INSIDE World Festival of Interiors has announced the 50 nominees being considered for the World Interior of the Year 2015 award. Running concurrently with the World Architecture Festival, INSIDE comprises of the most original and exciting interiors from the last 12 months.

Nominations have poured in from 16 countries that span four continents across the nine diverse categories that make up the awards. Among those competing are two dentistries, a music arena, two cinemas and a global TV studio. All nominees will compete in the form of live presentations and debates to a distinguished jury during the festival in November. Read on for a complete list of the shortlisted projects.

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Videos

Thanks to the increasing availability of giant LED screens, the Golden Age of Neon has quietly faded in Las Vegas. For decades casinos defined their visual identity with colorful neon signs and competed for the most innovative signage. But with casinos closing, being refurbished and the arrival of new lighting technology a lot of neon signs were replaced, and for many years the Young Electric Sign Company kept the old neon signs in their "boneyard" for storage and recycling. Fortunately historic preservation groups rescued these signs. With support of the arts council The Neon Museum was born to save neon treasures and to educate the public.

Read on to explore Las Vegas' luminous landmarks and The Neon Museum.

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Moreau Kusunoki, based in Paris, have been announced as the winners of the Guggenheim Helsinki competition following a year of shortlisting, refining and deliberation. Their proposal—entitled Art in the City—"sums up the qualities the jury admired in the design" noted Mark Wigley, chair of the jury. He continued: "the waterfront, park, and nearby urban area all have a dialogue with the loose cluster of pavilions, with people and activities flowing between them. The design is imbued with a sense of community and animation that matches the ambitions of the brief to honor both the people of Finland and the creation of a more responsive museum of the future."

The announcement was made this morning in Helsinki by Richard Armstrong, Director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation. Also present was Professor Mark Wigley, chair of the jury and Dean Emeritus of Columbia GSAPP, Jussi Pajunen, Mayor of Helsinki, Ari Lahti, chairman of the Guggenheim Helsinki Supporting Foundation, and the architect team.

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Videos

With the opening ceremony of SelgasCano's Serpentine Gallery pavilion earlier today, the Serpentine Gallery has released a set of images by Iwan Baan, capturing the riotous color explosion delivered by the pavilion's ETFE wrapping. Always one of London's most popular architectural attractions over the summer, this year marks the pavilion's 15th anniversary, and will be on display until October 18th.

Read on after the break for more images - and stay tuned to this posts for updates throughout the day!

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In a world where architects can use computers to produce representations of designs with new levels of accuracy and artistry, software fluency is becoming increasingly necessary. With that in mind, last month we asked our readers to help us develop a comprehensive list of tutorials. After studying the comments and scouring the internet for more sources, we have developed this improved list, which we hope will help you to discover new work techniques and better ways to apply different programs.

Of course, it's unlikely that any list of internet resources will ever be complete, so we're hoping to continually update this list with the web's best learning resources. If there are any tutorials sites we've missed which you found helpful, let us know in the comments!

In March of this year, two of the world’s great architects died in the same week. The coincidence was unusual not because of the similarities between these two men - the advanced stage of their careers, their age and relative success - but because of the marked differences. In the few days between their mutual passing, one of the two was awarded architecture’s highest medal, the Pritzker Prize. This year’s winner, Frei Otto, had been notified of his triumph in the months prior to his death. Someone you might call his alter ego – stylistically that is – the late, great Michael Graves, died shortly after the prize was awarded to Otto.

Otto was a leading light of a particular strain of European modernism, whose most lauded works were mainly completed in his youth; on the other side of the pond, Michael Graves ran a busy commercial practice with more than 350 completed buildings, but was reviled by some for his revisionist, classical style.

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Despite being largely invented and developed by Western technology companies such as IBM and Cisco, the concept of the Smart City has been exported all over the world, with some of the most advanced implementations of smart city ideals being found from Rio de Janeiro in Brazil to Songdo in South Korea. In this interview, originally published by Indian Architect & Builder as "Perceptions of a Smart City," Morgan Campbell talks with B V Doshi and Rajeev Kathpalia about Le Corbusier, urbanization, and what it might mean to establish a smart city in India.

Shortly after coming to office in 2014, Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi announced an urban agenda in the form of 100 new Smart Cities for the country. The idea has captured attention at home and abroad, provoking intense discourse and debate regarding the form and context into which these cities should be developed. In January of this year, the city of Jaipur hosted the first annual Architecture Festival. Crafting Future Cities is just one of many platforms for this discussion.

