Buffalo’s Albright-Knox Art Gallery has selected OMA to expand and refurbish the historic museum and its campus. The project team is being lead by OMA New York’s Principal, Shohei Shigematsu, who will spend the next year in partnership with the museum and in consultation with the community on how to renew and revitalize the august institution. Known as AK360, the building will be OMA’s first art museum project in the United States, and the Albright-Knox’s first expansion in more than a half-century. According to the museum, the project’s name is a reflection on this being the institution’s third expansion in its 154-year history, in addition, it establishes an embrace of public feedback and the acknowledges the condition of being encircled by parkland.

Phyllis Lambert, architect and Founding Director Emeritus of the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA), has been announced as the winner of the 2016 Wolf Prize for the Arts. Awarded by the Wolf Foundation in Israel on June 2, the architect was cited for six decades of championing innovations in building design, for her preservation and regeneration efforts with significant historical works, and for her leadership the field of architectural research.

The design proposals of seven shortlisted finalists for the Latvian Museum of Contemporary Art Design Competition have been released by the competition’s organizer, Malcolm Reading Consultants. Located in the capital city of Riga, the funding for the €30 million project is a public private partnership with support from from the ABLV Charitable Foundation and the Boris and Ināra Teterev Foundation, which co-founded the Latvian Museum of Contemporary Art Foundation. The Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Latvia and the Museum’s Foundation signed a memorandum of intent regarding the museum and building on 30 October 2014. The competition, organized in 2015 with 25 first-stage participants, will announce a jury-selected winner in mid-June.

Videos

Have you ever wanted to decorate your walls with old-style maps but been discouraged because they don't fit your minimal and contemporary aesthetic? Enter Cut Maps, the Virginia-based company that creates cartographic representations of cities and states using laser technologies to precisely define borders and streets. The resultant maps offer the illusion of their paper precedents, but with an otherworldly precision only possible in the digital age.

“Immersed in reading a book it feels like [being] inside an architecture, a metaphysical space surrounded by the words,” says Federico Babina, discussing his latest series of illustrations, ARCHIWRITER. In the new series of 27 drawings, the illustrator has created “portraits” of authors by personifying their writing styles, periods, and locations as built environments made from architectural elements and words. Heightening this sense of individuality, Babina states that the resultant portraits can be “fluctuating, vernacular, itinerant, ephemeral, concentric, labyrinthine, surrealist, oneiric, and futuristic.”

This week's issue of The New York Times Magazine, the special New York issue with a theme of “New York Above 800 Feet,” takes a rather irreverent approach to the magazine’s design. Instead of being viewed in the traditional horizontal orientation, the periodical has been rotated 90 degrees and is meant to be viewed by turning the pages up. The long dimension, which is only 10.875 inches horizontally, becomes 17.875 inches vertically, and according to the magazine’s editor, Jake Silverstein, “‘[It] remains absurdly short for our subject, but it is in keeping with the striving spirit that has given New York City its distinctive skyline: This is as tall as it is possible for our magazine to be."

Are tree covered buildings really in tune with ecological and sustainable principles, or are they just a form of greenwashing? This is the question posed by Kurt Kohlstedt in his essay, Renderings vs. Reality: The Improbable Rise of Tree-Covered Skyscrapers, for 99% Invisible. The author notes that vegetated designs come about for myriad reasons – the appearance of sustainability, better air and views, investment intrigue – but that most of these concepts will never leave the realm of paper or virtual architecture. For as many reasons that these buildings have become popular, there are detractors for why they simply cannot be built, including daunting construction hurdles (extra concrete and steel), vast irrigation systems, added wind load complexities, and the trees themselves having difficulty adapting to their vertiginous conditions.

Have you ever had a conflict with a client over being paid for a file? Have you also been out of free space on your dedicated FTP? The dispute scenario often leads to architects being shortchanged for their work. But, a new cloud sharing platform might mean the end of an era of intractable conflicts. Fileship.io promises a system that leaves the architects and other members of the creative economy in control. The simple idea behind the website is that a client’s files are locked behind a paywall, meaning that in order to gain access designers must be compensated. The platform also doesn’t rely on predetermined limits to server space, a scenario that often makes architects err on the side of leniency in order to load newer work on their FTP. Put simply by fileship.io, “You get paid. They get their file.”

Videos

Vivid Sydney, the Australian city's annual festival of lights, began today with colorful installations that reinvent icons like the Sydney Harbour Bridge and Jørn Utzon’s renowned Opera House. The event is host to over 90 light installations devised by more than 150 artists from 23 countries, appearing in eight precincts across the city.

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The Victoria & Albert Museum (V&A) has collaborated with La Biennale di Venezia on the Special Project Applied Arts Pavilion with an exhibition called A World of Fragile Parts. The project will examine threats faced by global heritage sites and how copies can act as an aid in the preservation of cultural artifacts.

