Vatican City participated in the Venice Architecture Biennale for the first time this year, inviting the public to explore a sequence of unique chapels designed by renowned architects including Norman Foster and Eduardo Souto de Moura. Located in the woods that cover the island of San Giorgio Maggiore, the chapels offer interpretations of Gunnar Asplund’s 1920 chapel at Woodland Cemetery in Stockholm, a seminal example of modernist memorial architecture set in a similarly natural wooded context.

A new video produced by Spirit of Space offers a brief virtual tour of the structures that make up the Holy See’s pavilion, lingering on each just long enough to show different views and angles. As members of the public circulate through the chapels in each shot, the scenes give an impression of how each chapel guides circulation.

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Sold in standard 4 foot wide sheets since 1928, plywood has been a staple of conventional construction for nearly a century. Dimensionally strong, easily cut, lightweight and capable of creating an effective barrier, plywood and other engineered panels like OSB, particle board, and MDF is ubiquitous, particularly for their use as sheathing material in balloon and timber frame construction systems. Boats, airplanes and even automobile frames have historically been built out of plywood, predating (or replacing) steel, aluminum, and fiberglass. As a simple material capable of being manipulated and shaped in a wide variety of ways, sheet ply was also favored in furniture and architectural designs by modernists including Charles and Ray Eames, Eero Saarinen, Alvar Aalto, and Marcel Breuer.

After two years in Berlin, the World Architecture Festival will move their 2018 edition to Amsterdam for three days of talks, design presentations, and award ceremonies featuring cutting-edge contemporary works and some of the most prominent figures in architecture today.

The Center for Globalization and Strategy from Barcelona’s IESE Business School has unveiled its annual list of the world’s smartest cities. In its fifth year, the IESE Cities in Motion Index has calculated the performance scores for 165 cities across 80 countries based on an exhaustive rubric of economic and social indicators. Familiar global power centers have maintained their position at the top of the heap, while expanded categories of assessment have helped a few small cities advance their position drastically.

As a part of the second Art and Architecture Triennial in Bruges, Marc Fornes / THEVERYMANY’s prototype pavilion entitled nonLin/Lin has been taken out of storage and placed on public display for the first time. First commissioned and displayed in 2011 by the FRAC Centre in Orleans, France, the exhibition will explore the rise of computational form-making. The work will spend the summer installed in the nave of the Grootseminarie, a 17th century Cistercian Abbey hosting an exhibition curated by Abdelkader Damani entitled Liquid Architectures.

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Neighboring Grand Central Station, Company’s office building at 335 Madison Avenue has one of the most coveted locations in midtown Manhattan. Charged with completely renovating the building’s atrium and office floors, the local New York firm SHoP Architects has unveiled a set of interior renders that show their plans for the commuter-friendly office space.

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Having previously assembled sets of images featuring the offices of architecture firms in Dubai, London, Paris, Beijing, Shanghai, Seoul, the Nordic countries, and Barcelona, architectural photographer Marc Goodwin continues the series with an exploration of 17 large and small offices in the Netherlands. Occupying buildings formerly used as offices, banks and old factories, the interior and exterior images capture a glimpse of the lives of these designers and their daily architectural surroundings.

After receiving 98 entries from teams based in 23 different countries, the jury for University College Dublin’s Future Campus project has selected six proposals for their shortlist, putting each selected firm’s design on display to the public on the project’s website. The finalists include the American firms Steven Holl Architects, Studio Libeskind, Diller Scofidio + Renfro and John Ronan Architects, as well as the Dutch firm UNStudio and Irish architects O’Donnell + Tuomey.

The project will include two major changes to UCD’s Belfield campus, located about 5 km from Dublin’s city center: a major update to the campus’ entry precinct along Stillorgan Road, as well as a new 8,000 square meter Centre for Creative Design, which will house UCD’s design studios.

With construction underway on their renovation of the Space Needle, Olson Kundig will shift their focus to a different American icon. The Seattle firm has unveiled their proposal as lead architect and exhibit designer for The Bob Dylan Center—a new museum that will also house the Bob Dylan Archive in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Sponsored by the George Kaiser Family Foundation and the University of Tulsa, the center is expected to open in 2021, with groundbreaking planned for 2019 in the Tulsa Arts District.

Last month Harvard University’s School of Public Health re-launched their Center for Climate, Health, and the Global Environment, introducing new partnerships and a new director for the institutional home of Dr. Joseph Allen’s Healthy Buildings initiative. With the stated mission of “improving the lives of all people, in all buildings, everywhere, every day,” the Healthy Buildings Team is leading research on how today’s built environments impact the health, productivity, and well-being of the people who inhabit them; as well as how future buildings can help us live healthier lives.

In the interest of defining their terms and presenting their research in a way that audiences outside academia can understand and incorporate into their work, the Healthy Buildings team have released an exhaustive list that details the simple foundations of making a building healthy.

The 9 foundations for healthy buildings are as follows:

For their first major project in Australia, international design firm Broadway Malyan has been selected by the developers behind Greater Springfield, the continent’s largest master-planned community, to design a new health-focused district around the site of Mater Private Hospital Springfield outside Brisbane. Already a healthcare hub containing the hospital, Aveo Springfield Retirement Village and a hotel, the proposed development would expand the so-called “health city” to include a hospital expansion, medical offices, residential and retail space, as well as facilities for wellness, education, research, hospitality, aged care, and start-up businesses.

Why do we remember buildings, locations, and experiences? Even a place visited in our childhood can conjure emotions that make an impact on us through the memories they create. Angela Brooks and Larry Scarpa explain that the work of Brooks + Scarpa Architects aspires to make a lasting impression out of even a brief encounter. “We try to leave something behind,” says Scarpa, “something ingrained in people’s memory that sticks with them.”

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