This week, the Trust for the National Mall opened the exhibition featuring the twelve final design concepts of the National Mall Design Competition in Washington, D.C. [...]

The submissions, created by ten of the country’s design heavy hitters, re-envision three prominent National Mall locations: Union Square, Sylvan Theater on the Washington Monument Grounds, and Constitution Gardens. — bustler.net

Chicago architecture firm Goettsch Partners has designed the signature building that will be the new home of Northwestern University’s Bienen School of Music and provide additional space for the School of Communication on Northwestern’s Evanston campus. The university is planning to break ground and begin construction in May of this year. The project is slated to be completed and ready for move-in in fall 2015. — bustler.net

"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

Back in March, three finalist entries were announced at Urban Intervention: The Howard S. Wright Design Ideas Competition for Public Space. [...] We had already published PRAUD's "Seattle Jelly Bean" proposal, and here's now also the finalist entry "Park" by Southern Californian practice Koning Eizenberg Architecture in collaboration with ARUP.

All three finalist submissions are currently in the process of design phase two. — bustler.net

Shenzhen-based firm WAU Design has shared with us their proposal "Twisted Link" that recently won the team a Commendation in the Design Ideas Competition for Liantang / Heung Yuen Wai Boundary Control Point Passenger Terminal Building, a new structure between the New Territories of Hong Kong and Luohu in Shenzhen, China. — bustler.net

Two top entries have been announced in the 2011 edition of the annual short film competition hosted by SMIBE, The Society for Moving Images about the Built Environment. Under the theme "Building Revolution," the contest had invited moving image stories that investigate, explore, and entertain our communities about social, environmental, political, technological, and economic issues that designers of the built world should be discussing. — bustler.net

In our last post, we published the winning designs of the [AC-CA]-hosted Amsterdam Iconic Pedestrian Bridge competition. Here's another proposal that didn't quite make the cut with the jurors, but we are happy to publish it. The author is Yaohua Wang, who – in past articles – managed to polarize the opinions like nobody else. — bustler.net

Three outstanding bridge designs have recently been selected as winners in the Amsterdam Iconic Pedestrian Bridge competition. Hosted by [AC-CA], this open international competition called for proposals that would reflect contemporary design tendencies and also take into consideration the "urban insertion and impact geared towards creating a new architectural symbol for an European capital city." — bustler.net

Texas A&M University has recently awarded the winning commission for the new Memorial Student Center 12th Man Hall to Memory Cloud, a collaborative project by RE:Site (Norman Lee and Shane Allbritton, Artists) and METALAB (Andrew Vrana, Joe Meppelink and Michael Gonzales, Architecture + Fabrication). — bustler.net

A secondary school project in Gando, Burkina Faso, a community center project in São Paulo, Brazil, and an urban renewal plan in Berlin, Germany are the winners of the Global Holcim Awards for 2012. These leading sustainable construction projects were selected from 15 finalist submissions by a jury of independent experts led by Enrique Norten. The finalists were the regional Holcim Awards 2011 winning projects that had been selected from more than 6,000 entries in 146 countries. — bustler.net

One winner and one Finalist have recently been announced at Tap City, a competition around a drinking fountain. The contest asked undergraduate and graduate students to create a structure, installation, or experience around a forgotten fountain, the Duncan Dunbar Memorial Fountain in Greenwich Village, NYC, to devise a radically innovative proposal for the most particular of urban design sites. — bustler.net

The Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge Celebration was the debut of Dallas’ newest architectural icon connecting Downtown Dallas to West Dallas over the Trinity River. More than 40,000 people attended the opening celebrations from Friday through Sunday, March 2-4, when it was a once-in-a-lifetime chance to walk, run and party on the bridge and toast the best new view in town.

The bridge, Santiago Calatrava’s first vehicular bridge in the United States, will officially be opened to traffic this evening. — bustler.net

Earlier this March, d3 officially announced the winners of the international Housing Tomorrow architectural design competition, and Bustler published the top submissions. This past Monday now, the d3 Housing Tomorrow exhibition also opened at the Mississippi State University School of Architecture featuring the winning entries and selected projects from the 2012 competition. The exhibition will run through April 20 at the school's Giles Hall Gallery. — bustler.net

LAN Architecture recently completed 70° Sud, an apartment building in Boulogne-Billancourt, a western suburb of Paris. The project emerged as the winner of a competition back in 2008. — bustler.net