Once The Hyatt Foundation has revealed the announcement date of the 2022 Pritzker Prize Laureates, the speculation has begun to swirl around which architect or architects will be honored with the architecture's highest award.

Foster + Partners has been chosen by Masterise Homes to serve as Architectural Advisors for the development of The Global City, an all-inclusive neighborhood in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam and the first of its kind in the country for the architecture office. The practice will provide innovative and sustainable design solutions for a fully-integrated master plan that features a full range of facilities, residential units, and connections to highways, major roads, and metro lines.

Paris City Council granted final approval to Gustafson Porter + Bowman's landscape design for the Eiffel Tower site. The project is the result of a 2019 international competition that sought to redesign the 2-kilometre axis leading up to the Eiffel Tower, connecting Place du Trocadéro, Palais de Chaillot, Pont d'Iéna, Champ de Mars and the Military Academy. The landscape plan redefines this iconic green space in Paris by increasing green areas by 35% and adding over 200 new trees, in addition to pedestrianizing the Iena bridge.

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Nowadays, the role of architects exceeds the limits of construction, reaching fields that are often unthinkable, but which nonetheless demonstrate a close relationship with the profession. If we go back in time, the fact is that many buildings, houses, monuments and even cities have been built intuitively without urban planning or renowned architects. Undoubtedly, today's architects are facing a great challenge that goes beyond demonstrating our skills and knowledge and extends to other areas that involve us, but we still don't know it. So we ask ourselves, what will be the profile of the architect of the future?

Student housing takes on many forms around the world, but most commonly, it’s envisioned as close quarters in a bleakly designed dormitory. While prospective students choose universities based on academic rigor, athletic programs, extracurricular activities, and future career opportunities, they’re now wanting to know what living on and off-campus will be like- and it has forced designers to rethink the traditional designs of dormitories into something more innovative that better reflects what students want (and expect) in their university homes.

The "2022 Pritzker Architecture Prize Laureate will be announced on March 15th at 10 am EST", states the official website of the Prize. Architecture's most relevant recognition is set to reveal its laureate(s) next week, aligned with the usual March announcement. “Architecture’s Nobel Prize” has been honoring every year, since 1979, a living architect or architects with significant achievements to humanity and the built environment.

Videos

Exterior doors provide a sense of security and define first impressions, which is beautifully demonstrated in the pivot door presented above (designed and crafted in Europe by Air-Lux). On the other hand, inside of a house, interior doors are capable of generating privacy, buffering noise, separating rooms and enhancing a room’s architecture. Therefore, in order to fulfill these needs – and considering that they are used multiple times a day – interior doors must be durable and timeless without sacrificing beauty and style. Among all the options that meet these criteria, pivot doors stand out because of their elegant movement, aesthetics and versatility. With a sleek contemporary design that exceeds the regular function of a traditional door, these swinging doors rotate on a vertical axis with nearly invisible hardware, taking on any type of décor, use and measurement with endless creative possibilities.

The British Council has announced that Jayden Ali, Joseph Henry, Meneesha Kellay and Sumitra Upham will be the curatorial team that will represent Great Britain at the 18th International Architecture Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia. The team will transform the British Pavilion into celebratory spaces that "embrace collective construction methods and processes that avoid exploiting people and the planet". The 18th International Architecture Exhibition will be held from May 20th until November 26th, 2023.

Since 2017, UN-Habitat, together with Shigeru Ban Architects, Philippe Monteil and the NGO Voluntary Architects' Network, developed several shelter typologies for a pilot neighborhood in Kalobeyei Settlement in Kenya. The Turkana Houses are meant to house South Sudanese and other refugees living in Northern Kenya who could not return to their original villages due to endless civil wars and conflicts. Unlike typical refugee shelters, these structures were meant to provide a home for long periods of displacement and the four typologies developed are informed by the extensive experience of Shigeru Ban Architects with disaster relief projects and the local building techniques of local people.

