Villa Malaparte, Adalberto Libera's modern Italian classic, is featured as the backdrop in Saint Lauren's spring 2018 campaign starring modern English classic, Kate Moss. The video for the campaign, directed by Nathalie Canguilhem, positions Moss on the dramatic and monumental steps of the villa, an architectural promenade that seems to lead directly to the sky.

Established by Hyundai Group, Hyundai Motorstudio Beijing was opened in the 798 Art Zone in Beijing on November 1, 2017. The large-scale panoramic mural 798 commissioned by Hyundai and created by Drawing Architecture Studio was officially released at the same time.

Around 14.5 meters in width and 12.7 meters in height, the mural takes the 798 Art Zone as the representative to depict the status of today’s city in the context of information overload. The drawing is a narrative map: most architectural renderings in the panorama are based on actual prototypes at 798. The assemblages are shattered, fragmented and free-floating. Enormous power comes from the inherent vitality and energy of the city. Its shell is cracked and broken to reveal the exciting maze of life inside. 798 is an imaginary representation of the real world, a reconstruction of countless fragments of physical space and time, that constantly collide, align and rearrange.

The Aarhus School of Architecture has revealed the winners of their drawing competition, Drawing of the Year 2017, which asked architecture students around the globe to submit their best digital, hand-drawn or hybrid drawings under the theme of “Everyday Utopia.”

More than 230 submissions were evaluated by an esteemed jury of architects, which consisted of Moon Hoon, founder of Moon Hoon Architects; Trine Berthold, associate partner at schmidt hammer lassen; and Torben Nielsen, professor at Aarhus School of Architecture.

The jury was impressed by the “overwhelming burst of creativity and clever concepts demonstrated in the drawings,” calling out the high level of craft and experimental approaches to drawing.

Three winners were selected:

The idea for the vessel came from feeling that we shouldn’t just make a sculpture or a monument – it felt to us that rather than building a sculpture, it would be great if something was creating more public space.

In the latest video in their Daily 360 series, The New York Times takes us inside Heatherwick Studio’s “Vessel” at Hudson Yards. After topping out last week, the full 154 flights of stairs that make up the unique public structure are now in place, offering some pretty extraordinary views of the Hudson River and west Manhattan.

Construction on the Santiago Calatrava-designed St. Nicholas National Shrine at the World Trade Center has halted, after the church failed to make a series of payments over a several month period to contractor Skanska.

As revealed by the Pappas Post, last week the construction company distributed a letter to its subcontractors informing them that the building contract had been terminated after The Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America defaulted on making payment. In the letter, Skanska directed subcontractors to stop all work and to remove all tools and materials from the site, or risk not being able to recover them.

Sometimes all your project needs is that little push or three. Travelling on public transport with a model you have spent hours painstakingly fussing over is one of the more stressful situations for an architecture student, especially when you must present it to your tutor. The violence that occurs on a busy bus inevitably predicts the end of your creation, your only hope left is to photoshop what remains.

However, the tutor’s response can be somewhat unpredictable (much like the demise of your model) and you can find yourself in a rare situation where they actually like it. Who knows what is going through their heads, but at the end of the day, they are the ones marking it so I wouldn’t argue.

The Leewardists have perfectly illustrated in their comic the pain that consumes us as we watch our most pride possession deteriorate in front of our eyes.

Winning the Italian Ministry of Education's design competition: Scuole Innovative, AS.IN.O is a proposal for a kindergarten and botanical gardens inspired by local materiality and historic context. The team from aut- -aut in Italy, comprised of Gabriele Capobianco, Edoardo Capuzzo Dolcetta, Jonathan Lazar and Damiano Ranaldi, based the layout of the scheme on the typical double courtyard house typology of the Campidano Meridionale area.

+ 9

Text from the organizers Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture (UABB). The Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture (UABB), the only exhibition in the world to explore issues of urbanization and architectural development, will be opening for its 7th edition on December 15th, 2017. UABB will be held at Nantou Old Town in Nanshan district, an urban village that was once the administrative center of the Bao'An County. Hou Hanru, Liu Xiaodu, and Meng Yan (in alphabetic order) make up the curatorial team, all known for notable accomplishments in their respective fields. UABB is thrilled to host more than 200 award-winning exhibitors from 25 countries to share their perspectives on diversity and urban villages at this year’s biennale.

Videos

Two months after the opening of the 2017 MPavilion in Melbourne, its designers, OMA’s Rem Koolhaas & David Gianotten, have returned to discuss the commission and design process, as well as their reactions to its use thus far.

“The opening was an opening with many formal obligations and many excellencies, and that was exciting,” said Koolhaas about the pavilions opening events. “But frankly more exciting was this morning, when the thing performed really wonderfully spontaneously in terms of raising a lot of issues and having from the very first second a really animated discussion about a whole range of issues. And that’s exactly we intended it go.”

Located in the largest remaining park in Beijing’s central business district, MAD Architects’ Chaoyang Park Plaza opened earlier this to year to much deserved fanfare. With a striking black glass form inspired by traditional Chinese ink landscape paintings, the complex is an immediate standout within its context.

