Egyptian architect, Ahmed Zayed has shared his design proposal for the 2012 London Olympic Games, a interactive installation along one of the iconic structures of London. Additional images and a brief description after the break.

Los Angeles-based HMC Architects shared with us their proposal for the Kaohsiung Port and Cruise Service Terminal Competition in Taiwan. They were selected as one of the five finalists. More images and press release after the break.

D3 Architectes has shared with ArchDaily his proposal for the Guyane Memory Center in Cayenne, French Guiana. Read more about this project after the break complete with additional images.

Salvaged Layers; a Collaborative Site Specific Performance project was an interdisciplinary collaboration between two groups of students from separate Universities. The studio challenged students to explore issues of craft, making and place through a series of full scale built interventions in a historic Indianapolis theatre which had been gutted in anticipation of a planned renovation. The raw state of the theatre’s interior gave students a rich and evocative palette to engage while simultaneously liberating them from the conventional notions of stage and audience.

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Architects: Students of Ball State University Department of Architecture; Faculty Coordinator Timothy Gray, Gray Architecture Location: 5505 E Washington Street, Indianapolis, Indiana, USA Project Team: Mark Vanden Akker, Austin Lucari, Jay Weeks, Brad Wanek, Veronica Eulacivo, Eric Jenson, Michael Neizer, Paul Reynolds, Greg Hittler, Luke Haas, Ben Greenberg; (Butler University) Jacqueline Vouga, Jeff Irlbeck, Jill Harman, Amanda Lynn Meyer, Amanda Miller, Joe Esbenshade, Chris Ziegler, Jessica Conger, Steph Gray, and Butler University Faculty Coordinator Melli Hoppe Client: Dale Harkin, Irving Theatre Project Year: 2010 Photographs: Greg Hittler, Courtesy of Gray Architecture

Authors: Aksel Karcher, Martin Krautter, David Kuntzsch, Thomas Schielke, Christoph Steinke, Mariko Takagi Publishers: Tim Henrik Maack, Kay Pawlik First Edition: 2009 ISBN: 978-3-9813216-1-6

More info after the break.

Hungary based studio Atelier Architects recently received a special mention for their Artist’s Colony Market design in a “market of the future” competition organized by Spanish architectural network Opengap. Details of the competition can be seen HERE and additional images and a description of Atelier Architects proposal can be found after the break.

Sao Paulo-based AUM arquitetos have won a competition to design the Regional Council of Administration in Santa Catarina, Brazil. More images and architect’s description after the break.

The partnership of Ian Douglas-Jones and Ben Rousseau has created the Legacy of the River Suite at this years Ice Hotel to commemorate the release of Disney’s new film, TRON: Legacy. You can follow the progress of the suite at the project’s website, Extreme-Design, as well as reading on after the break for additional photos and a brief description.

Five amazing housing project back from 2009 for you to remember, and enjoy. Check them all after the break.

Quinta Monroy / Elemental The Chilean Government asked us to resolve the following equation: To settle the 100 families of the Quinta Monroy, in the same 5,000 sqm site that they have illegally occupied for the last 30 years which is located in the very center of Iquique, a city in the Chilean desert (read more…)

This article is co-authored by Sherin Wing

It’s the season for end-of-year juries before everyone escapes to the sanity of real life. And true to expectations, horror stories abound about instructors and jurors.

Here is one story: a student at a well-known Southern California program said that after spending five straight days at studio without returning home once (he clearly didn’t read The 101 in re: change your underwear and it’s not medicine), his instructor approached him and said one thing: “You’re F%#@$!”

Hey, thanks for that helpful and really insightful advice!

And if that weren’t enough, this same instructor had embarked on a campaign of concerted humiliation of this student, teasing him not just to himself, but repeatedly in front of his entire studio class regarding another student he supposedly had a crush on. That is clear harassment and she should not only be fired, but she is opening up the entire school to a lawsuit.

More after the break.

Here is a short clip from SO-IL about their MoMA P.S.1 installation in motion. Pole Dance was the 2010 P.S.1 Competition winner, and ArchDaily visited the installation and interviewed the Brooklyn based firm. We featured the video interview with SO-IL last month, take a look.

A project for Downtown Fargo: an urban infill competition in North Dakota, F9 Productions began with the question: what would make Fargo grow? They are asking people to imagine if a prairie could become a building’s coat, what could it look like? Can the mighty Red River inform how pedestrians flow though the site? And what form can symbolize the regions enduring strength?

Their solution is to capitalize on the very resources that have been fertilizing this area for the past 100 years – its people and its local businesses. The proposed design is to infuse downtown Fargo with two big box stores that have, that in the recent past, fled to the suburbs. By bringing in Scheels and Trader Joes, along with a much needed Children’s Museum and prominent public plaza they aim to resurrect the downtown life that was once there. More images and architect’s description after the break.

Studio Mode/modeLab is pleased to announce the third installment of the coLab workshop series: Hybrid Prototypes. Hybrid Prototypes is a two-day intensive design and prototyping workshop (with an optional third day) to be held in New York City during the weekend of January 08, 2011. Further information and registration can be found below. We hope to see you next month!

Rotterdam based Studio Marco Vermeulen has shared with ArchDaily their recent proposal for a housing block competition in Moscow. Additional images and a brief architects description after the break.

