For the second consecutive year, Portuguese design office AND-RÉ has won the Iberian Urban Equipment Prize - Larus/Architectures, this year in the category Urban Furniture with "PACMAN", a captivating design that sets out to change the mindset of citizens in their relation with recycling. In 2011, the office won the award in the Lighting Design category with the "Verso" lighting system. — bustler.net

Design Week NYC is almost here, and the plethora of events going on around New York City can be quite overwhelming. But worry not, the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum has launched a new tool that will come in very handy: a mobile-ready website, designweeknyc.org, highlighting design-related events around the city during ICFF, the International Contemporary Furniture Fair, May 19-22. — bustler.net

The new Orange Barrel HQ will reuse existing concrete storage silos and a renovated 10,000-sqft warehouse with a new 10,000-sqft addition. OBM President Pete Scantland says they’re aiming for LEED Platinum certification with the project. Solar panels will be located on the back side of a 120-foot tall structure rising above the new offices, while the front side will provide a showpiece advertising space. — ColumbusUnderground.com

"A amphitheater at the base of the Washington Monument. A glass-enclosed restaurant overlooking the Constitution Gardens pond—and a winter-time ice-skating rink where the pond currently sits. A lively new Union Square, with streams of water arching into the Capitol Reflecting Pool.
Those are among the ideas that architects and designers have floated for redesigning and reviving three sites on the National Mall..." — dcist.com

Released on Sunday by the Center for an Urban Future — a think tank focused on New York City — “Designing New York’s Future” cites that New York City graduates twice as many students in design and architecture as any other city in the country. While extolling the schools’ strengths, the report also advocates for more business coursework in curricula... — thirteen.org

Many of us evaluate a restaurant based on the food; after all, restaurants are about eating. But how many of us stop and think about the design--like the look of the interior, the materials used, and the color scheme--when it comes to our food experiences?
This is the question that the Chicago Architecture Foundation wants you to think about through their series Appetite for Design. — gapersblock.com

Got a brilliant design idea in the live/work realm that is ready to take the world by storm? Well, now is your time to shine: Our friends at Dwell teamed up with Design Within Reach and launched the Live/Work Design Contest, which challenges designers to create a workspace “classic of tomorrow” – a new home-office solution that DWR could potentially manufacture and sell. Dwell will host the DWR-sponsored contest through the end of June [...]. — bustler.net

....breakthrough ideas still come from individuals, not committees. “There is nothing democratic about innovation." — New York Times

In an earlier draft of this comic, it appeared the Farnsworth house was being gnawed by ordinary beavers. My architect brother informed me that Mies van der Rohe was known for his innovations in steel and glass, not wood. So just to clarify: those are MUTANT beavers. — thoughtballoonhelium.blogspot.com

A Michigan native who as a boy played with Legos and wrote a fifth-grade essay titled "Why I Want to Be an Architect," Ronan wears the black-on-black palette that is a modernist uniform and goes well with his fluffy gray hair. The recognition for the Poetry Foundation headquarters is his second national Honor Award from the AIA. The first, given in 2009, was for the brightly colored Gary Comer Youth Center in the South Side's Greater Grand Crossing neighborhood. — Blair Kamin, Chicago Tribune

United States Artists has honored the USA Fellows for 2011 at a festive event earlier this week in Santa Monica, CA. Fellowship grants of $50,000 each were awarded to fifty outstanding performing, visual, media, and literary artists or artist teams. USA Fellowships are presented annually in the disciplines Architecture & Design, Crafts & Traditional Arts, Dance, Literature, Media, Music, Theater Arts, and Visual Arts. — bustler.net

With the announcement of the prestigious Dutch Design Awards 2011 being only days away, we're happy to share videos and photos from three live performances created by Rotterdam-based Studio Dumbar. The performances are to promote the Dutch Design Awards categories: Spatial-, Product- and Communication Design. — bustler.net

In Holland, we have two words for design. One is vormgeving; in German formgeben. And the other word is ontwerpen; in German entwurf. In the Anglo-Saxon language there’s only one word for design, which is design. That is something you should work out. Vormgeving is more to make things look nice... While ontwerpe means, and the Anglo-saxon word, but its stronger, means engineering. — thatnewdesignsmell.net