The winning proposal for the Albi Major Theatre, designed by Dominique Perrault Architecture, aims at transforming the texture of the city as well as its cultural influence. Appearing as an outstanding architectural symbol, on the outskirts of the historic center, the architects gave priority to the presence of the Major Theatre instead of the cinemas, in order to organize around it a network of public spaces and of cultural facilities. Therefore, the Major Theatre will be its center. More images and architects’ description after the break.

Coinciding with the exhibition Alturas de Macchu Picchu: Martín Chambi – Álvaro Siza at work on view at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) for an extended run until 29 April 2012, Pritzker prize-winning architect Álvaro Siza will give a not-to-be-missed lecture on Thursday 26 April 2012 at 7 pm at the CCA. The event is a rare opportunity to hear the preeminent architect speak in person. Siza’s lecture discusses his design development of the Iberê Camargo Museum in Porto Alegre, Brazil, completed in 2008 and noted for its sculptural volumes and tight integration with a coastal escarpment. As with all of Siza’s projects, hand sketches play a key role in the design process, from massing studies to fine-tuning details. For more information, please visit here.

Montreal has long been known as the ”city of a hundred steeples”. Through the heart of this northern metropolis, ATOMIC3 has scattered Éclats de verre: a giant shattered stained-glass window reorganised into a playful maze that offers a unique immersive experience to its visitors, and a colourful panorama to passersby.

Winner of the Créer l’hiver competition, Éclats de verre is one of three works that make up Luminothérapie 2012. The goal of this event produced by the Partenariat du Quartier des Spectacles in Montreal is to beat the winter blues, using interactive light-based installations.

Continue after the break for more.

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Despite many opposing residents, Fremont County Board of Commissioners has unanimously agreed to approve the Temporary Use Permit for Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Over The River. This will allow the world famous artist to temporarily suspend 5.9 miles of silvery, luminous fabric panels high above the Arkansas River, along a 42-mile stretch between Salida and Cañon City in south-central Colorado. After remaining on the drawing boards for 20 years, the Over The River installation plans to begin in early 2014 with an exhibition planned for August 2015.

“The Fremont County permit is essential to realizing this temporary work of art that Jeanne-Claude and I first envisioned nearly 20 years ago,” said Christo. “I am very pleased that the Commissioners have voted to approve this public work of art for Fremont County, and I want to thank them for their hard work and efforts in evaluating our application. I am glad to be moving forward with our plans to complete Over The River.”

Future Cities Lab’s HYDRAMAX Port Machines project, which is currently on exhibit at SFMOMA until July 29, proposes a radical rethinking of San Francisco’s urban waterfront post sea-level rise. The proposal renders the existing hard edges of the waterfront as new “soft systems” that would include aquatic parks, community gardens, wildlife refuges and aquaponic farms. A synthetic architecture is introduced that blurs the distinction between building, landscape, infrastructure and machine. More images and architects’ description after the break.

Vamvakidis Simos, Tzortzis Antonis, and Zapantiotis Fotis shared with us their proposal for the Park & Agricultural Heritage Museum in the Eptagonia community of Limassol, Cyprus. The individual volumes of the museum follow the gentle slope of the existing terrain, creating an “organic” connection to the landscape while creating individual passes and plateaus that are interconnected, in a composition close to the human scale and built context of the village. More images and architects’ description after the break.

The proposal by Influx_Studio for the Bab Al Bahrain Urban Oasis explores the value of the cultural and natural landscape inheritance as a design opportunity to address climate issues in public space, while catalyzing the urban potential of the site in the emerging new city urbanity. Urban Oasis is called to be the most important public space of Manama, embodying its dynamic character and showcasing its new sustainable identity. More images and architects’ description after the break.

This residential project in Ahmedabad, India by Vatsu Shilpa Consultants follows the metamorphosis of an old vacant rowhouse into a renovated townhouse into a final fusion with the adjoining building. The project began in 2004 and went through several modifications and additions. By 2010, the adjoining house was purchased and 56+55 Sumeru was created.