After exiting bankruptcy at the end of last year, Detroit has suddenly become something of a boomtown in the eyes of the media. Discourse now talks about Detroit Rising, the "Post-Post-Apocalyptic Detroit". Rents are rising, private investment is flowing into the city, and institutions that left the city for the affluent suburbs are now relocating back into Detroit proper. Too long used only as a cautionary tale, the new focus on the reality of Detroit and free flowing money opens the door for architects and urban planners, not to mention the wider community, to begin thinking about how they want to rebuild Detroit, and who they want to rebuild it for.

It’s the perfect opportunity to formulate plans that will genuinely aid Detroit, involve the community and create a revival that really achieves something. But as it stands, the "revival" forming in Detroit, aided and abetted by media coverage, will not improve conditions for the vast majority of Detroiters and will not create a sustainable platform for future growth, instead benefiting only the private investors and those rich enough to benefit from what is currently classic, by-the-book gentrification.

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During this week’s “Alternatives for Low Carbon City Architecture and Life” conference in Shenzhen, China, we sat down with Rocco Yim to ask him how his work—driven by his interest in connecting cultures— is related to the pursuit of low-carbon or sustainable design. Yim explained the core values that motivate his approach to design, revealing his attitudes towards technologically-driven design solutions. Read on to see what Yim believes to be the essence of succesful urban spaces.

When it was announced in 2012 that London's Robin Hood Gardens – Alison and Peter Smithson's world-famous Brutalist housing estate – was to be demolished, there was outrage among the architectural community. Since then, many have called for the profession to act in order to protect "one of Britain’s most important post-war housing projects," which led to a fresh bid to save the scheme in March of this year. Richard Rogers, Simon Smithson (a partner at RSHP and son of Alison and Peter Smithson), and academic Dirk van den Heuvel have now called upon members of the public to voice their concerns to the UK Ministry for Culture, Media and Sport, before the end of the week:

"Previous efforts in 2009 to have the building listed failed, but the case has now been re-opened and we understand that the new Minister for Sport, Tourism and Heritage will be reviewing the arguments at the end of this week [w/c 15th June 2015]."

Founded in 2008 and named after the constructivist bus shelter that was its first, temporary home, the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art is Russia's first private, non-profit art foundation. Relocating from a semi-industrial neighborhood on the northern edge of Moscow to Gorky Park, the Garage Museum's conversion of a Soviet era canteen and social club into Museum of Contemporary Art by OMA has so far been overshadowed by its more glamorous OMA counterpart which opened last month, the Milanese distillery conversion for Prada. Nevertheless, since opening last Friday the Garage Museum has attracted attention for Rem Koolhaas' shift towards preservation, something that has startled the critics. Find out more about what they thought after the break.

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Videos

Last year, for the centennial of the publication of Le Corbusier's design for the Maison Dom-Ino, Space Caviar traveled the length of the Italian peninsular in pursuit of ninety-nine reinforced concrete houses. Along the way they created ninety-nine short films. Their research, a survey of Italian domesticity and its relationship to the surrounding landscape over the past century, demonstrated that "few inventions have been as transformative of Italy as the concrete frame": simultaneously a symbol of wealth "generated by a building industry that rebuilt Italy from the rubble of the Second World War" and "the primary instrument of abusivismo," or the unregulated construction on the landscape. It is, as the team describe it, "the ultimate symbol of the architect’s extraordinary power — and enduring helplessness."

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Dear Readers,

Over the last 7 years we have built and maintained a huge database of thousands of buildings to provide you with the inspiration and knowledge that you need for your next project - an important part of our mission.

However this tremendous database lacked the structure that would allow you to use it with that purpose. Sure, you could navigate by building type or by country, you could use the My ArchDaily section to bookmark your favorite projects for reference, or you could browse an endless photo gallery. But this lack of a proper structure prevented us from delivering what you needed, and what you were constantly asking us for via emails or our contact form: a way to easily find the projects that inspire you.

But because ArchDaily started out by using an open-source CMS, we were confined to its features, and all of our ideas to deliver a better ArchDaily to you had to deal with that. So a few years ago we started working on our own platform, designed with the architect in mind. Buildings became objects, typologies became facets, and our database started to take shape. These features have been available at ArchDaily México and ArchDaily Brasil for a while now, but we had to overcome several other issues before migrating ArchDaily.com to our platform. As you can understand, dealing with hundreds of thousands of visitors who view millions of pages every day is no easy task, especially when you move them to a new platform with many new features.

