Creating a model for rendering does have its own set of rules. To get you up and rendering as quickly as possible, here are SketchUp's top five tips for prepping your SketchUp model for rendering.

The Prequalification Meeting of the International Competition for the Landmark Design of Qianhai New City Center was held in Banquet Hall, 3F, Tower C, MingWah International Convention Centre on May 20, 2019. The jury was made up of 7 experts and 2 client representatives. The jury studied the registration documents and conceptual proposals of the 124 applicants. After deep discussion, through 5 rounds of open votes the jury selected 10 shortlisted competitors into the competition and 2 alternatives in order who will enter Stage 2 - Proposal Preparation and Review by order if any of the 10 competitors quit.

Architecture firm ARCHSLON has designed a black residence for the forests outside Moscow. Taking inspiration from Russia's landscape, the house was made to integrate the building into the picturesque natural context with minimal impact to the forest. Aiming to preserve as many trees as possible and create a modern dwelling, the home was made to add depth to the surrounding forest.

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Archimatika has designed a modern high rise residential scheme for Manhattan. “The Snail” prioritizes slow living in the high-paced metropolis, providing residential amenities usually lacking in typical Manhattan housing. While proposing a departure from New York City’s fast-paced lifestyle, the scheme blends with the city’s urban fabric with mosaic concrete facades over a steel frame structure.

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Architectural photographer Kris Provoost has published his latest series, on the subject of Steven Holl’s Sliced Porosity Block in Chengdu, China. Designed in 2007, and completed five years later, the scheme sought to break the standard typology of Chinese cities, bringing public interaction to new heights. Six years on from the building’s completion, Provoost captured the building immersed in the daily life of Chengdu citizens.

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Some assembly required for this vision of future urban living. Known for simple, well-designed, flat-pack furniture, IKEA is proposing expanding their DIY-model to a much larger scale: entire city centers. Democratic Design Days is an annual event where IKEA introduces its upcoming brands and collaborations, this year featuring The Urban Village Project, a collaboration between SPACE10 and EFFEKT Architects. After two years of research, SPACE10 (IKEA’s global research and design lab) is releasing their vision to the public for a new way to design, build, and share our homes, neighborhoods, and cities.

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This article was made in partnership with Design Indaba, a website and annual festival that uncovers innovation for good. Click here to learn more about the annual event.

Dong-Ping Wong has created exceptional interior spaces, residential and commercial buildings, and public spaces for some of the biggest names and brands in the world. During his Design Indaba talk, the architect chose to design a city in 15 minutes with the help of fashion designer Virgil Abloh, who was on a live video call with the architect during the presentation.

As an entry to the 2019 Evolo Skyscraper Competition, JCPOA Tower was designed to combine cryptocurrency mining with a water park. Created by Ilia Attarpour, Dadbeh Mohebbi Gilani, and Ramtin Taherian, the project considered the US economic sanctions on Iran and the geopolitical crisis around the country's currency devaluation and near economic collapse. The designers proposed a cryptocurrency mining tower under the cover of its secondary water park function. The skyscraper explores how sanctions can be manipulated as a way out of crisis.

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The Elmhurst Art Museum has unveiled details of a new installation taking place in the Mies van der Rohe-designed McCormick House in Chicago. Designed by Luftwerk, a Chicago-based artistic collaborative of Petra Bachmaier and Sean Gallero, the “Parallel Perspectives” installation is a site-specific exhibition that uses color and light interventions to activate and interpret the house, celebrating the use of geometry in the mid-Century prefab prototype.

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The shortlist has been announced for the design of the National Pulse Memorial & Museum in Orlando, Florida, honoring the 49 people killed during the Pulse nightclub shooting on June 12th, 2016. Established by Dovetail Design Strategists for the onePULSE Foundation, the open, two-stage international competition seeks to honor those killed while also supporting the families, survivors, and first responders.

Startup UpCodes has created a free, searchable database of building codes, and the company is at the center of a lawsuit by the International Codes Council. The ICC writes the most widely used building codes in the United States, and they claim they have copyright over the codes and require a license fee for their use. UpCodes argues it is covered by the fair use doctrine, which permits some use of copyrighted material, but the ICC alleges its copyright and ability to raise revenue is being infringed upon. Central to the lawsuit is the question of whether the law can be copyrighted.

