The Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) has selected the internationally acclaimed Dutch architect Herman Hertzberger as the Royal Gold Medalist of 2012. Hertzberger established his firm Architectuurstudio HH in 1958 and since has made significant contributions to the world of modern architecture. He is not only an architect, but a teacher and published writer. Hertzberger has won a great many competitions, has been made an honorary member of several cultural bodies and has been awarded international architecture prizes, both for individual projects and for his oeuvre as a whole. Continue reading for more information on Hermam Hertzberger and the video above.

Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP (SOM) has been selected as winner of an international design competition with its Beijing Bohai Innovation City master plan that illustrates a new model of compact, environmentally enhanced urban design.

The winning proposal centers a new environmentally friendly district along the high-speed rail line, linking the national capital to the port city of Tianjin while leveraging the economic and lifestyle assets of the Beijing-Tianjin corridor. The city expansion will bring 17.6 million square meters of mixed-use development, with a focus on providing a premier headquarters location for advanced industries in the dynamically growing Bohai Rim, a region that already accounts for more than a quarter of China’s GDP.

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Tonight, Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP) Studio-X NYC welcomes Fast Company’s Greg Lindsay and the Institute for the Future’s Anthony Townsend for the first of a new series of events focused on the “smart city”.

“Lindsay and Townsend are calling the series “X-Cities,” where X marks the spot at which information technology and mega-urbanization converge. In this first session, the pair will lay out their respective cases for the top-down, intelligent design of “smart cities” versus the bottom-up evolution of crowd-sourced “civic laboratories.” Is information technology a real tool for city-building? And, if so, what is its bright and/or scary future?”

This event will begin at 6:30PM at 180 Varick Street in New York. It is free and open to the public. No RSVP is required. Continue reading for more information.

Brightly colored confetti and sequined samba queens covered the newly renovated Sambadrome in Rio de Janeiro, marking the beginning of the 2012 world-famous annual Carnival. Designed by Brazil’s legendary architect Oscar Niemeyer, the Sambadrome was originally constructed during the first government of Leonel Brizola (1983 – 1987) in an effort to provide Rio with an urban facility that would serve as the permanent location of the traditional spectacle of the samba school’s parade. Inaugurated in 1984, the Sambadrome is also known as the Catwalk Professor Darcy Ribeiro out of respect to the man who moved the parade to its current site. Continue for more.

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As a young architect and recent graduate of Kansas State University, Nicholas Kreitler shares with us five important recommendations for every graduate entering into the “real world”. Please feel free to add your recommendations in the comment section below.

Every school has a dif­fer­ent way of teach­ing their stu­dents, some take an approach focused on the­o­ry, some do it on prac­ti­cal experience and some try to take a bal­anced approach. Each of these have their advan­tages and dis­ad­van­tages, but I’m not look­ing to dis­cuss the cur­ricu­lum. I’d like to dis­cuss some of the things that were left out. Some­times there are just things that only real world expe­ri­ence can teach you. Now I am far from know­ing every­thing, if I know any­thing at all, but I have a seen a few glim­mers of hope on the hori­zon and that con­tin­ues to keep me moti­vat­ed. I have found that we are all search­ing for our place in this ever chang­ing world and a lit­tle advice is never a bad thing.

ArchDaily announced the winning proposal for the 2012 MoMA PS1 Young Architects Program (YAP) earlier this month. In order to bring you full coverage of the annual competition, we are featuring the other four creative designs that competed against HWKN’s Wendy. Virtual Water, a collaborative design brought to you by UrbanLab, endrestudio and Method Design, formally manifests what is hidden in plain sight: RAIN. The project reveals and plays with thousands of gallons of summertime rainwater that would otherwise be discarded from the PS1 courtyard.

Virtual Water refers to water hidden in everyday products. A pair of jeans, for example, has a 3000 gallon Virtual Water footprint because 3000 gallons of water are consumed in the various steps of its production chain (growing the cotton, dyeing the fabric, etc).

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ArchDaily announced the winning proposal for the 2012 MoMA PS1 Young Architects Program (YAP) earlier this month. In order to bring you full coverage of the annual competition, we are featuring the other four creative designs that competed against HWKN’s Wendy. AEDS’s (Ammar Eloueini Digit-all Studio) proposal creates a 21st century urban oasis in the fabled courtyard of PS1. The design encourages visitors to meander through a maze-like field of objects, enticing them to take up different paths, creating distinct experiential moments. This anti-monumental, anti-plop art approach is acutely attuned to both the human scale and the elemental senses.

For perhaps the first time, the entire courtyard will be activated throughout the day and long into the night, inspiring a voyeuristic curiosity, a desire to explore and inhabit hidden “moments.” A stream of water carves a path between the objects, stitching together three main spaces defined by the experiences of Water, Mist and Vegetation. At night, diffused light is fragmented through the digitally fabricated patterns that perforate the surface of the objects.

