Foster + Partners is designing Hotel 12, on the Ummahat AlShaykh Island in Saudi Arabia. Developed by the Red Sea Development Company (TRSDC), the project is one of two hotels on the island, the first being planned by Kengo Kuma.

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What kind of cities do we want to live in? What do we believe is important for a good life? And what makes a good home for all of us? SPACE10 with gestalten have teamed up to gather insights from world-renowned experts to explore a better urban future for humanity. Compiled in a book entitled The Ideal City, the findings draw five core principles: The city of tomorrow should be resourceful, accessible, shared, safe, and desirable.

Taking a holistic and multidisciplinary approach to rethinking how we could design, plan, build and share our cities going forward, the publication unfolds projects from 53 different cities in 30 different countries. Discover in this article, excerpts from the book, with the foreword by Bjarke Ingels and the last word by Xiye Bastida.

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This article was originally published on Common Edge.

Nathaniel Kahn’s 2003 documentary, My Architect, was at its beating heart a son’s search for his father. The film, which was nominated for an Academy Award and will be re-released later this year, explored the complicated domestic life of Louis Kahn: three children, by three different partners, all of whom were kept largely in the dark about the existence of each other. But the film was as much about the work of Louis Kahn as it was about his personal life. And, as a result, it ignited a renewed interest in his buildings, both in the mainstream culture and across architectural academia.

Foster + Partners has shared a new design for a hotel in Saudi Arabia set within sand dunes. Dubbed Southern Dunes, the project is part of The Red Sea Project tourist development. The hotel will include 40 villas that are constructed from timber and arranged to take advantage of surrounding views. Designed as part of the first phase of The Red Sea Project, it aims to be part of the world's "most ambitious" tourism development.

Design Base Architects have shared new details of Waimarino Luxury Lodge, a development on the shores of Lake Wakatipu in Queenstown, New Zealand. The high-end accommodation aspires to create a sustainable destination and an eco-conscious property that connects with nature through villas topped with living roofs. Waimarino – Maori for Still Waters – aims to be a modern, minimalist luxury that reimagines traditional hunting style lodges dotted across New Zealand.

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The College of Environmental Design (CED) at the University of California, Berkeley is offering a slate of introductory and advanced virtual programs for those interested in the fields of architecture, landscape architecture, environmental planning, urban design and sustainable city planning.

Foster + Partners is leading massive refurbishment works on a historic building in Madrid. The renovation project that will put in place an office building for Acciona, seeks to revitalize an abandoned old industrial building built in 1905, generating over 10,000 square-meters of new spaces.

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Kengo Kuma & Associates has designed a series of luxury villas for a new tourism development in Saudi Arabia. The project was commissioned by The Red Sea Development Company (TRSDC) as part of The Red Sea Project. Featuring seven typologies, the design will include villas built on land and overwater. The project aims to set new standards in sustainable development as a global tourism destination.

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Videos

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 Alessio Grancini, Prototype Engineer at Magic Leap and former Head of XR at Morphosis to discuss how VR can be used in architecture offices. The three cover basic terminology, software, workflows, costs, learning curves, using VR in the design process and for client presentations, the pros and cons of different headsets, controls, different types of rendering, the social implications of VR, and how he transitioned from architecture to the technology space. Enjoy!

The Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) has announced the selection of nimtim architects with artist Katie Schwab for the Becontree Estate’s public realm commission. Looking to redesign 12 neglected and underused corner plots across the estate, the project reimagines these areas as new civic squares in East London.

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Construction has begun on the new Red Sea International Airport by Foster + Partners in Saudi Arabia. The airport is located on the country's west coast, and is part of the larger Red Sea Project and tourism development. The design was inspired by the "colors and textures of the desert landscape" and will feature a series of five pod structures arranged radially around a central drop-off and pick-up space.

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Parking garages present an aesthetic challenge to even the most creative design minds. Their vast scale and monotonous appearance are necessitated by function, but result in the difficulty of making the garages visually interesting instead of simply overbearing. Cladding a parking garage in a unique material can add visual interest and texture to achieve a more human connection. However, this in turn creates concerns about still bringing light and air into the garage.

Scale defines spatial experience. From a single room or space to entire masterplans and urban designs, moving between scales shows how designers zoom in or out. Working across programs and contexts around the world, architects are exploring the possibilities of scale to shape human experience. For unbuilt work, these proposals combine ideas of structure, materiality and form to redefine typologies and the future of urban environments.

