Representing Brazil at the 2012 Venice Biennale will be StudioMK27 and Lúcio Costa‘s 1964 installation “Riposatevi”. The exhibit takes an intimate look at the lives of multi-generational households in modern Brazilian architecture. Curated by Lauro Cavalcanti, the Brazilian pavilion will investigate the intersections between traditional and contemporary artistic tendencies and will feature the movie installation, “Peep”, by Lea Van Steen and Marcio Kogan, with photography by Cleisson Vidal. The event will take place between August 29th and November 25th in the Giardini and Arsenale buildings in Venice.

More after the break. 

Recent award recipient of the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement and Portuguese master architect, Álvaro Siza, will be honored with an exhibition exclusively dedicated to his most personal aspects as one of the leading players in the international design scene at the 2012 Venice Biennale. The collateral event, “Álvaro Siza. Viagem sem Programa”, will feature an exclusive collection of 53 works, personally selected by the architect himself for this event, that were developed from travel notes and sketches. The exhibit will be organized in sequential order as a narration of Siza’s work in architecture and concept of life. It will be seen as “a succession of prospects, dreams, memories and the faces of unknown persons and friends encounters in that extraordinary “Journey without a plan”, which is life itself.”

Continue after the break to learn more.

Architects: CYS.ASDO Location: Taipei, Taiwan Architect In Charge: Chung-Yei Sheng Design Team: Jill Yang, Paul Chiang, Why Huang Project Year: 2011 Photographs: K. M. Lee

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Early in August, we introduced Sherin Wing’s latest exciting series she’s writing for ArchDaily: The AD Architecture School Guide. In case you missed it, you can check Sherin’s review of the University of Utah here. And don’t forget to follow her on Twitter if you want to provide any feedback.

At the University of Kentucky College of Design or UK/CoD, the School of Architecture has taken the goals of engagement, service, and education as an opportunity to transform not just the physical landscape but the economy and social structure of the Commonwealth as well. It is, frankly, an exciting program. And as exemplified by the The River Cities Project, practical skills are combined with pedagogy to enrich and improve the lives of all people: students, faculty and the Commonwealth of Kentucky. If that seems like a tall order, read on because this is definitely a program that succeeds.

Recently, we shared ODA’s honorable mention proposal for the National Library of Israel which fosters an open haven for learning and activity. The New-York based firm is also working on projects a bit closer to home in Manhattan that approach zoning restrictions with an air of optimism. ODA explained, “We embrace those parameters (zoning ordinances) and use them as the DNA of our buildings. If carefully studied, NYC’s zoning allows for many interpretations that follows logical principals.”

More about the residences after the break.

Architects: STGM Architectes Location: Petite-Rivière-St-François, Québec, Canada Project Year: 2012 Photographs: Stéphane Groleau

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This week we want to propose the 1998 Alex Proya’s film considered part of the neo-noir sci-fi movement. The movie shows a city that is an experiment in itself, in which the entire place have been forced to maintain in darkness. A work that make us remember classics as Metropolis or The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.

Do you think there are some places like this nowadays? Do you imagine it as a possible future? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

Completed July 2012 in Stuttgart, Germany, the winners of the 72 Hour Urban Action competition were recently announced. With only three days and nights to design and build interventions in public space, 120 creative people, working in 10 international teams stormed sites along the Wagenhallen area and Nordbahnhof street in the center of the city, where the much debated redevelopment plan of Stuttgart 21 has its most immediate and significant effect. The first prize went to team TÜFTLER, for creating a non-judgemental courtyard in response to their Toy Parking mission. More images and information on the winning teams after the break.

Inspired by the great potential of advanced information technology providing architectural solutions, the Russian pavilion of the 2012 Venice Biennale will feature the innovation city of Skolkovo. Skolkovo is one of the largest, most innovative Russian projects of today and has been worked on by many international architects, including Biennale director David Chipperfield. The exhibition will allow visitors to enter into the world of innovation city and use the newest IT-technologies to contribute to the research. Over the Biennale’s three month period, participants will be able to watch the exhibit’s virtual city of Skolkovo evolve as each international visitor leaves their mark.

Continue reading for more.

Roca London Gallery, together with design collective FLOCK, will be presenting ‘FLOCK Talks’ September 18th from 6pm-8pm. The event will consist of short presentations with designers from the fields of architecture, products, jewelery and fashion design. Speakers will include Zaha Hadid Architects, Naomi Filmer, and Flock co-founders Pernilla Ohrstedt and Simone Brewster who will each present a snapshot of their portfolio of work. For more information, please visit here.

With their early work inspired by Russian Suprematism, Zaha Hadid Architects’ pays homage to the historical lineages of collective research that has led to the major works of today’s contemporary architecture at the 2012 Venice Biennale with the installation ‘Arum’. The pleated metal structure is derived from the work of German architect Frei Otto, who paved the way for material-structural form-finding processes. This installation is a response to David Chipperfield’s belief that the theme of ‘Common Ground’ is meant to “reassert the existence of an architectural culture, made up not just of singular talents but a rich continuity of diverse ideas united in a common history.”

Continue after the break for the architect’s project description.

In its seventh year, the Shaw Contract Group recently announced the winners in their Design Is… Award program, which honors architecture and design firms that are changing the very idea of what design is. Through these winning projects, selected from commercial spaces from around the globe, we see how design is redefining the way we work, play and organize our lives. Out of 285 entries from 19 countries, the following five winning firms that won the Design Is… Award for 2012 can be viewed after the break and seen in the video above.

A few months ago, Deborah Sheehan, a Principal and Healthcare Leader at Cannon Design, was given the task of designing a prototype healthcare facility in Afghanistan, a country averaging about one hospital bed for every 2,400 people.

