We often think of Architecture as a profession within a vacuum, an idyllic world in which design is left to the imagination of the Architect and the possibilities of success are endless… so long as one finds a client. For as great as an Architects work is, or could be, without a client to realize those abilities with, an Architects work often goes unrealized and unappreciated. In a profession built on the visual and the tactile, the ability to verbally translate ideas and abilities serves as both the facilitator and denier. All Architecture school students have gone through the critique process, but presenting to  someone within academia is wildly different than making a pitch to a potential client.

AIA New York is hosting an workshop for perfecting the architectural pitch in two minutes or less. The power of a two-minute elevator pitch lies in cutting your mission and values down to the essentials, capturing a client’s interest to make them want to know more about you and hopefully hire you.

Projects from 2009 for our 8th selection of previously featured offices. Check them all after the break.

El Bosque Norte Building / Murtinho + Raby Arquitectos This building is located on a corner of El Bosque Avenue, within Las Condes Local Authority in Metropolitan Santiago, Chile. The neighbourhood has been increasingly the community’s office centre with several leading office buildings projects (read more…)

With over a million people watching Atlantis’ trip to the International Space Station, today marked the 135th and final lift off of NASA’s Space Shuttle Program. A monumental occasion or as NASA commentator said, a “sentimental journey into history”, the end of America’s 30-year shuttle program also opens the door to ask, what is next for the future of space travels?

We are sharing with you Foster + Partners design for The New Mexico Spaceport Authority Building, currently under construction and set for 2011 completion. Winning an international competition in 2006 with team members URS Corporation and SMPC Architects, Foster + Partners created a design concept fit for the first private spaceport in the world. A sinuous shape, the building morphs from the landscape creating interior spaces that seek to capture the drama and mystery of space flight itself, articulating the thrill of space travel for the first space tourists.

Renderings and construction photographs following the break.

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This competition entry for the redevelopment of the Kiev Edge Park’s infrastructure was submitted by architects Bablowsky & Wlasenko Architects, Roman Pomazan and Peter Vlasenko. The main goal of this project was to define strategic lines of the Kiev Edge’s development for short- and a long-term performance. It’s mission was to redefine and create a new connections between and inside the Edge along Kiev, Ukraine prominent River Dnepr.

Catch us after the break for more on this project.

Adrian Lahoud and Samuel Szwarcbord shared with us their honorable mention entry for the recent Geopolitical Borders Competition organized by Think Space and judged by Teddy Cruz. This project is about two lines, one existing and one proposed. The first line is invisible. It runs horizontally from east to west across the Mediterranean Sea. Like the contour lines on a weather forecast, it bends and twists according to the vast differentials of pressure between North and South. From the perspective of the African continent, Europe holds a minimal promise of opportunity that cannot be found at home. From the point of view of Europe, North Africa represents a local pool of labor power, ready to be dipped into at will, a steady reserve of energy (increasingly solar) and kilometers of unspoiled coast ready for development. Like any bad relationship, the asymmetry is secured through structural violence. This violence must be flexible enough to accommodate the contradictions and dynamics of both parties. Changing domestic imperatives, economic demands and legal requirements form plastic limits through which the stability of the line must be coordinated.

Massar was initiated in 2005 by the Syria Trust Development as a national educational and cultural program for children and adolescents. The central project of the program in Damascus is Massar Rose Science Center, which was designed by the Danish architect Henning Larsen and is currently under construction. The landscape featured here was designed by Atelier Loidl.

Can the experience of art be enhanced through architecture?

White walls + Isolated Rooms = Good museum? Eero Lunden Studio’s design of the Serlauchius Museum extension seeks to deviate from that mantra by developing an architecture that directly facilitates human interaction with art. It is Eero Lunden Studio’s belief that the experience of art can be enhanced through innovative architecture and new spatial experiences. The design of the Maison Promino seeks to achieve two main goals: to create an inspiring piece of architecture that will enhance the image of Serlachius Art Museum globally and to provide a truly unique museum experience by connecting visitors with the art like never before.

We recently found this video on Architecture Record’s website that features Steven Holl talking about his design for the Knut Hamsun Center. This design has been honored with many prestigious awards including the North Norwegian Architecture Prize and the 2011 Byggeskikkprisen.