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In apartments and small houses, the rest and entertainment spaces tend to share the same environment, making the living room fully oriented towards the television. But what to do when television is removed from space? Here are ideas on how to organize the living room without having the television as the main object of the room.

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Modern interior living environments’ fine-tuned lightscapes feature a delicate mix of ambient, task, and accent lighting to perfectly balance performance and pleasure. But one area of a home’s visibility that’s still so easily overlooked is the exterior.

The Second Studio (formerly The Midnight Charette) is an explicit podcast about design, architecture, and the everyday. Hosted by Architects David Lee and Marina Bourderonnet, it features different creative professionals in unscripted conversations that allow for thoughtful takes and personal discussions.

A variety of subjects are covered with honesty and humor: some episodes are interviews, while others are tips for fellow designers, reviews of buildings and other projects, or casual explorations of everyday life and design. The Second Studio is also available on iTunes, Spotify, and YouTube.

This week David and Marina are joined by Photographer Iwan Baan to discuss his career, how he became a most sought-after architectural photographer, working with Rem Koolhaas, his process, his style of architectural photography, documenting structures during construction and after completion, vernacular architecture, and more.

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Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, in partnership with Atlanta’s Goode Van Slyke Architecture (GVSA), have unveiled Centennial Yards' first ground-up tower. Titled One Centennial Yards, the project will feature 28 stories and over 500,000 square feet of office space, 19,000 square feet of amenities, and 21,980 square feet of outdoor spaces, all aligned with the innovative, health, and wellness goals of the Foster + Partners designed master plan.

Sharjah Architecture Triennial (SAT) announced the appointment of architect Tosin Oshinowo as the curator of its second edition, which will open in 2023. From its inaugural edition of 2018, the triennial established itself as an international platform highlighting the architecture of West and South Asia, as well as the African continent. Oshinowo’s appointment is prompted by the architect’s socially responsive approaches to architecture and her deep knowledge of the African architectural and urban context. Her work reflects SAT’S mission to pursue a multidisciplinary design approach “that fosters an understanding of the broader role of architecture, including its relation to social and environmental issues.”

According to the architect and researcher Patrícia Akinaga, ecological urbanism emerged at the end of the 20th century as a strategy to create a paradigm shift with regard to the design of cities. With this, urban projects should be designed from the potential and limitations of existing natural resources. Unlike other previous movements, in ecological urbanism architecture is not the structuring element of the city — the landscape itself is. In other words, green areas should not only exist to beautify spaces, but as true engineering artifacts with the potential to dampen, retain and treat rainwater, for example. With ecological urbanism, urban design becomes defined by the natural elements intrinsic to its fabric.

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This article was originally published on Common Edge.

In case you missed it, our world continues, after two years, to suffer cultural spasms in response to unseen, unrelenting, and deadly infective agents that continue to wash over entire populations, spreading fear, illness, and death. 

The U.S. is also suffering a quieter—but equally invasive—architectural plague, metastasizing into every part of the country. This architectural contagion has largely escaped criticism, but not since the raised ranch has an architectural “type” so fully transformed communities. In the 1950s, thousands upon thousands of dumbed-down Prairie Home allusions swept across fallow suburban farm fields like a wildfire. More than style, the half-buried lower level and split floors (one half-stair run apart) were a new way to explore how buildings could house people, especially in rapidly suburbanizing America.

The World Monuments Fund has released its 2022 World Monuments Watch list, a selection of 25 sites from across the globe that hold great cultural and heritage significance but are being faced with economic, political or natural threats. This year's selection highlights themes of global issues such as climate change, imbalanced tourism, underrepresentation, and recovery from crisis, urging for prompt preservation plans.

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Construction technology company ICON unveiled its newest 3D-printed project, “House Zero”, designed by Texas-based firm Lake|Flato Architects. The project is the first in ICON’s “Exploration Series,” which seeks to highlight the architectural possibilities enabled by additive construction and develop new design languages with the purpose of “shifting the paradigm of homebuilding”. The material honesty of the house combines the expression of robotic construction processes with the natural wood textures creating a timeless design.