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Sinaloa is a state located in the northwestern part of Mexico bordered by the states of Sonora, Chihuahua, Durango, Nayarit, and by the Gulf of California to the west. It consists of over 58200 km² of territory and is the agricultural hub of Mexico.

As reported in The Times of India, the board of governors for the Indian Institute of Management, in Ahmedabad, India has canceled the proposal to demolish Louis Kahn’s buildings on campus and replacing them with new structures, after a worldwide pushback from the international architecture community.

Architecture and urban design practice SeARCH has unveiled a design for a new timber housing project on Amsterdam's Haveneiland, IJburg. The team is working with care institution Amstelring, sustainability specialist DGMR and healthcare real estate investor Apollo Zorgvastgoedfonds on the sustainable development. The energy-neutral residential building, entitled Eyckstaete, will be the first timber residential building to offer sustainable housing for the elderly on IJburg.

The city of Laval, Québec’s 3rd largest city, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Senseable City Lab (SCL) have released six preliminary concepts exploring the “park of the future”. Investigating new experiences, the publication entitled “Senseable City Guide to Laval” is part of an on-going work “to develop a human-centered, innovative and resilient downtown area” located in the Carré Laval, a former quarry to be transformed into a mixed-use innovation district.

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COSA Colboc Sachet architectures has designed a "decarbonated cement and wood" public art school in Poitiers, France. Made for École Européenne Supérieure de l'Image - EESI, the design features a range of spaces for collaboration, making and digital training. The art school features an airy, light-filled interior, as well as a series of outdoor spaces and common areas that open to the district of Couronneries.

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The A’ Design Award is an international award whose aim is to provide designers, architects, and innovators from all design fields with a competitive platform to showcase their work and products to a global audience. Among the design world's many awards, the A' Design Award stands out for its exceptional scale and breadth, including over 100 award categories and having honored over 12,000 designers with an award over its 11-year lifetime.

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Dear community,

As we close this crazy 2020, we look back on what happened during the year, from the buildings that left an impact, to the fast changing trends in the profession and in our built environment.

But as we prepare for a challenging 2021 I want to share our reflections on these intense moments, which are not just a consequence of the pandemic, but also of the diverse and much needed social and cultural changes that have been unfolding during the last years. As a young and diverse Internet company, with a conscious and globally distributed team, we have been working during the last years to embrace change, as we think it is one of the attitudes that can prepare us for a world that is changing fast, on the intersection of two of the industries that are shaping society today: Internet and the built environment. To be ready for change is not easy, as we need to constantly challenge ourselves and our egos, and do things in new ways, in new contexts. But as 2020 demanded, we were ready.

The author or editor of over twenty books, Michael Sorkin was a renowned architect, urbanist, and writer. Principal and founder of Michael Sorkin Studios and president of the non-profit research group Terreform, a nonprofit urban research and advocacy center, Sorkin was especially famous for his writings for the Village Voice and the Nation. The Professor of Architecture and Director of the Graduate Program in Urban Design at the City College of New York who passed away earlier this year due to complications resulting from COVID-19 wrote the forward for Miró Rivera’s Monograph Miró Rivera Architects: Building a New Arcadia.

Landscape architecture practice Studio-MLA has been selected to design the new Community Park as part of the Fair Park Master Plan in Dallas, Texas. Replacing over one thousand parking spaces, the project will feature an 11-acre park with free programming for children, adults, and seniors. The team was chosen by Fair Park First, Spectra, and Biederman Redevelopment Ventures, and the new park will be the first project to come out of the Master Plan Update.

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The shortlist for the design of a 111-acres observatory urban park covering the Calan Hill in Santiago, Chile, has been officially released by a jury of experts.

Organized by the Municipality of Las Condes in collaboration with the University of Chile and the Cerros Isla Foundation, the competition seeks to choose the best architecture and landscape proposal for the design of a new urban natural park in Santiago: the Cerro Calan Observatory Urban Park (Parque Observatorio Cerro Calán)

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This article was originally published on Common Edge as "Presenting Architecture as Progressive, but Practicing Through Exclusion."

For a profession that likes to congratulate itself about how well-meaning it is, and sees itself as liberal, diverse, open, and progressive, British architecture has a serious problem with diversity of pretty much every kind. It is dominated by people from well-off backgrounds. It trains a lot of brilliant female architects but doesn’t pay them as much as men, and loses many of them after 30 when they are not supported in balancing work and family life. Its ethnic makeup is very, very white, considering that it’s 2020. A supposed beacon of success is the acceptance of the LGBTQ community within the field, but as with women and those from and religious and ethnic minorities, stories of unprofessional comments, inappropriate jokes, and insidious forms of jovially “innocent” othering and the diminution of identity-specific concerns abound.

In order to create vibrant public spaces, people need to have a constant presence in these locations, whether they are on their own or in groups. In fact, they need to linger in these places and establish social interactions. To do so, one major element has to be incorporated into the urban setting: the bench.

This seating feature, simple or high tech, insures firstly the comfort of the passersby and animates the area consequently, through the addition of the missing human aspect. Sometimes, this is all it takes to revive a space that became a dull passage. The most basic urban design component can take many forms and can be created from different materials, always generating a statement and serving its purpose.

The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame announced that Practice for Architecture and Urbanism (PAU) has won the competition to design its expansion in downtown Cleveland. Designed to help preserve rock and roll history, the extension includes internal and external gathering spaces for the community to learn and celebrate together. Serving as a connector to the Great Lakes Science Center, the expansion will bring more space for visitors, concerts and community events.

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In 1941, Swiss engineer George de Mestral was coming back from a hunting trip with his dog when he noticed that some seeds kept sticking to his clothes and his dog's fur. He observed that they contained several "hooks" that caught on anything with a loop, and from studying this plant, seven years later, he invented the hook and loop fastener, which he named Velcro.

Argentine environmental artist Tomás Saraceno has recently unveiled his latest venture at Moscow’s Garage Museum of Contemporary Art. On view and remaining until February 14, 2021, the installation entitled Moving Atmospheres, is a partially mirrored sphere suspended midair in the museum’s atrium, made from ETFE.

Design collective Mutual Atelier has won the competition to create a new Central Square in Rahovec, Kosovo. One of numerous proposals that explored new solutions to the square, the design was selected for its elegant formal solution and careful consideration of Rahevec’s city center. The scheme's circular form was made to provide a memorable identity for Rohevec’s city center and encourage public life to thrive.

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ELEMENTAL presents a sneak peek of its contribution to "How will we live together?" at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2021. Recently, violence has increased in the historical Mapuche-Chilean conflict, that is why the architectural office proposed to build places that recover the old tradition of parleys, spaces to meet in order to settle differences and discuss terms for an armistice.

Videos

Architects, not Architecture is turning five and is celebrating it with a Virtual World Tour. With its new event series, „AnA“ brings the architectural community a bit closer together by taking participants on a tour around the globe to “visit” selected cities and virtually meet some of their most relevant architects.