This week’s curated selection of the Best Unbuilt Architecture focuses on diverse scales of building. Drawn from an array of firms and local contexts, they represent proposals submitted by the ArchDaily Community. They showcase different approaches to designing at diverse scales, from the size of a single room to a high-rise. The projects include a log driving museum in Oslo and a center for health in Hawaii, to a laboratory in Shenzhen and a skyscraper in Costa Rica.

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Simply placing the word "smart" before any kind of architectural or technological term, or any term for that matter, seems to convert it into something new and futuristic. Some examples, such as the smart city, smart industry, or smart commerce show us that the "smart" adjective is already more common than we think, and that, moreover, it doesn’t sound that strange anymore. The smart building is also a novel concept used in today’s architectural world. The difficulty of discussing this concept, as with every innovative yet ambiguous term, is finding a clear definition of it. There is already much writing on it, and we won’t find an absolutely clear definition, but generally, we could define a smart building as: "A construction that strives for full energy efficiency in its usage, reaching this goal thanks to integrated and automated management and control of all its systems."

Brooks + Scarpa along with PCL and BEA, design/build team is one of three finalists selected for a new community mixed-use complex. Located in the heart of Miami Beach, just one block west of the beach, the structure that replaces a municipal surface parking lot, will include pools, libraries, retail, a community center, and a 3-acre park. Designed as a resiliency hub, the building can accommodate future residential and office use when less parking is needed.

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Construction has begun on MVRDV’s new 23-story mixed-use tproject at Mission Rock in San Francisco. One of four buildings in a multi-phase masterplan, the tower was designed alongside work by Studio Gang, Henning Larsen, and WORKac. The Mission Rock masterplan aims to turn 28 acres into a new neighborhood for San Francisco residents and visitors. The projects are made to connect to China Basin Park.

With the increase of urban density and the decrease in the availability of land, the verticalization phenomenon has intensified in cities all over the world. Similar to the vertical growth of buildings — which is often a divisive issue for architects and urban planners — many initiatives have sought in the vertical dimension a possibility to foster the use of vegetation in urban areas. Vertical gardens, farms and forests, rooftop vegetable gardens, and elevated structures for urban agriculture are some of the many possibilities of verticalization in plant cultivation, each with its unique characteristics and specific impacts on the city and its inhabitants.

But is verticalization the ideal solution to make cities greener? And what are the impacts of this action in urban areas? Furthermore, what benefits of urban plants are lost when adopting vertical solutions instead of promoting its cultivation directly on the ground?

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The 2020 COVID-19 outbreak has deeply redefined our relationship to public spaces. Fear of transmission (both direct and indirect) has closed schools, restaurants, office buildings, and transportation hubs, and has limited access to other densely populated locations and shared spaces. We have also learned that COVID-19 primarily transmits through the spread of water droplets from infected individuals, especially in scenarios of close contact, such as prolonged indoor activities. As a result, new building regulations have been put in place that reduce the circumstances in which the disease can spread. These safety precautions include mask mandates, redesign of ventilation systems, and social distancing policies. In this article, we will focus on social distancing.

It didn’t take long for the coronavirus pandemic to inspire both cutting-edge architectural design solutions and broad speculation about future developments in the field. Many of the realized innovations have been contracted by or marketed to the real estate sector. But as firms compete to provide pandemic comforts to rich tenants, the COVID-19 technology that directly affects working-class communities is mostly limited to restrictive measures that fail to address already-urgent residential health hazards or administrative conveniences for developers that allow them to circumvent public scrutiny. These changes had been long-planned, but they have found a new license under the pretext of coronavirus precaution. In terms of “corona grifting,” this sort of thing takes the cake.

Religion is a uniquely human reality. As are cities. As we emerge from our burrows of sequestration, the silent cities and places of worship will become human again, versus the present sad memory of what they once were.

We will recover from another human reality, the pandemic and when we do we will be forced to address some questions. Before this century, the automobile was once seen as the way Americans could create a new reality: a huge middle class that could control its life by using the freedom that cars gave them to go where they wanted, when they wanted, and to live where they wanted. Before this latest change of sequestration, that vision of what cars meant to our culture was changing —especially in cities.