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  Dubai Next: Face of 21st Century Culture

  Dubai represents a fascinating rebuttal of the idea that time is the key to achieving cultural depth. The largest city in the United Arab Emirates has evolved from an invisible fishing village to an omnipresent global city in only a few decades, and has left the rest of the world clinging to the tassels of the magic carpet on which it rides. It is no surprise then that the state-run culture authority hired one of the world’s most renowned architects to curate an exhibition of images tasked with answering the question “what does ‘culture’ mean in a city like Dubai?”. read more »
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  Elbe Philharmonic Hall

  Hamburg

  Music, at once otherworldly and arrestingly present, presents a unique challenge to architects called upon to house it. Herzog & de Meuron rise to the challenge with the Elbe Philharmonic Hall, an ethereal monument to musical form.

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  Art in Public

  Shenzhen's new art galleries by Urbanus

  The gold standard of art gallery design is the white box, a pristine space removed from worldly concerns, outside both place and time. It’s an important statement about the works that hang inside the gallery: art, it says, is universal and timeless. This is why it’s valued. But in its designs for Shenzhen’s newest art galleries, Urbanus Architecture is challenging these basic assumptions, producing art spaces that engage with local urban culture.

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  Urban Acupuncture

  I. M. Pei, Studio Pei-Zhu and Atelier Deshaus modernise the Chinese vernacular
  
  Torn across temporal and spatial axes, the challenge for contemporary Chinese architects is to become both genuinely contemporary and genuinely Chinese. The tension between identity and modernity may well be an old cliché, but there is real difficulty in being modern in a world where modernity is identified with Western grandeur or communist squalor, and real conflict in building a “Chinese” architecture without slipping into pastiche or nostalgia.

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  Jean Nouvel

  Architecture’s most prestigious prize finally honours Jean Nouvel for a career of architectural experimentation.
  
  Jean Nouvel, bald and in black, looks like everyone’s idea of an architect. He acts the part too: formulating ideas in bed, vacationing in the South of France, and dressing only in black (except in summer, when he wears only white). Thankfully, his embodiment of architecture’s great clichés is matched by his contribution to architecture’s contemporary vocabulary. Living up to his image, he is widely recognised as one of the most influential living architects, and routinely included amongst a select group of immensely successful superstar architects.

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  Cities Within Cities

  How to urbanise, industrialise and modernise
  
  As the world lauds Shanghai as a model of exciting urbanism, University of Leeds’ Professor Justin O’Connor has noticed something disturbing. “What,” he asks, “is exciting other than a vicarious reliving of the West’s own innocently brutal days of early industrialisation and modernisation?” Somewhere between dystopic science fiction and this innocently brutal past, Chinese cities hold the West’s gaze with their images of booming growth, teeming masses and environmental apocalypse. But the fact is that nineteenth-century London translates poorly into twenty-first century eco-anxiety and is unimaginable on China’s staggering scale. This is China’s great problem: how to urbanise, industrialise and modernise when the Western model – the only one seriously available – seems to imply Armageddon?

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  Bodega by Design

  Wineries by Frank Gehry, Foster+Partners and Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners
  
  The landscapes of northern Spain's millenia-old wine-growing areas are changing. Amidst the stone and the vineyards, there are now flashes of titanium, parabolic arcs and low-lying trefoils. Vineyards that pride themselves on the age of their vines are erecting structures whose most salient characteristic is their novelty. And while locals might approach the trend with scepticism – Frank Gehry's latest structure is hailed dubiously as la cosa, “the thing”, by villagers – the winemakers themselves show no signs of losing interest. read more »
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  Village Mona Vale Civic Centre and Library

  Brewster Hjorth
  Mona Vale, New South Wales

  This building is not just a library, the centre is also the new home for Pittwater Council- a refurbished and refitted space for the Council Customer Service Centre, Meeting Room, and Offices for Planning and Compliance officers. The Centre was to serve as the heart of the community, a place of interaction and involvement, not isolation.

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  Beaconsfield Community College

  Prior & Cheney Architects
  Beaconsfield, Victoria

  As flocks of young couples and new families flood into Victoria’s Cardinia Shire, the Municipality has been feverishly expanding its facilities to accommodate them and to keep pace with what is now the region’s fastest growing housing development. Indeed, it was not just architectural excellence and innovation that was needed for the new Beaconsfield Community Complex. It was energy.

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  Baddeley Park Sportsground

  Kinsley + Associates
  Cessnock, New South Wales

  Kinsley + Associates, led by Roger Kinsley, Managing Director, is uniquely positioned to deliver a coordinated architectural and engineering design solution. The grandstand is essentially constructed of Australian materials, with Luxalon cladding featuring above the colonnade.

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