But that day has finally come, and it will enable us to deliver new features and tools as we continue to develop them, without having to worry about legacy platforms. We are now in full control of our database, and we will continue to work to make it useful and accessible to you. At first, you won't see many differences, but under the hood is a completely new system.

What you will see over the coming days is a new faceted search that will allow you to quickly browse our buildings database, and a new version of My ArchDaily.

So in the next few hours some things won't work as expected, or might not work at all. But our development and editorial teams will be working around the clock to make sure that everything gets fixed quickly, and for that we need your help. Any errors that you find, missing images or drawings, messy text, missing videos, etc, please use the form below.

Thank you for trusting ArchDaily as your source of inspiration and knowledge, and rest assured that we will work as hard as we can to continue bringing you new features and tools to help you in the important duty of designing our built environment.

- David Basulto, Founder & Editor in Chief of ArchDaily

Videos

"In China there’s history but there’s no existing context. All the contexts are made for the future. Most of the designs, most of the buildings are only designed for a planning scenario lasting five or ten years. And in that case, first of all, you need to accommodate functions for the future, for the planned purpose. I’d say even though the current project is in a very rural area, it could soon, let’s say in just one or two years, become a populated area. So that’s a different challenge here when you are designing in China."
- Xu Tian Tian, Beijing 2013

Spontaneous Artist Community

Xu Tian Tian: What condition is Songzhuang in, in general? I haven’t been there for quite a while.

Pier Alessio Rizzardi: Songzhuang is developing very rapidly, everything was under construction, and especially in the areas around your three projects the residential buildings were growing fast… I must say that all the projects you designed [Songzhuang Artists’ Residence, Museum and Cultural Centre] were extremely damaged.

Xu Tian Tian: That’s quite disappointing...

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The monograph is a popular platform for dissemination and debate in the art and design world, yet architectural monographs are often treated with suspicion – viewed more as a self-serving PR exercise. But do monographs actually have a more substantive role within the practice of architecture? This was the backdrop for a discussion entitled ‘Why a Monograph?’ held at Waterstones Piccadilly as part of this year’s London Festival of Architecture. The participants included Jay Merrick, architecture correspondent of The Independent; Simon Henley of Henley Halebrown Rorrison (HHbR); David Grandorge, architectural photographer and Senior Lecturer at London’s CASS; and Ros Diamond of Diamond Architects. The session was chaired by ArchDaily Editor James Taylor-Foster.

In an exclusive hour-long interview with British designer Thomas Heatherwick, Monocle's Andrew Tuck discusses building a business in the world of design and architecture, the process behind revamping the iconic red London bus, and the inspiration behind placing people – and plants – at the heart of the River Thames. Heatherwick leads London-based Heatherwick Studio, a multidisciplinary design practice who have recently completed a distillery in England and a learning hub in central Singapore, They are currently collaborating with BIG on the new Google Campus in San Francisco having been recently labelled as among the top ten most innovative architectural practices of 2015 by FastCompany.

Listen to the interview in full below:

The question "what is the point of all this?" has dogged architecture for as long as anyone cares to look, but since the millenniumthe purely theoretical yet theoretically possible designs of Margot Krasojevic have taken this question as a challenge. Her latest proposal, a mesh shelter that takes the concept of snow caves and applies it to an artificial structure, is built for an eminently practical purpose: a built emergency shelter for climbers and others caught in extreme conditions. Yet the elaborate, high tech and naturally contoured structure is as much a thought experiment as it is a serious architectural proposal.

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Founded in 1978, Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios has spent over thirty years refining its approach to sustainability, and is now regarded as one of the UK's leading practices in low-energy design. Yet their work still resonates on many other levels, bringing them multiple awards including the 2008 RIBA Stirling Prize for the Accordia Housing Project which they completed alongside Alison Brooks Architects and Maccreanor Lavington. In this interview from Indian Architect & Builder's May 2015 issue, Peter Clegg talks about the principles behind their work, explaining the concept of holistic sustainability which makes their designs so successful.

Indian Architect & Builder: The Yorkshire Sculpture Park, The Southbank Centre and many other projects desire to involve the social aspects for the larger good of the community. How would you describe the incorporation of these into the design process?

Peter Clegg: Architecture is an art form but also social science and we have a duty not only to work with our current client base and generate ideas collaboratively, but also think ahead and envisage the needs of future generations who are our ultimate clients. Our most creative work comes from working closely with creative clients who are more prevalent in the creative and cultural industries.

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