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The challenge in the competition for the Amstetten School Campus was to combine two existing secondary schools in one location and complement the program with a new music school and an additional gym. With the area being characterized by an extreme heterogeneous development, with a wide range of buildings with various functions and styles, the design by Atelier Thomas Pucher, which won the first prize, is comprised of a compact five-storey cube which rises in the surroundings as a distinctive landmark. Additionally, the building is combined with two lower volumes and three courtyards, within a chessboard formation. More images and architects’ description after the break.

Despite previous efforts to build football related complexes in Iran, Kourosh Rafiey’s proposal aims to solve the country’s lack of these spaces. The design includes a high-tech complex with complete facilities that could fulfill all the desires of football players and fans, including hotel, stadium, sport complex, with expert doctors, offices , shops, parking and even exercise playgrounds for all age groups. More images and architects’ description after the break.

The MAS (Museum by the river), a must seen building itself, is currently exhibiting the Founder Pavilions, which give curious spectators a look at the here and now and into the future. In close cooperation with the Founders, Crepain Binst Architecture carefully designed a sophisticated setting symbolizing the unique character and essence of each Founder. Still, every pavilion is an added value to the whole MAS-experience. More images and architects’ description after the break.

Detail recently sent us Net Zero Energy Building from their Green Books series. Like everything Detail does, this books takes a thorough look at the technology surrounding this specific subject. It also, as always, gives great examples from the Virginia Tech Solar House to the Adam Joseph Lewis Center for Environmental Studies at Oberlin College.

Description: Net-zero energy buildings, equilibrium buildings, or carbon-neutral cities depending on location and underlying agenda, the statistics vary. The variety of terms in use indicates that a scientific method is still lacking which poses a problem not just in regard to international communication, but also with respect to planning processes as a response to energy challenges. The clarification and meaning of the most important terms in use is extremely important for their implementation. Since October 2008 a panel of experts from an international energy agency has concerned itself with these topics as part of a project entitled Toward Net Zero Energy Solar Buildings. The objective is to analyze exemplary buildings that are near a zero-energy balance in order to develop methods and tools for the planning, design, and operation of such buildings. The results are documented in this publication. More than just a showcase presentation of select projects, the focus of this publication is on relaying knowledge and experience gained by planners and builders.

Designed by Bernheimer Architecture for Syracuse University, the football practice facility along with a larger strategic masterplan for the Lampe Athletic Campus situated about 3 miles south of the Main Campus seeks to create an identity for this new “middle campus” by making an assemblage of disparate buildings into a strong collection. By creating an environment that would enhance the practice session, the architects stay true to one of Vince Lombardi’s favorite quotes, “Practice does not make perfect. Perfect practice makes perfect”. More images and architects’ description after the break.

We’ve finally passed the 75,000 photos in our Flickr pool! Keep sending them, so we can celebrate the 100,000 milestone. Remember you can submit your own photo here, and don’t forget to follow us through Twitter and our Facebook Fan Page to find many more features.

The photo above was taken by hansn in Copenhague, Denmark. Check the other four after the break.

Prior to becoming a Pritzker laureate, Italian architect Renzo Piano was commissioned to design the Menil Collection in a quiet inner-city neighborhood of Houston, Texas. Since celebrating its opening in 1987, the museum has expanded, adding Renzo’s second commission, the Cy Twombly Gallery (1995), along with the permanent, site-specific installation at Richmond Hall by minimalist sculptor Dan Flavin and the Byzantine Fresco Chapel (1997-2012) by owner Dominique de Menil. Surrounded by ample amounts of open space, the long-term master plan of the museum’s campus has been under the review of architect David Chipperfield.

Now, after an extensive international search to select the architect for the campuses new major addition that will house the Menil Drawing Institute (MDI), the architecture selection committee has announced the four architects under consideration. Once completed, MDI will be the first freestanding facility in America dedicated to modern and contemporary drawing, and one of the most advanced in the world.

