Unlike the toxic culture of open international competitions, which see countless architects waste days of unpaid labour to compete in a beauty contest of novelty forms, the Open Call is focused – and paid. The democratic process has seen Pritzker prize winners drawn alongside recent graduates, unheard-of elsewhere. Unlikely as it may seem, the scheme has made this small part of northern Belgium home to some of the best new public buildings in the world. — The Guardian

The result was a beguiling cocktail – part bastion, part brutalist hanging gardens of Babylon – and it stood as the ultimate expression of the modern movement’s search for a monument.

The complexity of incorporating so many venues on so many levels across a 40-acre site has always made the place an infuriating labyrinth for the uninitiated, with successive decades of signage and way-finding strategies deployed in an attempt to ease the maze-like passageways. — The Guardian

Their obsessive geometrical composition was an attempt to answer the call of Senegal’s first president, the poet Léopold Sédar Senghor, for a national style that he curiously termed “asymmetrical parallelism”.

Senghor never quite defined what this brave new style should look like, but he spoke vaguely of “a diversified repetition of rhythm in time and space”. Forceful, faceted forms and strong, rhythmic geometries became the vogue. — The Guardian

The storage has been forced to fit the quirks of the building, rather than the other way around, which seems like an odd way to design an art store. — The Guardian

The £235m mega museum of the tormented Norwegian artist stands as an ominous grey tower on the Oslo waterfront, lurching out at the top like a military lookout post, keeping watch over the fjord. It is a location scout’s dream for the ultimate villain’s headquarters, an almost comically menacing structure, bent over the pristine white iceberg of the city’s beloved opera house with a thuggish hunch. — Oliver Wainwright

He [Kahn] was enthusiastic about welcoming “another world-class venue to the capital, to confirm London’s position as a music powerhouse” when the sphere was announced in 2018; yet the following year, his planning officers’ first report concluded that it did not comply with his own London Plan. He is in a bind. Will he side with the Labour borough and listen to the locals, or back his development corporation in the hope of using this brash bauble to buff the capital’s post-Brexit brand? — The Guardian

Unesco’s decision will no doubt be shrugged off as the prissy overreaction of an unelected body and, given what has been allowed in Edinburgh, the world heritage designation seems largely ineffectual anyway. But the act of striking Liverpool off the list helps to shine a powerful international spotlight on a city that has been happy to embrace mediocre development for far too long. It is a useful reminder that the world is watching. — The Guardian

After 20 years of frantic city-building, rustic China is in a death spiral. Now architects are helping to reverse the exodus – with inspirational tofu factories, rice wine distilleries and lotus tea plants — The Guardian

In the four years since the celebrated Iraqi-born architect died suddenly in March 2016, a “toxic dispute” has been taking place between the executors of her estate [...]. The long-running feud has finally been settled in an explosive court hearing involving contested allegations of financial mismanagement, disregard for corporate governance and “clandestine relationships” between the current practice principal and junior members of staff. — The Guardian

Southwark council declared that its New Architect Design Services Framework was a “first-of-a-kind” attempt to engage with a new generation of diverse designers. As councillor Leo Pollak put it: “It is the framework some architects have been waiting for all their years.”

It turns out that black architects will have to wait even longer. — The Guardian

With each of us now living in socially distanced self-isolation, with shops shuttered, offices abandoned and urban centres reduced to ghost towns, it’s hard not to wonder what kind of lasting impact Covid-19 will have on our cities. Will homes need to adapt to better accommodate work? Will pavements widen so we can keep our distance? Will we no longer want to live so densely packed together, working in open-plan offices and cramming into lifts? — The Guardian

“I feel like I am atoning for some of what I did,” says Yasmeen Lari with an embarrassed chuckle. “I was a ‘starchitect’ for 36 years, but then my egotistical journey had to come to an end. It’s not only the right of the elite to have good design.” — Yasmeen Lari, in The Guardian

“Stone,” says architect Amin Taha, “is the great forgotten material of our time. In 99% of cases, it’s cheaper and greener to use stone in a structural way, as opposed to concrete or steel, but we mostly just think of using it for cladding.” — The Guardian