New London Architecture (NLA) has named the winners of this years New London Awards, celebrating the best projects and architects shaping London today. Taking home top honors, Zaha Hadid was crowned "New Londoner of the Year" for her influential work, both in the UK and abroad. The jury commended Hadid for "her role as a champion of design to both the government and the general public alike," citing her success with the London Aquatic Center and the Serpentine Sackler Gallery.

Out of the 51 projects awarded, Pringle Richards Sharratt's Black Cultural Archives (BCA) in Brixton was named London's best new building. The Grade II listed structure, which had been on the English Heritage's Heritage at Risk Register since 1992, was restored as a new home for BCA’s extensive archives, serving as an exemplar for preservation and reuse.

The Musée du Louvre and the Nord-Pas de Calais region has selected Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners (RSHP) to build a new conservation and storage facility for the Louvre in Liévin, northern France (Nord-Pas-de-Calais). Built primarily for study and research, the 20,000-square-meter "landscape building" will feature a series of vaulted light-filled conservation studios and storage spaces topped with a lush green roof.

“The consortium of architects, headed by Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners, has succeeded in taking the specific needs of properly preserving and accessing the Louvre’s collections, and turning them into a first-class architectural creation," said Jean-Luc Martinez, President-Director of the Musée du Louvre.

Now through September 7, you can take a "swim" in a massive "BEACH" that has taken over the National Building Museum's Great Hall. Spanning 10,000-square-feet, the BEACH was created in partnership with Brooklyn-based Snarkitecture to offer the people of Washington D.C. a one-of-a-kind installation as part of the NBM's "Summer Block Party."

The "ocean" is essentially a ball-pit comprised of nearly one million recyclable translucent plastic balls. It is contained within a mirrored, all-white enclosure flanked by a 50-foot-wide "shoreline" that offers visitors the option to wade the  "water" or sit back and relax. 

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British architect David Adjaye is set to submit plans for new Studio Museum in Harlem. Designed to replace the 47-year-old museum's existing facility on Manhattan's West 125th Street, the new $122 million proposal will more than double the museum's space, allowing it to become a premier center for contemporary artists of African descent.

According to the New York Times, Adjaye was chosen to design the museum due to his sensitivity regarding the artists and surrounding neighborhood, which in turn inspired the project; the project's main space will feature a four-story, multi-use core marked by an "inverted stoop" that will act as an inviting "living room" and host for public programs.

“I wanted to honor this idea of public rooms, which are soaring, celebratory and edifying — uplifting,” he told the New York Times. “Between the residential and the civic, we learned the lessons of public realms and tried to bring those two together.”

After serving as curator for the past three years at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, Portuguese architect Pedro Gadanho will be leaving his position to become the first artist director of the new Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology (MAAT) in Lisbon. Scheduled to open in the fall of 2016, the new MAAT museum will be responsible for the EDP Foundation's cultural program.

"Pedro Gadanho’s profile and international experience are essential to our ambitions for MAAT, making it a distinctive space of contemporary culture in Portugal", says António Mexia, CEO of EDP. Pedro Gadanho adds that "MAAT will be a cultural institution of the quality and breadth seen in major European cities, offering an exciting contemporary program at the intersection of art, architecture and technology."

The United Arab Emirates National Innovation Committee has unveiled plans to build the world's first 3D printed structure with a massive, 20-foot-tall 3D printer. Though many structures have utilized 3D printing, none have been entirely built by using the technology. Everything - the building's structure, interior finishes, and furniture - will be 3D printed in sections and then assembled on site, according to a report by 3DPrint. The 2,000-square-foot building will then be used to house the Museum of the Future headquarters in Dubai.

Nader Tehrani, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) architecture professor and founding principal of Office dA and NADAAA, has been appointed dean of The Cooper Union's Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture. From 2010 to 2014, Tehrani served as the head of MIT's Department of Architecture, while leading two offices in Boston and New York City. He will now join Cooper this month and focus his efforts on speculative research and interdisciplinary collaboration.

Details have been released on a new residential project designed by ODA Architecture at Brooklyn Bridge Park in New York. Occupying two waterfront sites in the Pier 6 uplands development area, the project will include two10,000-square-foot buildings focused on affordable housing, community development and preserving the surrounding parkland.

Construction is slated to begin next week on a $35 million office building designed by BIG at Philadelphia's Navy Yard. As the Philadelphia Inquirer reports, Liberty Property Trust will break ground Tuesday on the 94,000-square-foot office building at a site adjacent to a five-acre park designed by James Corner Field Operations. The project will be Liberty's fourteenth development at Navy Yards - a 1200-acre office park sited on a World War II Navy shipyard.

The Alvar Aalto Foundation and the City of Jyväskylä has launched an open international competition in search of an architect to design an extension that would connect the Alvar Aalto Museum with the Museum of Central Finland, and the surrounding outdoor area. The aim is to connect these two key Aalto works to form an attractive, high-quality museum center.

“On the initiative of the Alvar Aalto Foundation we set about taking the matter forwards, our hope being to hold an international design competition. It is wonderful to be involved, via the competition, in linking the museum buildings together, something that Alvar Aalto had originally intended,” says Director of the Alvar Aalto Foundation Tommi Lindh. Read on to learn more.

Videos

Foster + Partners has won the competition to design Cardiff Interchange, the city’s central bus station. Part of the wider Central Square regeneration masterplan for the area, also by Foster + Partners, the interchange is being relocated closer to the Cardiff Central train station in an effort to allow greater integration of all transportation networks and accommodate future growth in passenger traffic.

A photo posted by Andrés Jaque (@andres_jaque) on Jun 23, 2015 at 10:11am PDT

This week COSMO begun its venture to filter more than 42,000 gallons of New York City water during the course of MoMA PS1's Summer Warm Up series. The 16th installation built as part of the annual Young Architect's Program (YAP), COSMO is a portable water purifier designed by Andrés Jaque / Office for Political Innovation to combat the world's clean water crisis while serving an animated backdrop to PS1's party atmosphere.

An interview with Jaque, after the break.

Architectural photographer Pedro Pegenaute has shared with us a video through MX-SI's Serlachius Museum Gösta in Mänttä, Finland. An expansion of the existing Joennimei manor, the new building was built to host contemporary art traveling exhibitions and accommodate the museum's growing collections. MX-SI was also commissioned to design a new bridge that connects the museum to the island of Taavetinsaari. You can see them both in the film above.

Designed with the architect in mind, nendo has created a morphable Architect Bag for TOD's. "In the extended form," says nendo, "the bag holds a full-size A3 drawing as well as samples with quite a bit of length. Folding it into half creates two spaces where you can store A4 size drawings and documents, and the middle part of the flex section houses rolled-up drawings, heavy catalogues or books and samples of construction materials. With the ability to store away the two handles, you can turn it into a clutch bag when you have fewer things to carry." Take a closer look, after the break.