“Climate change, natural disasters, urbanisation, mass tourism and neglect, as well as recent violent attacks have brought the risks faced by many heritage sites and cultural artefacts into public conversation," states the A World of Fragile Parts press release, outlining the concerns of the project. "Artists, activists and educational institutions are beginning to respond to the urgent need to preserve by exploring opportunities provided by digital scanning and new fabrication technologies. Several key questions emerge: What do we copy and how? What is the relationship between the copy and the original in a society that values authenticity? And how can such an effort be properly coordinated at a truly global and inclusive scale?”

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MVRDV has designed a fully transparent kitchen for Kitchen Home Project, a satellite event at this year’s Venice Biennale, focusing on living and the home environment. Kitchen Home Project was initiated by Weng Ling of the Beijing Centre for the Arts (BCA), and also features works by Kengo Kuma and the Hong Kong-based media artist Au Yeung Ying Chai. MVRDV’s proposal, “Infinity Kitchen,” imagines the next stage of kitchen design, creating counters, shelving, cabinets, and faucets entirely out of glass – the metaphor being that a see-through environment will add greater transparency to the food being made in the kitchen, and make inhabitants more aware food choices, cleanliness, and the culinary experience.

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The Oslo Architecture Triennale has announced the program and participants for this year's sixth edition of the event, titled After Belonging, which will open in September of this year. Participants will contribute to two exhibitions, occurring alongside a conference, and collateral events, taking place September 8-November 27, 2016.

As described by the Oslo Architecture Triennale website: "The 2016 Oslo Architecture Triennale designs the objects, spaces, and territories for a transforming condition of belonging. Global circulation of people, information, and goods has destabilized what we understand by residence, questioning spatial permanence, property, and identity—a crisis of belonging. Circulation brings greater accessibility to ever-new commodities and further geographies. But, simultaneously, circulation also promotes growing inequalities for large groups, kept in precarious states of transit. After Belonging examines both our attachment to places and collectivities—Where do we belong?—as well as our relation to the objects we own, share, and exchange—How do we manage our belongings?”

David Chipperfield has chosen to mentor Swiss architect Simon Kretz as part of the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative for 2016-2017. Launched in 2002, but working with architects only since 2012, the venture is a biennial philanthropic programme created by Rolex to “ensure that the world’s artistic heritage is passed on from generation to generation, across continents and cultures.”

On the eve of the Venice Biennale, The New York Times’ Michael Kimmelman sits down with Alejandro Aravena in an intimate profile for T Magazine’s Beauty Issue. Visiting a number of projects by the architect and his office, Elemental, Kimmelman experiences socially minded architecture in an age of informal growth, income inequality, and mounting threats linked to climate change, all while learning about Aravena’s own path and growth as a practitioner. Although told by colleagues that he might be standoffish, Kimmelman finds Aravena to be “earnest, open, a little nerdy –– and deadly serious.”

REX has released designs for 2050 M Street, an office building in Washington DC’s Golden Triangle Business District. The 41,800 square meter (450,000 square foot) building evolves and merges two existing typologies in the US Capitol: heavy masonry or concrete buildings, with high relief facades and punched windows – in styles ranging from Beaux Arts to Neoclassical, Art Deco and Brutalist – or modern structures with taut glass envelopes, many with applied decorative treatments. To reconcile these two competing strategies, 2050 M Street provides hyper-transparent, floor to ceiling glass, without view-impeding mullions. From the exterior, the panels appear scooped or concave, establishing that an all-glass building can also have a high-relief facade befitting of the nation’s capitol.

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Mecanoo has unveiled plans for the Namdaemun Office Building in Seoul. The tower takes its name from the Namdaemun Market, the oldest and largest market in South Korea, which is next to the ancient southern gate of the city. Opened as a government managed marketplace in 1414, the market is now an important 24-hour destination for trade and tourism. The slim 14-story, 5,900 square meter (65,000 square foot) building rests on a corner opposite the commercial activities of the market.

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LEGO® today unveiled “Big Ben” as the company’s newest kit in its Creator series. Aimed at adult LEGO® fans (meaning 16 and older) the 4,163 piece design pays tribute to the engineering and architecture of the 19th century Gothic Revival clock tower adjoining the Palace of Westminster and Elizabeth Tower. Highlighting the set’s complexity, LEGO® has outlined the its unique features, including “detailed facade with statues, shields and windows, and a clock tower with 4 adjustable clock dials and a removable roof allowing access to the belfry, plus buildable exterior elements including a sidewalk, lawn and a tree depicting the building’s location.” Big Ben measures over 23 inches (60 centimeters) tall and will be available to purchase on July 1, 2016.