Continue after the break to find out the finalists.

With the guidance of their instructor Matthias Hollwich, students Andreas Tjeldflaat and Greg Knobloch from University of Pennsylvania’s School of Design have proposed an alternative to the traditional prisons seen throughout the United States. The innovative high-rise penitentiary acknowledges the fact that nearly two-thirds of the 14,000 inmates released annually from New Jersey correctional facilities will return to prison within five years. 499.SUMMIT offers a solution that intends to reverse that statistic and help inmates successfully transition back into society.

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Breaking Ground: Chinese American Architects in Los Angeles (1945-1980) at the Chinese American Museum (CAM) is an exhibition that focuses on four Chinese American architects that have transformed parts of Los Angeles with iconic buildings and distinct design styles. The work will be on display until June 3rd 2012 and feature architects such as Eugene Choy, Gilbert Leong, Helen Liu Fong and Gin Wong.

Breaking Ground is part of Pacific Standard Time, a collaboration created by Getty in which sixty cultural institutions will tell the story of the birth of LA art scene over the course of six months beginning October 2011. Breaking Ground at CAM LA tells the story of the skyline and the changing built environment through the perspective the four prominent Chinese American Architects.

More after the break.

I once saw a video of David Hockney discussing a Chinese landscape scroll. A provocative little art-geek film (or so it seemed at the time) entitled, ”A Day on the Grand Canal With the Emperor of China (or Surface Is Illusion but So Is Depth)”.

On the surface, the film’s subject is a 17th-century Chinese scroll painting. The depths, however, are personal and make the film more about the artist himself, a target for his projection. So, if surface is illusion but so is depth, then what we have is an interesting problem.

In this sense, he wasn’t trying to lay down any absolute truth or theory about Chinese landscape painting, or even himself. But merely his understanding at that moment in time—a moving target exploring another moving target. What would Hockney say about the scroll now?

When I first noticed Moby blogging about architecture, this film, long-buried in my art history memory, was one of the first reference points that came to mind. Like Hockney with the scroll, Moby is seemingly unrolling Los Angeles and winding his way through it’s weird little buildings and spatial complexities. The hills–and one does not always associate hills with Los Angeles–are uncannily similar to the hills in the Chinese scroll.

Designed by GRAFT Architects, Vertical Village is a residential, hotel and entertainment development in Dubai that harnesses the most powerful renewable energy source in the desert, the sun. Organized to reduce solar gain and maximize solar production, the buildings are massed as self-shading slabs at the north of the site on the east-west axis to reduce low-angle sun penetration. At the southern end of the site, a vast solar collector array optimally angles itself toward the sun and faces the main public strip as a potent gesture to the developments sustainable intent and minimum LEED Gold rated performance. More images and architects’ description after the break.

The aim of Enforma and AIM Studio in their design of the Salt Tower, located in Budva, Montenegro, was to carefully analyze the specific location and the possibilities that this place offers to the users. Inspired by the old town of Budva, while integrating energy efficient strategies, their transformation from rectangular form to a tall crystal grain reflective structure on the Mediterranean coast justifies the project’s name. More images and architects’ description after the break.

The proposal for the Kyiv Urban Wildlife Park by Katya Larina, Yevgeniya Pozigun, Irina Klixbull, and Roman Pomazan responds to what the place means for the thousands of people who cross the area which is nestled between two fast developing banks. Therefore, the design becomes a development of a decision-making instrument which is intended to guide the future development of Kyiv Islands. More images and architects’ description after the break.

The proposal by BudCud for the Osiedle Przyjaźń 2.0 is an innovative university campus located in the center of Bemowo district in Warsaw. Founded in the1950s as a habitat of small wooden houses, filled with an abundance of green areas, the campus is a crucial factor for city development. It is an element, which significantly affects the attractiveness of a district or even a whole city. While retaining its small scale character, their urban arrangement is clearly divided into function zones. Each zone works as a separate unit of a bigger network – sustainable, modern and pro-social estate. More images and architects’ description after the break.