Magazine

A development plan preserving the James R. Thompson Center in Chicago, a postmodern icon designed by Helmut Jahn, has been accepted in the State of Illinois's bid to sell the building. John Hill

The Board of La Biennale di Venezia has announced that Ghanaian–Scottish architectural academic, educator, and novelist Lesley Lokko will curate the next Venice Architecture Biennale, which will take place from May to November, 2023. John Hill

As 2021 — year two of the coronavirus pandemic — draws to a close, World-Architects takes a month-by-month look back at some of the stories that transpired over the last twelve months: awards, competitions, buildings, exhibitions, and passings.  John Hill

The American Institute of Architects (AIA) has announced that Angela Brooks and Lawrence Scarpa of California's Brooks + Scarpa Architects are winners of the 2022 Gold Medal, while Boston's MASS Design Group wins the 2022 Architecture Firm Award. John Hill

The Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) has announced that India's Balkrishna Doshi is the 2022 recipient of the Royal Gold Medal, which recognizes architects "who have had a significant influence on the advancement of architecture." John Hill

Hiroshi Sugimoto's redesign of the Hirshhorn Museum's Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC, has been approved by the National Capital Planning Commission, allowing the Hirshhorn to move forward with site development plans that have been years in the making. John Hill

The same week that Barbados removed Queen Elizabeth as head of state and became a republic, Prime Minister Mia Amor Mottley announced the creation of the Barbados Heritage District, featuring a slavery memorial designed by Adjaye Associates, which released a short film visualizing the... John Hill

Copenhill, also known as Amager Bakke, the waste-to-energy plant topped with a ski slope in Copenhagen, was judged the top prize at the annual World Architecture Festival that was held virtually this year. Here we present some images of the design by BIG – Bjarke Ingels Group and other winners... John Hill

The recipients of the 32nd annual Piranesi Awards have been announced, following the jury's deliberations on November 26 at Monfort Exhibition Hall in Portorose, Slovenia. John Hill

The Lightcatcher, designed by architects Francesco Magnani and Traudy Pelzel of Venice's MAP studio, has opened in Melbourne's Queen Victoria Gardens. It is the seventh MPavilion commissioned by the Naomi Milgrom Foundation. John Hill

The project designed by architects Fernando Porras-Isla, Lorenzo Fernández-Ordoñez, and Aránzazu La Casta (Porras Guadiana Arquitectos), a major landscape reconfiguration in a key location in the Spanish capital, reopened to the public at the end of November. John Hill, Antonio La Gioia

OPEN Architecture's Chapel of Sound is a semi-outdoor concert hall this sits on the floor of a valley north of Beijing famous for hosting remnants of the Ming Dynasty Great Wall. A short film captures the spatial and acoustical qualities of the recently completed building. John Hill

Curators Ilka and Andreas Ruby have transformed the Barcelona Pavilion into a domestic space — a temporary version of the EU Mies Prize-winning "Transformation of 530 Dwellings in the Grand Parc Bordeaux" by Lacaton & Vassal architectes, Frédéric Druot Architecture, and Christophe Hutin... John Hill

Influential artist and designer Virgil Abloh has died of cancer at just 41. Head of his own Off-White label and artistic director for Louis Vuitton’s menswear, Abloh graduated from the Illinois Institute of Technology with a Master of Architecture in 2006. John Hill

Diller Scofidio + Renfro has unveiled their design for Sarofim Hall, which reinterprets Butler Buildings to create a "new hub for cross-disciplinary practice" at Rice University in Houston, Texas. John Hill

Six long years after it was approved by the Parisian city council, Herzog & de Meuron's Tour Triangle proposed for the 15th arrondissement is moving forward following a recent financing deal. John Hill

The Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow has unveiled SANAA's design that will revive The Hexagon, a building with six pavilions originally designed by Ivan Zholtovsky. Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa explain their design in a short film. John Hill

The World Monuments Fund (WMF) has announced that John Puttick Associates has been awarded the 2021 WMF/Knoll Modernism Prize for their preservation of the Preston Bus Station in Preston, UK. John Hill