In this photo series, Laurian Ghinitiou captures the series of buildings, drawing attention to their relationships to those surroundings. From the bustling streetscape, to the local residents fishing in the nearby pond, to KPF’s fast-rising CITIC Tower in the distance (soon to become Beijing’s tallest tower), Ghinitiou’s photographs are a reminder that all architecture is a product of the people and buildings around it – even the most dramatic of forms.

Check out the full photo set below:

+ 41

Architect and Project Professor at The University of Tokyo, Fumio Matsumoto put together more than 30 iconic buildings into a single 3D printed object called, “Memories of Architecture.” Façades, exterior forms, interior spaces, and structures of significant architectural works were reproduced at 1:300 scale and merged together in order from old to new.

+ 20

“Lightness and transparency are very close friends. You start from something and then you take off, you take off, you take off... And at a certain point you have to stop taking off, otherwise, everything falls down. If you do this you find that there’s a kind of beauty there. It’s a beauty that is profound, it’s not cosmetic.”

In this video by Luis Fernández-Galiano, Italian architect Renzo Piano talks about his path to finding beauty in lightness and transparency. This clip is a part of a full documentary and interactive booklet series by Fundación arquia and produced by White Horse.

The end of 2017 is nearly upon us, and with the start of 2018 comes speculation about who will be the next Pritzker Prize winner. Will the jury honor an influential member of the "old guard," as they did in 2015 when they bestowed the award upon the late Frei Otto? Or will they recognize a young architect who is redefining the profession, as they did when they selected Alejandro Aravena? Will the award go to an individual or to two or more architects working together? And will it reward virtuoso spatial design irrespective of context, or will the selection be more political, as it was last year when locally-focused practice RCR Arquitectes took the prize?

We want to hear from our readers – not just about who probably will win the prize, but about who should win the prize, and why. Read on to cast your vote in our poll, and let us know in the comments whose name you'd like to hear announced in 2018.

Of all construction materials, concrete is perhaps the one that allows the greatest diversity of finishes and textures. The mixture of its ingredients, the shape and texture of the formwork, and the pigmentation of the materials all offer the opportunity to achieve an interesting design. This week we've prepared a selection of 10 inspiring images of innovative concrete, taken by renowned photographers such as Gonzalo Viramonte, Song Yousub, and Ana Cecilia Garza Villarreal.

+ 7

Due to rapid population and economic growth, Indonesia is facing issues such as land subsidence and rising sea levels. To combat these problems and more, SHAU Architects created a master plan for the Jakarta Jaya Foundation focused on large-scale land reclamation to integrate green space. By addressing impending challenges, SHAU Architects proposal, Jakarta Jaya: the Green Manhattan, won a Smart Cities prize at the World Architecture Festival 2017.

Architectural research initiative, arch out loud, have released winners for their international competition to design a landmark for a nuclear waste site in New Mexico. As part of the brief, participants were required to design a timeless piece of architecture that could stand for 10,000 years to warn future generations of the unstable by-products of nuclear weapon production that are buried 2,150 feet beneath the surface.

In the competition, many entrants engaged with the local geology of the site where the waste isolation pilot plant (WIPP) is situated for the landmark that would withstand millenniums. Testbed, the winner of the competition, proposed ex-situ mineral sequestration by reacting olivine or basalt with carbon dioxide to form inert and solid carbonate material to capture the gas, that would act as an ‘artificial tree.' The other proposals questioned the site and the underlying issues regarding human involvement with nuclear activities and the consequences, designing structures that heavily juxtaposed the natural landscape.

Architect and illustrator, Marta Vilarinho de Freitas has yet again enchanted us with her intricate drawings of cities in thin-line-pen on paper. The Portuguese architect has been exercising her passion in drawing through a series of drawings entitled, Cities and Memory - the Architecture and the City.

Fascinated by cities, Marta’s illustrations express her connection with architecture while still capturing the romantic and qualitative aspects of each city, its patterns, colors, atmosphere, and light.

Marta Vilarinho de Freitas combines fantasy with detailed accuracy in her compositions of stacked building facades, roof pitches, plans and sections along with elements distinct to the city depicted such as Dutch windmills, boats, books, and instruments.The process of creating these drawings is cyclical in that they continue to inform Marta of the spirit of each city as she draws each art piece.

+ 7

Following the American Institute of Architects’ (AIA) announcements of the 2018 AIA Gold Medal and Architecture Firm of the Year, three additional national awards have been revealed: the Topaz Medallion, for excellence in architectural education; the Whitney M. Young Jr. Award, honoring architects tackling social issues; and the Edward C. Kemper Award, for professional service.

A new set of renderings has been released the Shigeru Ban Architects’ Terrace House development in Vancouver, revealing the interiors of the residential building for the first time. Being developed by PortLiving, the project will utilize an innovative hybrid timer structural system. When completed, it will become the tallest hybrid timber structure in the world.

+ 1