With the new mayor focusing our attention on smart development and social equality, 2016 will be a banner year for the London Festival of Architecture. Election watchers will be familiar with many of this year’s hot topics: community spaces, social housing, docklands renewal. But considering the theme this year is ‘community’, there will be something for every tribe of Londoner. Out of 300 events, we’ve picked the 10 must-sees. — thespaces.com

Liverpool's Riba North will have conference facilities and a gallery "at its heart", a spokeswoman said.

It will open in August with an exhibition of designs for Liverpool that were never built.
The centre, which will be housed in the Broadway Malyan-designed Mann Island on the city's waterfront, "will offer a magnificent opportunity to display Riba's historic collections, telling hundreds of years of the UK's extraordinary architectural history", Duncan said. — bbc.com

[King Carl XVI Gustav] said the sprawling brass-clad structure, designed by the British architect David Chipperfield to house the Nobel Foundation and host its prestigious annual prize ceremony, would dominate Stockholm’s celebrated 19th-century waterfront...

‘The size of the building is determined by what is necessary for a Nobel Centre. It’s not exploiting the value of the land or something – it’s not a developer building, an office building or a hotel...’ [Chipperfield said.] — The Guardian

THE Palestinians’ new national museum is a striking monument to the state they don’t yet have. Designed by a firm in Dublin, the museum itself is angular and modern, with glass curtain walls topped by smooth white limestone. From afar it looks almost like a low-slung bunker perched on a hill north of Ramallah; inside, though, it is light and airy. A terraced garden stretches out below, filled with dozens of local species...

Only one thing is missing—the exhibits. — the Economist

[Garth England's] extraordinary drawings, made in Hengrove Lodge care home between 2006 and 2013 and published in a beautiful book called Murdered with Straight Lines, capture the changing city through the eyes of this post-war everyman. Born in Bristol general hospital in 1935, England spent most of his 79 years in the city’s suburban south: in Knowle West, Hengrove, Bedminster and Totterdown... — The Guardian

Foster is a surprising choice for the project, as his commissions are typically flashy and in high-profile areas like midtown or the Financial District. But the sole rendering shows his signature mix of contemporary panache (glassy construction with a cantilevering portion) and contextual thoughtfulness (low-scale, boxy structures in keeping with the industrial area). — 6sqft

In a region at once feared and exoticized, we have been witnessing for more than a generation the devastation of old centers and the rise of new ones. Today there is no better context in which to investigate the complexities of global practice in architecture than that of the rapidly changing Arab city. — Places Journal

It is not the first time, though, that a design like this has been pitched for the university. However inadvertently, the DS+R design resembles another proposal for the campus—a draft project that was eventually revised. While the resemblance between two draft renderings is hardly consequential, this one comes as a surprise, given the nature of the projects and the history between the firms. — City Lab

The new building design introduced massive 40 foot sliding glass doors that could one day turn that store into an iCar showroom if they wanted to.

The estimated breakdown of the costs started with the shell of the building costing Apple $19 million. Some of the other costs included $1 million on the staircase alone. If there's 30 stairs that $33,333 per stair. — Patently Apple

the destruction of the Bavinger House is not surprising. Back in 2011, the home appeared to suffer damage in a storm, and when a crew with News 9 attempted to see the house, they were “greeted with gunfire.” [...]

the house remained something of a mystery (it sat on private property, accessed by a rural road) until last July, when PraireMod reported that it had been contacted by Bob Bavinger’s son, Boz, who claimed to be putting the property up for sale for the price of $1.5 million. — hyperallergic.com

A Labour MP has formally asked the government’s independent spending watchdog to investigate how the trust behind London’s proposed garden bridge has spent almost two-thirds of the government funding for the project before construction has begun.

“We’ve had millions of pounds of public money spent and we have no idea what it’s actually been spent on, and it was spent before it even got full planning permission,” Hoey said. — theguardian.com

When I talk about small spaces, I’m not talking about photogenic shelters constructed from found materials by Silicon Valley billionaires. I am not talking about cabin porn. I am talking about the universal human instinct to burrow, regardless of your personal dimensions. — NYT

For the moment, we remain largely wedded to superficial visual futures. The likelihood is that the prevailing chrome and chlorophyll vision of architects and urbanists will become as much an enticing, but outdated, fashion as the Raygun Gothic of The Jetsons or the cyberpunk of Blade Runner — Guardian