'Cities for Play' is a project whose main objective is to inspire architects and urban planners to create stimulating, respectful, and accessible cities for children.

Natalia Krysiak, its creator, is an Australian architect who believes that children's needs should be placed at the center of urban design to ensure resilient and sustainable communities. In 2017, she produced 'Cities for Play,' studying examples of cities that are concerned with providing environments that are capable of promoting the health and well-being – physical and emotional – of children through a focus on play and "active mobility” in public spaces.

Pritzker Prize 2020 Laureates, Irish architects Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara are known for their powerful yet delicate approaches. In this exclusive video for ArchDaily, Martha Thorne, executive director of the Pritzker Architecture Prize and Dean of IE School of Architecture and Design, shares some of the reasons why Grafton Architects has won the Pritzker Prize 2020.

The British Council has announced that curators Manijeh Verghese and Madeleine Kessler will represent the UK at the 17th International Architecture Exhibition at the Venice Biennale 2020. Selected from a shortlist of nine proposals, the winning project entitled “The Garden of Privatised Delights”, explores the creeping epidemic of privatized public spaces across cities in the UK.

Videos

“When you read Love in the Time of Cholera you come to realize the magic realism of South America.” Yvonne Farrell, Shelley McNamara and I were in a corner of the Barbican Centre’s sprawling, shallow atrium talking about the subject of their most recent accolade, the Royal Institute of British Architects inaugural International Prize, awarded that previous evening. That same night the two Irish architects, who founded their practice in Dublin in the 1970s, also delivered a lecture on the Universidad de Ingeniería and Tecnologia (UTEC)—their “modern-day Machu Picchu” in Lima—to a packed audience in London’s Portland Place.

A new building in Antarctica breaks ground at the Rothera Research Station. Designed by Hugh Broughton Architects, the project commissioned by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), aims to facilitate the British Antarctic Survey’s (BAS) ongoing climate-related research.

The Hungarian Pavilion at the 2020 Venice Biennale will feature the work of twelve design studios that will reconsider twelve iconic modernist buildings in Budapest. For the 17th International Architecture Exhibition, the pavilion's curator Dániel Kovács wants to explore the value and heritage of architectural modernism to reconcile past and future architecture.

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Architectural rendering and visualization have become crucial tools in the art of communication. From client presentations to internal design reviews, showing your 3D models in lifelike, beautiful environments can convey both practical information about the project’s development, as well as the feeling and experience of a space.

Space Saloon and Designers on Holiday have announced DeSaturated, a week-long interdisciplinary community-in-residence design festival in California's Cuyama Valley. Following the success of the first two iterations, LANDING and FIELDWORKS, the team is returning to California once more. The community-in-residence program will bring together designers, artists and researchers to address issues of water scarcity.

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With residential developments offering ever-smaller housing units, the challenge for architects and interior designers to develop compact and multifunctional solutions for interior projects increases. From this perspective, it is increasingly common for professionals to focus on their clipboards in creating new solutions for joinery and multifunctional furniture that allow the space to transform completely in a few seconds, such as strategic cabinets and bookcases to supply the lack of storage space; sliding furniture on rails or pulleys; cabinets that turn into beds through vertical rotation; drawers in stairways, etc.

This year, architecture’s highest honor, the Pritzker Prize, has been granted to Grafton Architects' Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara of Dublin, Ireland. The 2020 Laureates, who are both educators and architects, are known for their powerful yet delicate approaches. Their contextual and modern interventions are very attentive to history, demonstrating high levels of sensitivity and craftsmanship.

With more than 40 years of professional experience, Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara, partners and co-founders of Dublin-based Grafton Architects, are the first women to be jointly awarded the architecture’s highest honor, the Pritzker Prize. In addition to a very welcoming breath of hope towards greater female representation in the field, the selection also cast light over an equally urgent theme in the profession: recognizing architecture practice as a collective effort.

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Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara founded Grafton Architects in 1978, after they met each other at the School of Architecture at University College Dublin. The practice, named after the street where the duo's first office was located, has been awarded this year’s prestigious 2020 Pritzker Award. Grafton's built work reflects the continued search of architectural excellence, in buildings ranging from small scale housing to large public volumes.

Australian architecture is rooted in the land. From environmental and climatic concerns to the country's unique cultural background, the built environment down under is defined by a history of connections to local contexts. Today, Australian architecture has also come to embrace a multicultural identity, with a new class of cultural projects showcasing how contemporary buildings and structures are being designed for the future.

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NextOffice has created a space where engineers can gather and communicate with each other. Located in Mashhad, Iran, the 14 200 square meter development was inspired directly from traditional Iranian constructions, with the implementation of a structural void that generates the rest of the morphology and defines access.

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JMC Holdings unveiled images of a 21-story office building in Pittsburgh’s 1501 Penn Ave. Designed by Brandon Haw Architecture, an international architecture studio based in New York, in collaboration with the AM/Woolly Group, the new commercial structure is LEED-certified.

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Door handles are a ubiquitous part of daily life, being used constantly in almost every space but rarely given thought by the passing user. Nevertheless, the chosen material of each handle can vary widely in terms of aesthetics, durability, and sustainability, with good choices going noticeably right and poor choices going noticeably wrong. For objects that are seen and used multiple times every day without fail, it’s imperative that designers get the choice right.

To deepen this topic, FSB helps us to lay out the properties of four of the most common handle materials below, allowing you to make an informed decision on which material aligns best with your project’s needs.

Since the winner(s) of the Pritzker Prize 2020 will be announced this Tuesday, March 3, we have asked our readers who should win the most important award in the field of architecture.

AMO, the think tank of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), co-founded by Rem Koolhaas and led by Samir Bantal, has announced a recent research collaboration with Volkswagen. Focused on rural areas and the countryside, the partnership will look into the future of rural mobility, through a first conceptual study on electric tractors.

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BIG has just released images of No 1 Quayside, its latest office building in Newcastle. Designed in collaboration with local studio Xsite Architecture, the project’s curvature is directly inspired by the bridges over the River Tyne and the sloping neighboring hills.

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Today marks the start of the registration phase for the international ICONIC AWARDS 2020: Innovative Architecture. These awards recognize the best of architecture and innovative interior and product design, as well as outstanding communication concepts and singularly innovative materials. The winners will be honored at the awards ceremony on 5 October 2020 at the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich, where they will have ample opportunity to network with other players on both the national and international scene.

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Architecture and engineering firm HED has broken ground on the new Lynda and Stewart Resnick Student Union at Fresno State. Working with McCarthy Building Companies, the team created the design for the California State University to enhance campus paths of travel to invite students and visitors into the new center for student life. In turn, the design will provide additional space for a growing student population.

As one of the oldest building materials, dating back to at least 7500 BCE, brick is often thought of as a traditional, classic option for a building facade. Throughout its long history, however, the brick industry has changed and modernized to remain architecturally relevant. Innovations in brick construction continue to provide new opportunities for designs that combine the warmth and character of a natural material with the efficiency and aesthetics of a modern building. 

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