BIG is having a good week, now with another competition win to design the Museum of the Human Body in Montpellier, France.

The jury — led by City Mayor Ms Hélène Mandroux — selected BIG out of five international shortlisted teams. BIG collaborated on the design with A+Architecture + Egis + Base + L'Echo + Celsius Environnement + CCVH. — bustler.net

French firm A+ Architecture has just been announced as the first-prize winner of the "Scène Campagne" competition. Led by the Communauté de Communes de Valcézard, A+ Architecture's winning proposal will soon be realized into a new cultural, economical, and social facility for the countryside village of Cornillon in Southern France. — bustler.net

A turn of events took place for Cité Radieuse in 2010, when the building’s rooftop gym and solarium went up for sale. Designer Ito Morabito, who goes by Ora-Ito, purchased it as a collector might. “Like you buy a piece of art, but architecture,” he noted. After the acquisition, it became Ora-Ito’s self-appointed mission to honor the iconic structure.

Ora-Ito transformed the rooftop of Cité Radieuse into MAMO, a contemporary art center dedicated to exhibitions and creative ateliers. — knstrct.com

Paris-based architecture firm Jakob+MacFarlane designed this prefab tubular addition for the Regional Contemporary Art Fund Centre (FRAC) in Orleans, France, as a container for art collections and place for architectural experimentation. The fluid addition to the 19th century building was just completed and it will be inaugurated on September 14th. — Inhabitat

Anya Sirota + AKOAKI, a design studio based in Michigan, has installed two monumental stars in a defunct tannery in Amilly, France. Titled POP IT UP, the installation is open to the public through September 29, 2013. — bustler.net

French designer Ora-Ïto is converting the famous Marseille roof terrace into a haven for contemporary art — guardian.co.uk

But for lovers of contemporary architecture, Paris can be a surprisingly rich place. The latest crop of French architects is producing some of the best new work the city has seen. They are an eclectic group comfortable taking large risks while still melding the work into an august context. — travel.nytimes.com

The €150m satellite of Paris's Louvre museum shimmers like an apparition on the raised plane of the former coalmine, looking down over streets of pitch-roofed miners' houses, dotted with the occasional chip shop. The building is formed from a series of long, low-slung walls that fade in and out of view as the changing light dances over its surface – or as clouds of drizzle engulf it entirely in the wintry gloom. — guardian.co.uk

The mayor's office in Yvrac said Wednesday that workers who were hired to renovate the grand 13,000-square-meter (140,000-square-foot) manor and raze a small building on the same estate in southwest France mixed them up.

"The Chateau de Bellevue was Yvrac's pride and joy," said former owner Juliette Marmie. "The whole village is in shock. How can this construction firm make such a mistake?" — npr.org

Rotterdam's MVRDV has completed the transformation of a disused mustard laboratory in Dijon, France (previously on Bustler) into an innovative call center with an education center, incubator and social program. — bustler.net

In 2008, the substantially updated town center of Plessis-Robinson, a suburb of Paris, was named “the best urban neighborhood built in the last 25 years” by the European Architecture Foundation. A composite of six connected districts ranging in size from 5.6 to 59 acres, the revitalization comprises public buildings, retail, market-rate and subsidized affordable housing, parks, schools, gardens, sports facilities, and a hospital. Construction was begun in 1990 and took a decade to complete. — switchboard.nrdc.org

One of France's most important landmarks of modernist architecture, La Cité Radieuse housing estate in Marseille, built by the architect Le Corbusier, has been damaged by fire.

Fire services fought for over 12 hours to put out a blaze that began on Thursday afternoon in a first floor flat in the nine-storey concrete complex which is protected by special heritage status in France. — guardian.co.uk

Through meticulous infiltration, UX members have carried out shocking acts of cultural preservation and repair, with an ethos of “restoring those invisible parts of our patrimony that the government has abandoned or doesn’t have the means to maintain.” The group claims to have conducted 15 such covert restorations, often in centuries-old spaces, all over Paris. — wired.com

A group of consultants in Paris has hatched a plan to turn the Eiffel Tower into a giant tree by covering it with 600,000 plants. Their dream is to literally plant the 324 meter tall aesthetic symbol of Paris with 12 tons of rubber tubing, and gradually add bags planted with greenery all over. — Inhabitat

French architects Paul Le Quernec and Michel Grasso have shared with us photos of their recently completed collaboration, a nursery in Sarreguemines, France. The design is based on the concept of a body cell with its nucleus as the core and surrounding elements that are being confined by the cell membrane. — bustler.net