As Sadiq Khan arrived for his first day at work as London’s new mayor, architects urged him to be bold in tackling the city’s housing crisis.

They warned that his policies alone won’t be enough to solve the problems and advised him to widen his approach.

“Bold strategic moves are what’s required, and I therefore hope the new mayor has the stomach for a fight,” said Russell Curtis of RCKa. — bdonline.co.uk

The Art Fund’s Museum of the Year shortlist was announced...with Bristol’s Arnolfini; the Bethlem Museum of the Mind in south London; Jupiter Artland near Edinburgh; London’s Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) and the York Art Gallery in the north of England being nominated for the £100,000 prize. — theartnewspaper.com

RIBA revealed an array of projects as the winners of the 2016 London Awards during a recent ceremony. First launched in 1966, the yearly competition distinguishes some of the area's top-notch design projects in various architectural categories. While winning in the competitive London Awards is already a great honor, they're just the beginning of RIBA's yearlong awards cycle. Now, the London Awards winners will move on to compete in the RIBA National Awards. — Bustler

Earlier this year, photographer Baker took us on an odyssey through two icons of Modernism in the UK by Wells Coates: London’s Isokon building and Brighton’s Embassy Court. Now he’s teamed up with director Alex Simpson to create a mini-documentary, The Legacy of Wells Coates.

The Isokon was once home to Soviet spies, Agatha Christie and Modernist émigrés including the founder of Bauhaus school, Walter Gropius. — thespaces.com

If you want evidence that London’s renters are being taken advantage of, look no further than a new social media campaign. Launched Monday, the #rantyourrent hashtag encourages London’s overcharged and poorly housed tenants to visually detail the bad conditions they’re expected to put up with in return for large sums of monthly rent.  

The results, detailed in a new Tumblr called Vent Your Rent, make for sobering viewing. — citylab.com

Höller wanted to show that you don’t necessarily get to know a sculpture better by literally travelling through it; that once inside it begins to look like something else entirely... The Slide, a permanent fixture at London’s Olympic Park, will give people a full 40 seconds to experience this and decide for themselves as they make their way down the 178m chute at an estimated 15mph. — wallpaper.com

Harnessing the collective intelligence of plant behaviour, the reEarth project explores new forms of bio-cooperative interaction between people and nature, within the built environment.

Echoing the architecture of Buckminster Fuller, the geodesic sphere, is both exoskeleton and ecological iconography. Its core of twelve garden modules, each carrying native British species on outwardly-extending linear actuators allow the structure to become mobile by shifting its centre-of-gravity. — interactivearchitecture.org

In 2008 the financial crisis was caused by the sub-prime property crash in the US. Today London is facing a super-prime crisis. [...]

the market in London and parts of the south-east does not respond to local demand, because it is fuelled by the demands of global capital flooding into London, much of it from highly dubious sources, as the Panama Papers reveal. If London has been shown to be a hub of global money laundering, the property market is its driving force. — theguardian.com

A monumental recreation of the destroyed Arch of Triumph in Palmyra, Syria, has been unveiled in London’s Trafalgar Square.

The 1,800-year-old arch was destroyed by Islamic State militants last October and the 6-metre (20ft) model, made in Italy from Egyptian marble, is intended as an act of defiance: to show that restoration of the ancient site is possible if the will is there. — theguardian.com

Sam Jacob Studio’s mixed-use development in the Hoxton Street conservation area retains the façade of the Victorian pub originally on the site while creating ground-floor community facilities with an apartment above.

The four-storey scheme will restore the last remaining piece of what was once a terraced street razed to the ground by bombing during the Second World War.

The new block is expressed as a curved wall punctured by diamond-shaped window openings. — Architects' Journal

Called the Grand Entrance Hall, the underground space – opening today – will be run by The Brunel Museum and is set to host plays, operas, concerts and even weddings.

Architects Tate Harmer breathed new life into the 1843 Grade II*-listed shaft – originally designed by civil engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel and his father Marc – adding a cantilevered staircase to make the 75ft-deep hall accessible. — thespaces.com

Hong Kong-based philanthropist and entrepreneur Yana Peel has been appointed chief executive of the Serpentine Galleries in London. The [Serpentine's] trustees took the unusual decision to choose a fellow trustee to fill the new post. Julia Peyton-Jones, who put the institution on the international map, is stepping down as co-director this month after 25 years at the helm.

Peel will work in partnership with Hans Ulrich Obrist...[who] takes on the new role of artistic director. — The Art Newspaper

Plans for London’s first timber skyscraper were presented to the Mayor of London Boris Johnson this week with researchers saying natural materials were “vastly underused”.

The design is for an 80-storey, 300m-high wooden building integrated into the Barbican complex. The tower would create 1,000 new residences. Architects’ Journal described the concept scheme as “toothpick-like”. — independent.co.uk