There were other strong contenders, but the 2011 Carbuncle Cup for Britain's "ugliest new building" has been awarded to the £600m MediaCityUK. This concatenation of anaemic buildings is the controversial new regional headquarters of the BBC, and home to the media studies faculty of Salford University. — guardian.co.uk
Hoping to lure top talent to remake Navy Pier, pier officials on Thursday began an international search for a team of architects and other designers who will re-imagine the pier's outdoor public spaces as part of a broader revamp of the facility. — featuresblogs.chicagotribune.com
Construction has commenced on the world’s largest indoor arena, designed by Populous, in Manila, Philippines. In a ground breaking ceremony held last week, the arena design was described as a ‘phenomenal structure’. — bustler.net
Swiss design firm RAFAA has shared with us their entry to the invited competition for Ivanpah, a 392-megawatt solar thermal power facility currently being built by BrightSource Energy Inc in the Californian Mojave Desert. The project - which counts NRG Solar, Google and BrightSource as equity investors - is currently the largest solar plant under construction in the world. — bustler.net
In the past few days, we've received many exciting entries to the South Korean Busan Opera House competition. The entry "Filtration" from graduates of Columbia University received the second prize in the competition's student category. The design team included Paul Tse, Sarah Chung, Steven Tsai, Xander Lu, and Evelyn Ting. — bustler.net
In its sixth year, the Shaw Contract Group Design Is… Award program honored oustanding projects by architecture and design firms. Through these winning projects, selected from commercial and hospitality spaces from around the globe, design is teaching, inspiring, healing, and uniting. — bustler.net
The World Architecture Festival Awards program has announced its 2011 award shortlist with 281 entries spanning the globe from as far south as Tasmania to the Arctic Circle in Norway with new countries such as Libya, Haiti and Cambodia appearing alongside the USA, UK, Australia, China, Japan, Spain, and Scandinavia. — bustler.net
New for WAF 2011 is the introduction of the OpenBuildings People’s Choice Award which is being supported by our friends at OpenBuildings.com. To view the shortlisted projects, cast your vote and provide comments, visit: http://openbuildings.com/peoples_choice/waf/leaderboard. Votes can be... View full entry
Competition entries to the tremendously popular Busan Opera House competition keep pouring into our inbox these days. Here is another one of our favorites, the proposal "Anisotropia" designed by London-based studio Orproject. The design team included Ho-Ping Hsia, Christoph Klemmt, Rolando Rodriguez-Leal, Rajat Sodhi, Natalia Wrzask, and Christine Wu. — bustler.net
Kubota & Bachmann Architects from Zurich, Switzerland have sent us their entry "Harmony" for the Korean Busan Opera House ideas competition. The design team included Toshihiro Kubota and Yves Bachmann. — bustler.net
In case you had missed LA's Little Tokyo Design Week back in July, here is the winner of the design week's grand prize, the Golden Astro Boy Award, in detail: ARTCUBE, an interactive installation by Los Angeles-based designer Brandon Shigeta: ARTCUBE contains a novel interactive sculpture... View full entry
It's fun to design – even when you have to work for free ! In fact, a freebie “conceptual design” is what two Harvard-educated women produced for Barbie’s new home in a competition to build a dream home for the Mattel doll, sponsored by the American Institute of Architects. — Globe & Mail
Related: Winner of the AIA Architect Barbie Dream House Design Competition View full entry
Boston-based firm PRAUD has shared with us their entry to the Busan Opera House competition. The international ideas competition invited visions for a massive cultural center, comprising a 2,000-seat opera house and a 1,300-seat multi-purpose theater, that acts as a landmark building for this booming South Korean city and puts Busan on the map of international tourism. — bustler.net
Eero Lunden Studio from Helsinki, Finland and Eric Tan of Danish firm PinkCloud.DK have sent us their collaborative entry to the Serlachius Art Museum Gösta design competition in Mänttä, Finland. — bustler.net
Portal to the Point Project Advisor Paul Rosenblatt AIA, Principal of SPRINGBOARD Design, is pleased to announce the selection of five finalists for the Portal to the Point Design Ideas Exploration sponsored by Colcom Foundation. The finalists are: Marlon Blackwell Architect, MAYA Design, SCAPE Landscape Architecture, Weiss/Manfredi, and wHY Architecture. — SPRINGBOARD Design
Project Teams Selected for Portal to the Point: A Design Ideas Exploration Portal to the Point: A Design Ideas Exploration is an ‘Idea Generation Project’ funded by Colcom Foundation. Five multi-disciplinary teams have been selected to focus on public art and design in Point State... View full entry
The winning entries for the 2011 Animal Architecture Awards have just been announced. Now in its third year, the award contest "All Creatures Great & Small" invited critical and unpublished essays and projects to address how architecture can mediate and encourage multiple new ways of species learning and benefiting from each other - or as the organizers call it, to illustrate cospecies coshaping. — bustler.net
