After four months of research identifying works in Latin America and the Caribbean that met the eligibility criteria of the 'Latin American Architecture Prize Rogelio Salmona: open / collective spaces' a list of finalist has been compiled. Members of the International Curatorial Committee, architects Ana Maria Duran (Andean Region), Ruth Verde Zein (Brazil Region) and Fernando Diez (Southern Cone Region), and Art History background Louise Noelle Gras (Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean Region), postulated a total of 62 works covering the four regions.

On the 5th of August, upon completion of a shortlist the International Curatorial Committee selected 20 works whose authors will be invited by Rogelio Salmona Foundation to participate in the second round of this award.

Here are the 20 Finalists of the Latin American Architecture Prize Rogelio Salmona.

Earlier this week we covered the announcement of the winners of the expansion of the Lima Art Museum (MALI). The following 13 projects received honorable mention as according to the jury they "were essential during the deliberation process, for their originality, daring or because they helped shape the discussion."

The proposals came from a wide range of studios including Mexican firm Productora, a collaboration between Zaha Hadid and David Mutal, Campo Baeza and Llosa Cortegana amongst them. Continue below for the 13 projects in detail.

A few months ago, the Art Museum of Lima (MALI) announced an international call for a competition to design a new contemporary art wing via an underground expansion. After receiving 387 proposals from 56 countries, the jury has selected the architects Burgos & Garrido Arquitectos and LLAMA Urban Design as the winners of the competition, beating out entries from other top architects including Zaha Hadid Architects and Alberto Campo Baeza.

The new addition will include new exhibition halls, a library, classrooms, a cafe/restaurant, storage space, a public square, access to a future subway station and a landscape proposal for the park surrounding the museum. See images of the winning proposal and the two finalists after the break.

Bricks are an iconic element of Solano Benítez’s studio. An ancestral material, forged by man using an ancient technique of modeling and baking. Bricks are very versatile, cheap and easy to manufacture – even marginalized areas of the world can afford to build houses with brick. Benítez feels the poetry of brick and has experimented with its versatility, relying solely on bricks as the main construction material. [1]

Gabinete de Arquitectura's exhibition, designed by Solano Benítez, Gloria Cabral and Solanito Benítez, was awarded the Golden Lion for Best Participant in the International Exhibition, Reporting From the Front, for “harnessing simple materials, structural ingenuity and unskilled labour to bring architecture to underserved communities.”

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Curated by Juan Román and José Luis Uribe, Chile’s pavilion at the 2016 Venice Biennale will present 15 architecture projects that aim to transform the daily life of people living in rural areas of the country.

Titled “Against the Tide,” the exhibition will feature the work of a new generation of architects – students from the School of Architecture of Talca. The projects were envisioned, designed and built by the students as part of their university graduation requirements.

A group of researchers from KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm has developed Optically Transparent Wood (TW), a new material that could greatly impact the way we develop our architectural projects. Published in the American Chemical Society's journal Biomacromolecules, the transparent timber is created through a process that removes the chemical lignin from a wood veneer, causing it to become very white. This white porous veneer is then impregnated with a transparent polymer, matching the optical properties of the individual cells and making the whole material translucent.

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At the UTFSM in Valparaíso, Chile, architect Verónica Arcos developed a first-year studio centered around the theme of "materiality."

Based on an application of math and geometry in the study of Mexican architect Félix Candela's work, the workshop sought to "put form in crisis and take it to its maximum expression."

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Today at 10am EST, the press conference for the 2016 Venice Biennale will take place at Chile’s Presidential Palace La Moneda. During the conference Alejandro Aravena will present “Reporting from the Front,” his central exhibition for the Biennale.

You can watch a live streaming of the press conference above.

With the participation of 96 pavilions from diverse countries around the world, the Expo Milan 2015 tackles one of the most pressing global issues -- alimentation -- through its theme “Feeding the Planet, Energy for Life.”

The Brazilian Pavilion, designed by Studio Arthur Casas and Atelier Marko Brajovic, was considered one of the most attractive pavilions by the thousands of visitors who have passed through the Expo so far. Featuring a large open space traversed by an elevated net on which visitors can walk, the pavilion is as “as porous as the Brazilian culture,” and creates a pathway above plants native to the country.

Below is a beautiful series of photographs of the pavilion taken by Fernando Guerra, a partner at Últimas Reportagens, along with his brother Sérgio Guerra.

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Between Sunday, May 17 and Monday, May 18 projects developed under the second phase of Espacios de Paz (Spaces of Peace) were inaugurated in five cities across Venezuela. A genuine exercise in participative design, 20 Latin American architecture groups worked for five weeks with communities in neighborhoods dominated by violence, high dropout rates and crime to convert deteriorated and abandoned spaces into public places of peace.

For each project, four groups of young architects worked together to carry out a process of dialogue, research, design, and ultimately the construction of either an athletic, social or educational facility to be administrated by the local community. Espacios de Paz is coordinated by the local office of PICO Estudio, with guidance from public institutions and under the leadership of Isis Ochoa, the High Presidential Commissioner for Peace and Life.

ArchDaily en Español Editors, Nicolás Valencia M. and José Tomás Franco, were invited by PICO Estudio to document and view the five projects in their final phase of construction and speak with the architects and community representatives about the development of the projects and some of the challenges faced in the process.

Learn more about each of the five projects after the break.