Jean Nouvel has won the prestigious competition to design the National Art Museum of China in Beijing. — bustler.net

Gehry Partners has sent us detailed information about their entry to last summer's most buzzed about architectural competition, the National Art Museum of China in Beijing. Gehry's beautiful NAMOC entry made it all the way to the final of three competition rounds and found itself in lofty company with submissions from fellow Pritzker Prize winners Zaha Hadid and Jean Nouvel. — bustler.net

The day after Chinese architect Wang Shu was awarded the $100,000 Pritzker Architecture Prize, the field’s equivalent of a Nobel, in May 2012, he returned to the old Beijing neighborhood where he grew up and found it in the process of being demolished. The hutong, with its maze of narrow streets and traditional courtyard houses, was being sacrificed to make room for a new philosophy center. — businessweek.com

The French architect behind the Louvre Abu Dhabi, the Fondation Cartier and the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris has designed the breathtakingly bold new National Art Museum of China (Namoc) for Beijing, a vast structure which combines internal complexity with apparent external simplicity. — ft.com

A new breed of Chinese architects like Li Hu seeks inspiration from inside themselves. [...]

Conventional wisdom says that "futuristic", modern and massive architecture is making Beijing into an international metropolis. However, Chinese architect Li Hu says the capital city needs architects who have their own attitudes. — usa.chinadaily.com.cn

Only a few more weeks, and we will officially find out who has won the prestigious competition for NAMOC, the new National Art Museum of China in Beijing.

Below is the entry of one of the twenty firms that were invited by the competition organizers to submit designs, Beijing-based firm MAD. — bustler.net

If you're in Portland, Oregon these days, don't miss to check out the exhibition BEIJING by visual artist Aaron Yassin, currently on view at Chambers@916.

BEIJING, Yassin's latest project, is a series of dynamic and mesmerizing architectural photographic composites built from images of iconic buildings in Beijing, spanning hundreds of years, from the Temple of Heaven to the Bird’s Nest Stadium. — bustler.net

As China's flood-ravaged capital dealt with the aftermath of the heaviest rain in six decades Monday, including the deaths of 37 people, questions were being raised about whether the city's push for modernization came at the expense of basic infrastructure such as drainage networks. [...]

The city has seen tens of billions of dollars poured into its modernization [...] — all while basics like water drainage were apparently neglected. — npr.org

The building has two colossal, uneven leaning towers (the highest rises 768 feet) that are conjoined at the top by an enormous angular bridge. Conservative estimates put the cost at nearly $900 million; Koolhaas, for his part, says he has “no idea” of the price. What is certain is that the CCTV building now dominates the skyline of Beijing, just as it dominates the airwaves of the country. — thedailybeast.com

Low resolution rough cut of footage I shot at the CCTV building in Beijing in Feb 2012. This footage is part of a documentary I am making about my father Rem Koolhaas. — Tomas Koolhaas, via vimeo.com

In an international design competiton for the rapid development of satellite cities along Chinese high speed rail corridors, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill's Beijing Bohai Innovation City master plan has just been named the winning submission. — bustler.net