The challenges that Sheehan and her colleagues faced were considerable: limited construction materials, few skilled tradesmen, political corruption, tribal rivalries. But the resultant design solutions were smart, low-cost, and high-quality – they had to be, after all.

To a certain extent, Sheehan was expecting her team to come up with an innovative design; what she didn’t consider, however, was how applicable the design strategies would be to our own troubled system. In her article for HealthCare Design, “Beautiful, Broken, and Broke,” Sheehan outlines the 4 things the Afghanistan healthcare system does well, frankly better than the American, and what we could gain by applying them here…

Read after the break to find out the 4 design strategies employed in Afghanistan that could help our Healthcare System…

The Siberian Center for Contemporary Art and Siberian Center for the Promotion of Architecture is inviting all to participate in the open international competition for the architectural concept of the symbolic object of city environment dedicated to Russian avant-garde (or to El Lissitzky). In Russia there are no monuments either to the Russian avant-garde movement or to Russian avant-gardist. That is why this project is unique. The realization of this project will be significant for the city and Russia and it will underline the importance of Novosibirsk as one of the centers of Russian constructivist architecture. The deadline to register is October 1 and the deadline for submissions is no later than October 2. For more information, please visit here.

Pracownia Architektoniczna Poznań Projekt, in collaboration with mode:lina Architekci, shared with us their design for the main entrance to the Voivodeship Police Headquarters in Poznań, Poland. The building, which is part of a historic urban structure, aims to adjust the entrance for disabled users as well as set a new standard for Police interiors. More images and architects’ description after the break.

As previously announced, the Portuguese architects behind “OCO – Ocean & Coastline Observatory” have won Habitat for Humanity’s Open Architecture Challenge: RESTRICTED ACCESS 2011. Over 500 teams from 74 countries submitted innovative solutions for the recovery and reuse of disabled and abandoned military sites. These submissions were filtered down to 13 finalists by a jury of 33 esteemed professionals. The Lisbon-based architects of OCO claimed grand prized with their vision to redevelop a desolate military site, that once defended the coast of Trafaria in Portugal, into a civic space that promotes coastal preservation.

Continue after the break for more. 

The Poland Pavilion at the 2012 Venice Biennale will feature a design exploration into the interaction between sound and architecture in creating our environment. The project, by Katarzyna Krakowiak, is a sound sculpture that presents architecture as a primary system of listening. The sculpture collaborates with neighboring pavilions and echos the sounds that reach the Polish Pavilion, highlighting its acoustic qualities. The exhibit will be on view from August 29th through November 29th.

More on the exhibit after the break.

The proposal for the National Library of Israel by ODA takes on special significance as a site where past, present, and future converge. Unlike traditional libraries, often closed fortresses of knowledge, the new library is organized around a variety of platforms of activity that enhance interaction between the users, enabling the library to become a forum for cross-disciplinary conversations. Through the form of a floating monolith that visually connects to the foundations of Parliament, the library underscores the idea that education and learning are the bedrock of democracy. More images and architects’ description after the break.

Taking place September 1-2, the two-day ‘PROTO/E/CO/LOGICS 002: The Field is Open’ Symposium, put on by the Mediterranean Laboratory for Architecture and Urban Strategies (MLAUS), is envisioned as an open platform for rethinking increasingly complex landscape of architecture and asymptotic cultures. Through expansion in material science, cloud computing, transformations in constructability and manufacturing (such as ongoing revolution with 3d printing) and internet of things, boundaries of architecture are becoming fuzzy and the Field is increasingly Open. In recognizing the active participation of nonhuman forces in events and understanding that the agency spawns beyond human, provides a new ground for addressing design ecology. For more information, please visit their official website here.

In conjunction with its current exhibition The Landmarks of New York, the Parrish Art Museum will host an illustrated presentation by multi-talented, award winning architect David Rockwell titled “Untold Stories from an Eclectic, Exceptional Practice.” A brief discussion between Rockwell, who founded Rockwell Group in 1984 to focus on a diverse array of projects that range from hotels to hospitals, restaurants to airport terminals, and Broadway set designs to consumer products, and exhibition curator Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel will follow the talk. The program will take place Thursday, August 23, at 6:30 pm. Tickets are $5 for Parrish members, $10 for nonmembers. Reservations are strongly recommended. For more information on the event, please visit here.

The OpenAEC Challenge is an architectural competition where the criteria for winning is based on how well you collaborate with others and not on how well you design in isolation. In that sense, it’s less a competition, and more a challenge. The sole purpose of this Challenge is to abolish a pervasive myth undoubtedly shared by a vast majority of architectural students around the world: That real-world buildings are designed by a sole, mastermind architect, working in isolation. This Challenge will be centered around a real project—a 48 acre (19.5 ha) sustainable, agro-tourism farm, called Flocktown Farm, located an hour outside of New York City. It will be broken down into eight, two-week long phases or charrettes, over the length of the Fall semester, 2012. For more information, please visit their website here.

In January of 1975, Buckminster Fuller sat down to deliver twelve lectures that made up the 42-hour series Everything I Know. The entire event was captured on video, with the most advanced, bluescreen technology of the time. Fuller discusses an array of topics, from “architecture, design, philosophy, education, mathematics, geometry, cartography, economics, history, structure, industry, housing and engineering”, to all his major inventions and discoveries, along with “his own personal history in the context of the history of science and industrialization”.

The embedded video above is recompiled and edited version of the series. You may download the entire 42-hours (for free!) from the Internet Archive. The Buckminster Fuller archive has also made transcripts of Everything I Know - “minimally edited and maximally Fuller” – freely available.

Continue after the break for links to the remaining lectures.