As a firm which has already won major awards, worked on culturally significant projects on a large scale, and generally achieved substantial success and recognition in just over 10 years, SO-IL seem to straddle a line between being an “emerging” and an “established” practice. Florian Idenburg and Jing Liu founded SO-IL (Solid Objectives-Idenburg Liu) in 2008 and have since gained a reputation for modern, clean-lined designs, but often with a unique material twist.

YACademy launches the first edition of Architecture for Workplaces, a high-level training course offering 8 scholarships and internships in internationally-renowned architectural firms.

102 hours of lessons, a 30-hour workshop, lectures and placement opportunities in internationally-renowned architectural firms like UNStudio, Alfonso Femia, L22, Morphosis, 3XN, and Amdl Michele De Lucchi.

This Article was originally published on Metropolismag.com.

The Conserving Modern Architecture Initiative (CMAI) and Keeping It Modern grant are dedicated to supporting new methods and technologies for the conservation of Modernist buildings.

Architects always find themselves searching for the most innovative ways of presenting their projects, going for elaborate models or Virtual Reality technologies driven by a passion for design, building, and creation. Perhaps this passion of architecture was triggered at an age earlier than expected, playing around with LEGO’s.

Now that LEGO has created an architecture-themed collection, the brand gave architecture lovers the opportunity to explore famous landmarks and recreate their structures with basic geometric blocks. Innovative architecture firm WAY Studio discovered the possibilities of model-making with LEGO’s and used its blocks as a design tool for a series of their projects.

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One of the most enigmatic and underappreciated architects of the 20th century, Carlo Scarpa (June 2, 1906 – November 28, 1978) is best known for his instinctive approach to materials, combining time-honored crafts with modern manufacturing processes. In a 1996 documentary directed by Murray Grigor, Egle Trincanato, the President of the Fondazione Querini Stampalia for whom Scarpa renovated a Venetian palace in 1963, described how "above all, he was exceptionally skillful in knowing how to combine a base material with a precious one."

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Arguably the leading name of a generation of internationally high-profile British architects, Norman Foster (born 1 June 1935)—or to give him his full title Norman Robert Foster, Baron Foster of Thames Bank of Reddish, OM, HonFREng—gained recognition as early as the 1970s as a key architect in the high-tech movement, which continues to have a profound impact on architecture as we know it today.

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This article was made in partnership with Design Indaba, a website and annual festival that uncovers innovation for good. Click here to learn more about the annual event.

It took a few years and multiple failed career attempts for renowned minimalist designer John Pawson to truly enter the world of architecture. Though he’d cultivated an interest in design from a young age, he’d initially shied away due to his beliefs that he needed to be good at math and that design was an innate skill rather than something that could be taught.

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Persian architecture studio Fundamental Approach Architects have won first prize in the Golshahr Mosque and Plaza National Design Competition in Iran, proposing an atypical mosque design for the city of Karaj.

The winning proposal bypasses traditional mosque designs, blurring the lines between the contemporary structure, the city, and the surrounding landscape.

The Royal Architectural Institute of Canada (RAIC) has recently announced the shortlist for the RAIC International Award 2019, highlighting socially-transformative architecture around the world.

In this edition of the award, the jury was composed of Anne Carrier, Stephen Hodder, Barry Johns, Eva Matsuzaki, Diarmuid Nash, Gilles Saucier and David Covo. Analyzing projects from 12 countries and six continents, the jury selected an educational building in Perú, an artist residency and cultural center in Senegal and a spiritual temple in Chile for the shortlist.

Turkey-based firm Melike Altınışık Architects have released more details on the construction of Istanbul's 369-meter-tall Çamlıca TV and Radio Tower, including photographs by London-based architectural photography studio NAARO. The telecommunications tower evokes a sense of motion and rhythm within its silhouette that changes when viewed from different directions across the city.

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Daniel Libeskind has collaborated with photographer Caryl Englander and curator Henri Lustiger Thaler from the Amud Aish Memorial Museum to present a temporary exhibition at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. “Through the Lens of Faith” opens on July 1st, 2019, marking the 75th anniversary of the concentration camp’s liberation in 1945.

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