The World Architecture Festival 2014 at the Marina Bay Sands closed on a festive note with the final top-prize winners being announced during a gala dinner and awards ceremony on October 3...The WAF "super jury" awarded the overall winning World Building of the Year award to The Chapel in Vietnam designed by Vietnamese architecture firm a21studio. Three projects in Victoria, Canada, Australia, and China also won major top awards, and two Inaugural Prizes were given. — bustler.net

Today, on China’s southern coast, the integration of the Greater Pearl River Delta (PRD) is turning fiction into fact (sans the harsh lawman), with 11 cities linking to create an urban area of 21,100 square miles (55,000 sq km) and a population of up to 80 million.

The nine cities of the PRD, plus the special administrative zones of Hong Kong and Macau, are becoming increasingly linked by a series of bridges, tunnels, roads, and high-speed rail networks. — urbanland.uli.org

The French architect Jean Nouvel has announced details of his design for the National Art Museum of China in Beijing. [...]

“The National Art Museum of China represents an incredible opportunity for the most ambitious materialisation of a place of expression… a place that witnesses the vitality of a civilisation, the civilisation of the greatest people on earth,” say the organisers. — theartnewspaper.com

[...] colleges in China are copying America’s copycat approach. There’s a university in Shanghai where faux English manor houses sit side-by-side with dorms modeled on Britain’s half-timbered homes. To the north, Hebei province boasts a university inspired by Harry Potter’s Hogwarts—itself fashioned on the traditional collegiate Gothic. Even specific colleges have been cloned. — theatlantic.com

"Giving the boulevard back to the people... makes the streets habitable again," says Sean O’Malley of SWA. — swa group

But I’ve seen aerial photographs of this place taken by the Philippine navy. They show the massive land reclamation work China has been doing here since January.

Millions of tonnes of rock and sand have been dredged up from the sea floor and pumped into the reef to form new land. — BBC News

Residents of Beijing can use one of the city’s 34 newly installed recycling machines to trade empty bottles for phone card rebates or free public transit passes.

Those who choose the phone card rebate just need to type in their phone numbers or scan their cards and the rebate will be automatically applied.

The value of the rebate will correspond to the value of the type of bottle that was recycled. — pangeatoday.com

Architecture theorist Jacob Dreyer explains how the Stalinist model of urbanism – a centrally planned component within a national economic unity – is thriving in modern China — theguardian.com

State-owned news outlets reported this month that the government would ban the use of coal in Beijing and other urban areas by 2020 in an effort to reduce the noxious air pollution that chokes many cities. [...]

But [President Xi Jinping] and other officials have provided few details — and, indeed, have sent conflicting, even disturbing, signals about their plans. Some measures China is considering could actually exacerbate climate change. — nytimes.com

In the wake of economic reforms in the 1990s that helped set off the largest urban migration in history, China had the rare opportunity to embrace cutting-edge city-building approaches as it expanded its skyline. It could have avoided the mistakes that made Los Angeles into the land of gridlock, or bypassed the errors that turned the banlieues of Paris into what one American planner calls “festering urban sores”.

But China looked back instead of forward. — theguardian.com