OMA NY: Search Term is the first monograph produced by the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) since Content came out in 2004. Focused, as the title indicates, on OMA's New York studio, Search Term uses thousands of images — 5,565 of them, to be precise — to tell... John Hill

As part of the two-part exhibition at Wrightwood 659, Romanticism to Ruin: Two Lost Works of Sullivan and Wright, Chicago cultural historian emeritus Tim Samuelson gives short video tours of five demolished Louis Sullivan buildings in the Loop. John Hill

The Sir John Soane's Museum in London has announced that the recipient of the fourth annual Soane Medal is Marina Tabassum, Bangladeshi architect and pioneer of "‘the architecture of relevance." John Hill

The Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) has revealed the 2021 shortlist for the RIBA International Prize, the biennial award that "celebrates projects that demonstrate design excellence and social impact." John Hill

During an award ceremony held in Venice on November 13, the Holcim Foundation announced the four winners and four commendations in the Global Holcim Awards for Sustainable Construction.  John Hill

M+ opened to the public on Friday, November 12, in Hong Kong’s West Kowloon Cultural District, in a building designed by Herzog & de Meuron. Billed as Asia’s first global museum of contemporary visual culture, M+ opened with approximately 1,500 works on display. A fifteen-minute film from... John Hill

One month after reports indicated Norman Foster's Tulip tower planned for the City of London was "likely to happen," the 305-meter-tall tower has been rejected over its "unsustainable concept" and its visual impact on heritage buildings. John Hill

One River North, the third project in the United States and the first in the country east of the Rockies for Ma Yansong's MAD Architects, features a landscaped "canyon" traversing ten of its sixteen floors. John Hill

CROSSROADS: Life in the Resilient City is a short film by Nils Clauss and Neil Dowling that tells five stories in five cities — New York, Seoul, Mumbai, Paris, Nairobi — inspired by this year's Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism. John Hill

The Tampa Museum of Art has announced a $65 million expansion that is being designed by New York's WEISS/MANFREDI and will "enliven Tampa’s cultural scene and significantly alter the city skyline." John Hill

The recently completed Babyn Yar Synagogue in Kyiv, Ukraine, commemorates the massacre of approximately 35,000 Jews over two days in September 1941. The building was designed by Manuel Herz Architects to literally open like a book, echoing the congregation's act of coming together to read from... John Hill

The Real Deal is reporting that the 76-story residential tower at 8 Spruce Street in Lower Manhattan designed by Frank Gehry and that goes by the name New York by Gehry is for sale, with an asking price of $850 million.  John Hill

As part of PastForward, the National Preservation Conference, held virtually from November 2–5, the United States' National Trust for Historic Preservation announced the recipients of the 2021 National Preservation Awards. John Hill

Ricardo E. Bofill — the son of famed architect Ricardo Bofill Levi, who founded Taller de Arquitectura in 1963 — answers "what is architecture?" and other questions posed by a group of architects from Innsbruck in the latest installment of WIA. John Hill

Despite nationwide criticism over the lack of windows in most bedrooms, the University of California, Santa Barbara is apparently moving forward with plans for a 4,500-bed, 11-story dormitory partially funded and designed by 97-year-old billionaire Charles Munger. John Hill

Curator Mohamed Elshahed, author of Cairo Since 1900: An Architectural Guide, has mounted the exhibition Cairo Modern at the Center for Architecture in New York City. The exhibition features twenty notable projects designed by Egyptian architects between the 1930s and the 1970s,... John Hill

The TRANSFER Global Architecture Platform has revealed the winner of its 2021 Architecture Video Award: Split Lives by Joshua Bolchover and John Lin of Rural Urban Framework. John Hill

Architect and educator Michael Sorkin, who died in March 2020 in the wave of Covid that swept through New York City, was known best as a tenacious and irascible critic of buildings and cities. His writing was also joyful, apparent in the widely circulated list of "250 Things an Architect... John Hill