Magazine

The Obama Foundation has posted interviews with the seven finalists for the Obama Presidential Center (OPC) to be built on Chicago's South Side. Among other things, the architects were asked what their favorite Chicago building is and why. John Hill

A team of architects from Seattle's Olson Kundig have won Blank Space's third annual Fairy Tales storytelling competition. Their architectural narrative, "Welcome to the 5th Facade," takes readers to "a future that is similar enough to our own, yet ripe with new challenges,... John Hill

Berlin-based photographer Malte Brandenburg's Stacked series of photographs presents frontal views of his city's post-war housing estates in order to show the variation found in the "fairly identical" buildings. John Hill

Luis Martínez Santa-María of Madrid has won the Fundació Mies van der Rohe's "Fear of Columns" competition with "I don't want to change the world. I only want to express it." His winning design will be realized as a temporary installation this summer. John Hill, Silvia Pujalte Toledo

On Sunday the exhibition A Japanese Constellation: Toyo Ito, SANAA, and Beyond at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City opens to the public. World-Architects got an early look and presents photos of just a few of the numerous models that make up the show. John Hill

Alejandro Aravena, director of the 15th International Architecture Exhibition in Venice and recipient of the 2016 Pritzker Architecture Prize, hit the press circuit recently to discuss his Biennale theme, Reporting from the Front, and explain what exactly is going on in that photo... John Hill

Architect Emanuel Christ and Christoph Gantenbein have completed their much-anticipated addition to the 19th-century Swiss National Museum, a jagged concrete mass that touches down in three points to connect the old and new buildings to the adjacent Platzspitz park. John Hill

David Maisel's series of photographs, The Fall, now on display at Haines Gallery in San Francisco, explores from above the landscape between Toledo and Madrid, Spain, to reveal the not-so-subtle interactions between humans and nature. John Hill

To celebrate the holiday season, the Lab at Rockwell Group has created "Luminaries," an interactive light installation amongst the palm trees inside the winter garden at Brookfield Place, the former World Financial Place in Lower Manhattan. John Hill

National Geographic has put together a helpful visual guide to Manhattan's building boom, which will add 47 skyscrapers to the island's crop of 28, pre-2004 buildings over 700 feet tall. John Hill

As part of the FIAC art fair taking place in Paris, Kengo Kuma has installed a wooden folly in the Jardin des Tuileries for Galerie Philippe Gravier. The name of the piece, Yure, translates to "slowly moving in the wind." John Hill

The contribution of Gramazio Kohler Research, ETH Zurich, and the Self-Assembly Lab, MIT, to the Chicago Architectural Biennial is an installation they call "the first architectural construction built by robotic machines using only rocks and thread, without any adhesive and mortar." John Hill

Flanking the grand stairs near the main entrance to the Chicago Cultural Center is Studio Gang Architects' contribution to the Chicago Architecture Biennial: Polis Station, which proposes new ways of integrating police stations into their communities. John Hill

Most of the 100+ contributions to the Chicago Architecture Biennial take the form of displays that can only be looked at, but a few installations at the entrance to the Chicago Cultural Center, and one outside, invite people to sit for a while. John Hill

World-Architects is excited to announce the launch of Catalan-Architects, the seventeenth platform under the World-Architects umbrella. The regional Catalan-Architects platform recognizes the amazing quality of buildings and landscapes produced in the region anchored by Barcelona. John Hill

News came in September 2014 that architect Isay Weinfeld would take his Brazilian modernism to a site next to the High Line in New York for luxury residences. Renderings have finally been released for the project. John Hill

A stainless steel sculpture nearing completion in China's Xianjing region bears a striking resemblance to Anish Kapoor's famous Cloud Gate sculpture installed in Chicago's Millennium Park in 2006. John Hill

It's hard not to be charmed by the once-a-day paper buildings that Charles Young of Edinburgh has been creating since August 2014. John Hill

The Chicago Architecture Biennial has posted the more than 100 entries for the BP America Lakefront Kiosk Competition on Pinterest, with the winner to be announced soon. John Hill

Reinhold Messner's sixth and last MMM-Museum opens to the public on 24 July 2015. Designed by Zaha Hadid Architects, the museum is fused with the 8,000-meter peak of the Kronplatz-Plan de Corones Ski Mountain in South Tyrol, Italy. John Hill

On the occasion of its 25th anniversary, Rotterdam's Shift has transformed the Tschumi pavilion in Groningen from a clear glass box to a kaleidoscope of color. John Hill

With beaches a few hours away from Washington, DC, the National Building Museum is bringing one to the city in the form of an "ocean" of nearly one million translucent balls courtesy of Snarkitecture. John Hill

On the occasion of the Making Africa exhibition at the Vitra Design Museum, architect Diébédo Francis Kéré has designed and installed a pop-up store for Camper within the Buckminster Fuller Dome on the Vitra Campus in Weil am Rhein, Germany. John Hill

The 15th Serpentine Gallery Pavilion, designed by Spain's SelgasCano, opens to the public on Thursday in London's Kensington Gardens. John Hill

The TREExOFFICE co-working space launched today in Hoxton Square, the first initiative to be realized by the Park Hack project, which was set up to test innovative models that sustain and enhance public open spaces. John Hill

Italian architects Filippo Pagliani and Michele Rossi of PARK have released PARK Mapp, a guide to modern and contemporary architecture in Milan, the city of Expo 2015. John Hill

SecondMedia's Foamspace submission is the winner of Storefront for Art and Architecture’s 2015 Street Architecture Prize Competition, to be displayed as part of the IDEAS CITY Festival in New York City at the end of May. John Hill

Yesterday, MIT dedicated a new memorial to Sean Collier, a campus police officer killed in the line of duty in April 2013. John Hill

On 1 May 2015 the new home of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, designed by the Renzo Piano Building Workshop in collaboration with Cooper Robertson, opens its doors to the public right next to the southern tip of the High Line. John Hill

Snarkitecture, the art/architecture duo of Alex Mustonen and Daniel Arsham, in collaboration with COS (Collection Of Style), have created an immersive environment where visitors to the Salone del Mobile "are invited to relax, interact and recharge among the chaos of the festival." John Hill

As part of Milan Design Week 2015, United Nude and 3D Systems have asked five architects/designers, including Ben van Berkel and Zaha Hadid, to "re-invent shoes" using 3D printing technology. John Hill

The first 21st century pavilion in Venice’s Giardini della Biennale, the Australian Pavilion designed by Denton Corker Marshall, opens to the public next month when the 56th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia, takes place. John Hill

Canadian artist Steve McDonald's forthcoming book Fantastic Cities, published by Chronicle Books, invites readers to color the real and imagined places he has carefully depicted. John Hill

Adolfsson & Partners' design for the office of King, the maker of the wildly popular Candy Crush Saga and other games, takes the playfulness of tech company workplace design to an extreme in what the designers call "The Kingdom." John Hill

Next week is the annual Salone del Mobile in Milano, where product designer and interior architect Gert-Jan Soepenberg is launching Vase #2, a tribute to the design and form of Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim Museum. John Hill

Artist Tomás Saraceno explores social and biological complexity through the manipulation of spider webs in a new exhibition at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in New York. John Hill