, and research. Joining the Museum of Islamic Art designed by I.M. Pei, and the still under-construction National Museum of Qatar, designed by Jean Nouvel, in the words of the competition brief, “Art Mill will and extend and intensify the cultural quarter being developed in Doha.”

The Ford Foundation has received Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) approval for renovations to its building at 320 E 43rd Street in Midtown Manhattan, reports New York Yimby. Constructed from 1963 to 1967, with a design by Kevin Roche and John Dinkeloo and an atrium garden by Dan Kiley, the building became an instant architectural mecca and was made an individual and interior landmark in 1997. The proposed renovations, designed by Gensler, seek to restore a half century of alterations to the building’s appearance, in addition to subtle changes to adhere to adhere to fire and accessibility codes.

At last year's Moscow Urban Forum, Charles Renfro discussed Diller Scofidio + Renfro's design for Zaryadye Park in Moscow. Located in the heart of the city, the park employs Wild Urbanist principles, which seek to emulate Russia's diverse landscapes – tundra, steppe, forest, and wetland – against a backdrop of architectural landmarks that includes the Kremlin, Red Square, and St. Basil’s Cathedral.

Zaha Hadid Architects has 36 projects underway in 21 countries, and four of them will be completed this year. The Salerno Maritime Terminal will open later this month, the Port House, Antwerp, in September, the King Abdullah Petroleum Studies and Research Center (KAPSARC) in Riyadh, in October, and the Mathematics Gallery at the Science Museum in London, in December.

In spite of the untimely death of the practice’s namesake last month, the firm has pledged to continue with its slate of projects, stating, “Zaha is in the DNA of Zaha Hadid Architects. She continues to drive and inspire us every day, and we work on as Zaha taught us – with curiosity, integrity, passion and determination.”

Terra Award, the first international prize for contemporary earthen architectures, has released a shortlist of 40 projects competing for awards in nine categories. The finalists selected span five continents and 67 countries. Each entry was evaluated on a range of topics including: architectural quality and landscape integration, environmental approach and energy performance, creativity and innovation, technical performance, local economy and social intensity, and showcasing of skills. Project materials range from light clay to cob, poured earth, wattle and daub, compressed earth block (CEB), adobe, rammed earth, and others.

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Hou de Sousa (Nancy Hou and Josh de Sousa) have recently won two competitions for temporary installations in Washington DC and New York, both using salvaged materials. The first, Raise/Raze, is the winning proposal for DC’s Dupont Underground, an abandoned trolley station repurposed as a contemporary arts and culture space. The project reuses the balls from Snarkitecture’s “The Beach” installation at the National Building Museum for a new environment-generating initiative, which opens on April 30.

As winners of the 2016 Folly Competition held by the Architectural League of New York, Hou de Sousa will also soon build a pavilion in Socrates Sculpture Park, in Queens. A simple wooden canopy, the structure is a multi-purpose space made of standard dimensional lumber, but has been accentuated with shingles of scrap wood found on-site. Known as Sticks, the pavilion will open to the public on July 9.

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A photo posted by Onch Movement | Jewelry (@onchmovement) on Apr 18, 2016 at 12:04am PDT

Coachella, the annual music festival that takes place in California's Colorado Desert, is a spectacle on numerous levels, but it is the associated visual artists, architects, sculptors, and designers that are an often overlooked element of event's success. Below are the best architectural installations of Coachella 2016.