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RIBA President Angela Brady discusses design in 2012 with British architect Richard Rogers. Together, they discuss the important issues surrounding housing and cities, both agreeing that “intensification is critical”. Homes built within a compact city are said to be five times more efficient than those built outside the city. This realization is an important fact that should guide government officials, builders and architects to work together towards more intelligent and beneficial growth patterns.

The controversy surrounding Frank Gehry’s proposal for the Eisenhower Memorial has just reached new heights as the Chicago Tribune’s Blair Kamin has recently published a 1,500-word essay, written by the influential neo-traditionalist architect Leon Krier, that bashes Gehry’s proposal and ideology. Krier calls Gehry a “greatly confused artist” who’s “style is a century old” and “seems “innovative” only to the ignorant”. Kier continues to claim the commission who appointed Gehry’s design “shares his [Gehry’s] intellectual confusion and distaste of classical Washington D.C.” Continue reading for more.

The votes are in and 72 per cent of the citizens in Isny im Allgäu (Bavaria, Germany) have vetoed Peter Zumthor’s design for the new city gate commonly referred to as the “glass underpants”. As the Swiss architect is famously praised for his context-sensitive and timeless designs, the people of Isny initially felt “lucky” to have Zumthor design for their town. They had high hopes for their very own Steilneset Memorial – the Norwegian city of Vardo’s beloved installation that has brought a surge in tourism – but ultimately were disappointed. Continue reading for more.

Chicago-based artists Petra Bachmaier and Sean Gallero of Luftwerk have transformed Millennium Park into an interactive, choreographed light show titled Luminous Field. Colorful geometrical images set to music composed by Owen Clayton Condon of Third Coast Percussion illuminate “Cloud Gate”, commonly known as “The Bean”, and transform its surrounding plaza into a digital canvas. This site-specific video and sound installation is the first of its kind for Cloud Gate. Be sure to take part in this “immersive sculptural experience” before it concludes on February 20th. The spectacle begins each night at 6pm. Continue after the break for more images.

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The battle carries on as world-famous artist Christo fights for approval to construct a temporary work of art that will 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. Over the River has been on the drawing boards for 20 years now, with over $7 million of Christo’s money invested into it with environmental studies, mock-ups, surveys from the air and wind tests.

In November, Christo received approval from the federal Bureau of Land Management, which owns 98 percent of the riverfront. This was a huge step forward in the project and now only a few more local permit approvals are standing in the way.

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Together, BIG + Times Square Alliance + Flatcut + Local Projects and Zumtobel celebrates Valentines Day with a BIG red pulsating heart in the middle of Times Square, New York. The 10-foot-tall heart pulsates as the 400 transparent, LED lit, acrylic tubes sway in the wind. Once people touch the heart-shaped sensor, the light grows brighter and the pulse beats faster. Joining hands with more people will increase the intensity of the heart.

“The heart reflects what Times Square is made of: people and light – the more people, the stronger the light,” Bjarke Ingels, Founder & Partner, BIG.

See the love with the video above and more images after the break.

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Since 2007, controversy has been stirring due to the rising costs and delayed schedule of Herzog & de Meuron’s Elbphilharmonie concert hall in Hamburg, Germany. Recent reports state the court has approved the city of Hamburg’s €40 million lawsuit against the primary contractor HochTief, who has stopped working in four areas of the €600 million project this past November. HochTief blames the architect due to differences in its plans.

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Check out this condensed video, provided by the RSA (Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce), featuring Michael Pawlyn. As many architects have been inspired by nature, Pawlyn concentrates on biomimicry’s potential to influence the function rather than the form of a building. He believes a functional revolution needs to occur, stating we need to focus on a radical increase in resource efficiency, a shift to closed-looped systems and the transformation from our current fossil fuel economy to a solar economy. With the natural world as our living proof, Pawlyn believes all three of these challenges are crucial and achievable.

We found this Venn diagram on arthitectural. This illustration was originally created by Colin Harman in regards to graphic design. However, there is no doubt this logic can apply to architecture, or any other design profession.

Le Corbusier’s Cité Radieuse has been severely damaged fire. The nine-story “vertical village” in Marseille, France became a historic monument in 1995 and serves as one of the most important postwar landmarks of modernist architecture.

The Museum of Modern Art and MoMA PS1 have announced the New York based office HWKN (HollwichKushner) as winner of the annual Young Architects Program (YAP) in New York. As winners of the 13th edition of the program, HWKN will construct an outdoor summer installation at the PS1 courtyard in Long Island City, Queens. The winning proposal, known as Wendy, was selected from five finalists and will provide a unique setting for the popular Warm Up summer music series.

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