The Chair in Landscape and Environmental Design at University of Montreal (CPEUM) is pleased to officially launch an international ideas competition in urban design YUL-MTL : Moving Landscapes. The international ideas competition aims to reinvent the landscapes that highlight Montreal’s international gateway corridor linking Montreal-Trudeau International Airport (YUL) to its downtown area (MTL) along Autoroute 20.

The International Ideas Competition is anonymous, free and open to all planning and design professionals. It is held as a single-stage. A total of $100,000 CAN will be awarded to and shared between 3 laureates.

More information and a link to the competition can be found after the jump.

Aurora is the title of Henning Larsen Architects’s entry for the new university hospital in Odense, Denmark. It was recently named among the three finalists. The iconic building complex provides an ideal framework for quality healthcare in the region of southern Denmark. The new Odense University Hospital (OUH) embodies an innovative building of high architectural quality, designed to meet the requirements and challenges of tomorrow. Like the goddess Aurora, the hospital finds renewal in the transition between old and new – and the conversion from tradition to modernity. The human scale supports the conception of the hospital as ”the good host” and a place where patients and visitors can easily orient themselves and feel at home. When approaching Aurora, you are met by an inviting and recognizable urban scale, where the complex is divided into varied units with each their clear entrance and reception area.

Stephane Malka, of Malka Architecture has shared with ArchDaily his project AME-LOT, a material reuse, found material, restorative proposal. Further images of the project as well as a narrative from the architect are available after the break.

It’s 50! Since we started with the Flickr Round Up, we’ve chosen 250 photos of the best architecture photography out there. Check our Flickr Pool for more! As always, 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 thomaslewandovski in Frankfurt, Germany. Check the other four after the break.

Sustainability can be associated with wildly expensive technological advances. Which not coincidentally can immediately turn off clients.

So how do we define it? What does it mean, from a resource-conservation standpoint, as well as from a business one? For one viewpoint, we turn to Mark English, AIA. He has promoted sustainability efforts on several different levels for years. That means that not only does he incorporate sustainable strategies in his designs, he also helps other firms implement them in their work. He has been involved in programs including the California Solar Initiative, Green-point Rating, and he is also a Director on San Francisco’s AIA Board. He also edits two online publications including “Green Compliance Plus” where articles explore such topics as Passive Houses and the debate on Green Certification, and which also assists other professionals in meeting energy-efficient goals. Another publication, “The Architect’s Take,” presents news from an architectural standpoint. In fact one of those articles provided the basis for some of this author’s work.

The Wanderlust Hotel in Little India, Singapore features a collaboration of designers from Singapore studios including Asylum, phunk Studio and fFurious - together with architect firm DP Architects. Each level is dedicated to the designs of each firm. The Lobby is themed as Industrial Glam by Asylum – a juxtaposition of the surrounding’s setting and contemporary design. Level 2 is Eccentricity by phunk Studio and is designed with bright colors and neon lights on all the surfaces, including a rainbow corridor and mosaic tiled jacuzzi. Level 3 is Is it just Black and White by DP Architects which feature contrasting black and white painted spaces with origami and Pop-Art works on display. Level 4 is Creature Comforts by fFurious where friendly monsters keep guests company in their rooms.

Read on for more images of the Wanderlust Hotel after the break.

Adjacent to a central transportation artery for the city of Beirut, and situated at the nexus of two urban fabrics, this design negotiates issues of scale, unit diversity, views and zoning regulations. Stacked glass boxes emerge from a massing, which is positioned to maximize buildable area.

Machado and Silvetti Associates shared with us their entry for the Olympic Port Competition that came in fourth place. This project proposal for the 2016 Olympic Media Village in Rio de Janeiro includes housing for 11,000 people, retail and office space, a 5-star hotel and a convention center. To accommodate post-Olympic marketing of the buildings the entire residential and office program has the capacity to be transformed from a hotel setting with individually accessed bedrooms and private baths to two- and three-bedroom apartments and leasable tenant space.

Via Kim Jong-il looking at things.