Amanda Levete Architects, AL_A, has just shared the news that their Central Embassy building is set to start on site this February. Situated along Ploenchit Road, Bangkok’s primary commercial artery, the 1.5 million sq ft project merges a 7 storey luxury retail podium and a 30 storey 5 star hotel tower into a twisting shape. The form marks a grand gesture for the city, as the curved mass climbs high into the sky creating an identifying mark for the area. The interiors are flooded with natural light as the form wraps around two vertical light wells, revealing stepped terraces and vertical gardens.

More about the project after the break.

Located in Kenmore, Washington the new Bastyr University Student Village accommodates 132 students amongst 11 three-story free-standing cottages. The design-rich and eco-friendly village, by CollinsWoerman, was originally designed to meet LEED Gold, however the project exceeded expectations and earned LEED Platinum certification while being completed under budget and ahead of schedule. The student village achieved 34 percent energy savings over more traditional multifamily projects and diverted 97 percent of construction waste from landfills through careful teamwork and planning. The award is the top honor the USGBC makes for multifamily projects.

Bastyr University student village was awarded the Outstanding Multifamily Project in the 2010 LEED for Homes Awards from the US Green Building Council.

More photographs and drawings of this project following the break.

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Architects: CollinsWoerman Location: Kenmore, Washington, USA Design Team: Pat Logan, John Aldredge, Sarah Reisenauer and Brian Walters Project Year: 2010 Photographs: Lara Swimmer and Karen Steichen/CollinsWoerman

We received the following exhibition by Chandler Ahrens and John Carpenter. It is located in Brooklyn, New York City, and it was inaugurated on the occasion of the conference ACADIA 2010 LIFE in:formation hosted by The Cooper Union. It examines concepts, tools and technologies that implement responsive and generative aspects of information in the design process.

The exhibition chairs are Chandler Ahrens, Michael W. Su and Axel Schmitzberger and conference chairs are Pablo Lorenzo-Eiroa, Aaron Sprecher and Shai Yeshauyahu.

Further information and photos after the break.

With almost 35,000 photos from our Flickr Pool, we decided to feature this section on a weekly basis. So starting today, your Best from Flickr Round Up comes every Thursday! As always, remember you can submit your own photo here, and don’t forget to follow us through Twitter and our Facebook Fan Page to find many more features.

The photo above was taken by andrEs Af in Barcelona, Spain. Check the other four after the break.

Dutch urban planners POSAD, shared with us their proposal for the Solar Park South Competition in Italy, for which they received an honourable mention. More images and press release after the break.

Here’s a video about Unsolicited Architecture, a collaborative workshop initiated by Studio-X Rio + NAI in Rio de Janeiro Brazil. In a 24 hour time period four teams were formed, four neighborhoods were explored (they each explored the neighborhood where the local architect’s office is located), held a brainstorming session, and then presented their ideas – zero clients, zero budget.

“Ninety-eight percent of buildings are boxes, which tells me that a lot of people are in denial. We live and work in boxes. People don’t even notice that. Most of what’s around us is banal. We live with it. We accept it as inevitable. People say, ‘This is the world the way it is, and don’t bother me.’ Then when somebody does something different, real architecture, the push-back is amazing. People resist it. At first it’s new and scary.”

“The thing is, I hate the celebrity architect thing. I just do my work. The press comes up with this stuff and it sticks. I hate the word starchitect. Stuff like that comes from mean-spirited, untalented journalists. It’s demeaning. It’s derisive, and once it’s said, it sticks. I get introduced all the time, ‘Here’s starchitect Frank Gehry…’ My reaction: ‘What the fuck are you talking about?‘”

Don´t miss Frank Ghery’s epic interview on the January issue of Playboy.

More snippets of the interview after the break:

This competition entry for a settlement in Russia by F A S(t) concentrates on the vernacular of traditional Russian architecture. The five building volumes follow Russian building tradition by flaunting accentuated profiles that stand out and are noticeable in the skyline. In addition, they all have an internal organization and relationship to one another that provides for social events to flourish at ground level, also an aspect of Russian design strategies.

For more on this project come back after the break.

There’s still a long road to FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022, but the design and construction of the 12 stadiums has already started. We will be featuring as many as we can, for you to see how will future stadiums look like. To start, sports architecture experts, Populous, shared with us their design for the Sports City Stadium, located along the Persian Gulf in the eastern coastal city of Doha. More images and complete architect’s description after the break.

IVANISIN. KABASHI. ARHITEKTI won the open international competition for their design intervention at the River Piva in Mratinje, Montenegro in 2009. The design strategy was to illuminate the natural and engineered elements of the site, located at the Piva-Mratinje Hydro-Power Plant, built in 1975 at the narrowest point of the river. As a whole, the intervention is located on the sunny end of the damn in front of the concrete reinforcement of the cliff.

Conceived in five phases, the architecture is designed in such a way that it can become occupiable at any stage of completion. The project consists of five elements: Tower-Down, Plateau, Tower-Up, Bridge, and Floating Platform. These magnifiers of natural and technological elements seek to address the humility of architecture in this sublime junction of the natural and man-made.

Read on for more on this project after the break.