BIG + realities:united + AKT + Topotek 1 & Man Made Land have been selected to design the new Waste-to-Energy Plant that doubles as a ski slope for Copenhagen’s citizens and its visitors by 2016.
News
BIG + realities:united + AKT + Topotek 1 & Man Made Land have been selected to design the new Waste-to-Energy Plant that doubles as a ski slope for Copenhagen’s citizens and its visitors by 2016.

I think this is a wonderful concept. For two reasons. First, it seems to offer a great way to go beyond simply creating a solitary object and almost by definition integrates the building into the larger urban fabric/public realm. Moreover, it seems a perfect way to extend the architects role into post-occupancy programming. In other-words simple by combining multiple programs into their design, they are able by default to direct post-occupancy use.

Per this post by Harvard GSD school blogger Andreas, we read in China Daily that this news item about plans to merge nine cities in the Pearl River Delta region into a super-sized metropolis, is in fact not accurate.

Both Christopher Hawthorne and Nicolai Ouroussoff reviewed Frank Gehry's newly opened, New World Center in Miami Beach, which sits in a park designed by West 8.

Discussion Threads
Steven Ward restarts Hand Drawing is dead thread.

For those of you wondering what happened to Archinect Sessions after the first one. Orhan lets us know that there was a break for personal reasons but they will be starting back up again, soon(ish).

We discuss Autodesk's Project Vasari. difficultfix thinks Vasari is opening a huge door for bim, energy modeling within Revit.

Barry Lehrman wants to discuss the four finalists in The Minneapolis Riverfront Design Competition.

School Blogs
Bo at Kansas State University CAPD has arrived in Itlay where he will be studying this semester. He has spent some of the last weeks pondering Is it worth it to give up aspirations and the ability to create "high architecture" in order to live a sustainable and enjoyable life? Would I be eschewing some kind of moral responsibility I have to create the most powerful and important work that I can? Or is that an argument that I've created to justify some need for recognition or propaganda that I've believed?

Lian at Harvard GSD talks about her studio this semester. The project is entitled The project is called 'CITY/CODE' and the studio is a big change for her and the other students because: Unlike the work in landscape architecture, our training in architecture generally doesn't deal with the spatial and temporal indeterminacy of flows and systems. And since we're also not urban planners, the scale of our site--a ginormous (and this proves my point: I don't even know how to verbally convey the square footage of a site this size) tract of land across Willets Point in Corona, Queens--is unsettling. We are also not accustomed to working in groups for studio. Group work is common in courses, but not in the sacred ground of studio, and we are in teams of three for the ENTIRE SEMESTER. We're even spending a week collaborating with our colleagues in the landscape program.

Andreas at Harvard GSD is taking Peter Rowe's seminar on modern Chinese architecture and urbanism and planning on cross-registering for a MIT seminar dealing with Asian cities in a more thematic manner.

At University of Illinois Chicago, Matthew's studio this semester is ARCH 552. This studio is based on the exploration of formal language though intensive modeling and diagrammatic drawing. The structure of the class involves weekly full class pin-ups and she posts images from the first two weeks of pin-ups.

Dorothy at University of Michigan TCAUP is in the third week of her thesis semester and is reading: Foa's Phylogenesis on multi-layered infrastructure, Mike Webb's Temple Island on ridiculous drawings and Neil Denari's Gyroscopic Horizons on placelessness v. place without limit.