Why do architects choose architecture? Typical reasons include a deep passion for form and a desire to leave meaningful, functional design as a legacy. Rarely do you hear that an architect held a burning desire to do business and THIS was their chosen means to that end. Rather, doing business is necessary to follow their pull toward architecture. And so the industry is filled with capable architects who know little about the mechanics of running a firm. Payroll, HR, marketing, sales and public relations are foreign topics. They want the jobs, but they don’t know how to get them. They need employees, but lack management skills or knowledge of how to team build, recruit or downsize during a recession.

In the coming months, I’ll be writing various articles to address these topics that impact architects running their own business – large or small. We’ll also consider marketing ideas that have a proven track record of helping companies differentiate from the competition.

The theme that consistently surfaced was the importance of relationship building and the ability to communicate. Those skills set apart those who have excelled. Some highlights from each panelist are below.

The MAD Travel Fellowship was launched by MAD Architects in 2009 to provide mainland Chinese students with an opportunity to travel abroad and research an architectural topic of their choosing. It is only through travel the visceral experience of walking into a space – that one can begin to understand the full context and meaning of architecture.

In the past two years, with the support of long-term sponsor VERTU, 10 students from all over China have received the grant and traveled to destinations including Greece, Switzerland, the United States, and Egypt.This year, 5 students will have the opportunity to travel for 7-10 days in their chosen city or region of independent study. Following their trip, the students will give a public presentation of their experience.

Qualifications, submission and further information is available after the break.

Next week we will be taking our Architecture City Guide to Paris and we need your help. To make the City Guides more engaging we are asking for your input on which designs should comprise our weekly list of 12. In order for this to work we will need you, our readers, to suggest a few of your favorite modern/contemporary buildings for the upcoming city guide in the comment section below. Along with your suggestions we ask that you provide a link to an image you took of the building that we can use, the address of the building, and the architect. (The image must be from a site that has a Creative Common License cache like Flickr or Wikimedia. We cannot use images that are copyrighted unless they are yours and you give us permission.) From that we will select the top 12 most recommended buildings. Hopefully this method will help bring to our attention smaller well done projects that only locals truly know. With that in mind we do not showcase private single-family residences for obvious reasons. Additionally, we try to only show completed projects.

Since 1945 the residential palace of Gösta Serlachius in the Joenniemi Manor area in Männtä, Finland has been home to the Gösta Serlachius Art Collection, one of the Nordic countries’ most significant private collections. This proposal for the extension of Serlachius Museum by the Office Jarrik Ouburg will expand the capacity of the museum by five times, creating an ensemble of buildings that enhance the quality of the natural landscape.

Read on for more on this project after the break.

De Architekten Cie., Jason Lee and Patrick Koschuch, has won the open international Kaohsiung Port Station Urban Design competition in Kaohsiung, Taiwan.

The competition was initiated by the city government of Kaohsiung to transform the derelict site of the old railyards and port station from a barrier between two important areas of the city (the Hamasen and Yancheng districts), into a connective piece of the urban fabric. The stated ambitions by the client for the 15.42 hectare site are to highlight the cultural heritage of the site’s former function while introducing new programmes and building volume to accommodate city expansion. These twin objectives are to be achieved in a phaseable and highly sustainable manner. Since a large portion of the site and existing railway buildings are designated as historical monuments, the central challenge of the brief was to strike a balance between the desire for cultural preservation/revitalization, introducing new development onto the site, and establishing enough connections across site to transform the area from an urban barrier into an urban connector.

Holm Architecture Office (HAO) recently shared with us their entry for the Pulsen Community Center in Balling, Denmark. The Pulsen Community Center unites an array of health and sports-oriented facilities under one roof. A combination of baths, fitness areas, doctors’ offices and community gathering spaces, the design creates a unique new building type that aims to promote interaction and creativity among the citizens of Balling.

African architect Diébédo Francis Kéré, founder of Kéré Architecture in Berlin, Germany, has been awarded the Marcus Prize for Architecture. The prize, which recognizes emerging global talents, is administered by the School of Architecture and Urban Planning (SARUP) at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee (UWM). Kéré will visit SARUP in the spring 2012 semester and lead a graduate studio on specific architectural challenges in Milwaukee. He also will participate in public workshops and lectures. More award description and a brief synopsis of the architect and his work after the break.