The topic of this year's Tallinn Architecture Biennale Vision Competition, Recycling Socialism, seeks architectural ideas and methods to envision the future of an iconic circular block-housing district in Tallinn – Väike-Õismäe ("Little Blossom Hill"). Väike-Õismäe stands apart from other similar neighborhoods in Tallinn by way of its concentric plan derived from the idea of a circle-city. The district is positioned circularly as a single, complete solution around a pond in the middle and the environment and modern-day life are still searching for a common language. More information and a video after the break.

The Rio de Janeiro CityVision Competition is the fifth international ideas competition launched by CityVision with the purpose of providing a vision on Rio de Janeiro’s future. We live in a particular period, made so ​​by a broader vision of history itself, for which “the sums don’t add up” and the meaning of “time” has lost its positive and progressive meaning, giving way to a “contemporary time” in which present, past and future (or rather our visions of it) seem to coexist. Reality is now compromised by the crisis and bad taste has prevailed. It has now become necessary to analyze the city and grasp the essence of its disgust. Submissions are due no later than June 11. For more information, please visit here.

The Spring 2013 Lecture Series at the College of Architecture and Design (CoAD) at NJIT (New Jersey Institute of Technology) began this month with Kathryn Dean’s talk and will conclude on April 18th. This semester, the series, which is free and open to the public, will feature Jonathan Massey, Nataly Gattegno + Jason Johnson, Tony & Margaret Santos, Ken Greenberg, Alan Organschi, and Axel Schmitzberger as keynote speakers. The concluding event is an AIA-endowed lecture by Will Bruder, which is also a part of the annual Design Showcase event. As part of the series, on March 6, CoAD will host a Spring Symposium on “Distributed Intelligence” sponsored by AIANJ. Lectures are Mondays at 5:30pm in Weston Lecture Hall unless otherwise noted. For more information, please visit here.

Opening March 11, and on view until April 30, Rome’s Ermanno Tedeschi Gallery (Via del Portico d'Ottavia 7) will offer “Never Say the Eye Is Rigid:Architectural Drawings of Daniel Libeskind,” the city’s first exhibition of architectural drawings by the world-renowned architect. The exhibition includes 52 original drawings from eight diverse Libeskind projects in Germany, Italy, Poland, United Kingdom and the United States, including the architect’s signature work, the Jewish Museum Berlin (2001), and Memory Foundations, Ground Zero (2003), the master plan for the World Trade Center site. More information on the exhibition after the break.

Pratt Institute's School of Architecture will present "COLD war COOL digital," an exhibition of 20 scaled prototypes of modernist, pre-fabricated, and globally-distributed Cold War era housing systems that were created using contemporary 3D printing technologies (opening reception 2/18 at 6:15, details below). The exhibition will investigate architectural modernism and its global influence and will connect with contemporary prototype pre-fabrication methods and digital research in housing and skyscraper design. A symposium that explores the technical, aesthetic, and political aspects of prototyping and pre-construction in architecture will be held tonight in conjunction with the exhibition.

More details after the break...

As a follow up to 'The Competition' trailer we published this month, architect Angel Borrego Cubero of Office for Strategic Spaces (OSS) announced that the documentary he directed and produced is going to be shown at Instituto Cervantes New York, as well as Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. The screenings will take place March 4th, 7:00pm and March 8th, 4:00pm respectively. The screening at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, an event curated by Daniel Ibañez, will be preceded by a small introduction given by director Angel Borrego Cubero, and followed by a discussion with the audience and professors from the GSD. For more information, please contact: pr@o-s-s.org

As part of the VIII Biennial Ibero-American architecture and urbanism exhibition, Note Gallery will be hosting the presentation of the new book "Itenerarios de Arquitectura 06 - Paulo Mendes da Rocha" by Catherine Otondo and José Paulo Gouvea on Wednesday, February 27th. Following the book presentation, the Architects Conference, featuring Cristina Guedes & Francisco de Campos and Ricardo Bak Gordon Architect, both winners of the VIII Bienal Ibero-americana de Arquitectura e Urbanismo, will take place Thursday, February 28th. Both events take place at the Boavista Gallery in Lisbon. For more information, please visit here.

Upon their recent selection to host the International Specialized Exposition in 2017 (EXPO 2017) with a theme Energy of the Future, National Company Astana and Mayor’s Office of Astana launched a sponsored international architectural competition for the development of a concept design of EXPO facilities, including an installation to serve as the symbol of EXPO 2017 in Astana. The objective of the competition is to get conceptual architectural and urban planning solutions and ideas for EXPO facilities. The competition began last week and will last until June 18.The winner will get award equal to 15 Million KZT (equivalent to US$ 100,000). For more information, please visit here.

Design saturates every facet of our lives. As the new MoMA exhibition states: design is a fundamental tool in helping people respond to change. Applied Design, running from March 2nd to January 31st, focuses on the various means and methods by which we design and the product of those varied paths that lead to innovation.

This year's Douglas C. Allen Lecture, presented by the Georgia Institute of Technology School of Architecture, features Adriaan Geuze, one of the founders of West 8 Urban Design & Landscape Architecture. Founded in 1987, West 8 is an award-winning international office which has established itself as a leading practice within the last 20 years with about 70 architects, urban designers, landscape architects, and industrial engineers. The event takes place Wednesday, March 6th, from 6:00pm-7:30pm in the Reinsch-Pierce Family Auditorium. For more details about the event, please visit here.

Spontaneous Interventions: Design Actions for the Common Good, the official U.S. representation at the 13th International Architecture Exhibition at the Venice Biennale (2012), will travel to Chicago in May 2013, and is seeking new projects—urban interventions realized in U.S. cities in the past two years—with an emphasis on those based in Chicago and the Midwest region. The exhibition will be on view through Summer 2013. The exhibition in Chicago will feature a site-specific adaptation of the original exhibition design and will include many of the projects featured in Venice alongside dozens of new projects selected as a result of this open call for submissions. Submissions are due no later than March 6th. For more information, please visit here.

In the framework of New Culture Festival, 'Art-Ovrag 2013: Garden City', there is currently an open call for their open architectural international competition “Balancing Pavilion”. The event, which takes place annually in Vyksa, Russia, gathers the best modern art designers, architectures and artists in one place. The 30 best projects will be presented on the exhibitions in Vyksa city, Volga department of NCCA (Nizhny Novgorod) and State Museum of architecture named after Schusev, Moscow. The deadline to register is March 22nd and the submission deadline is March 30th. To register, and for more information, please visit here.

Going on now until March 31, the Olympiades, Paris exhibition at the Pavillon de l'Arsenal revisits the Olympiades district and its half century past rich in architectural thought, controversy, citizen debates and engagement at the heart of the city of Paris in general and the 13th arrondissement in particular. About 40 years after the construction of the first buildings, the historian and exhibition curator, Françoise Moiroux, explores the urban, political and social elements of vertical urban planning and platform architecture through the prism of the Olympiades area. More information after the break.

Opening tonight, February 20, at 6:00pm PST at the Perry Rubenstein Gallery in Los Angeles, Iwan Baan's 'The Way We Live' exhibition features captivating large-scale images of urban, architectural, and home environments that capture Baan’s singular vision. Baan’s artistic practice examines how we live and interact with architecture, focusing on the human element, which brings buildings, intersections, and public gathering places to life. Running until April 13, this is Baan's first solo exhibition at the gallery. More information after the break.

As part of the Nordic Cool 2013 Forum: Designing Nature: Art & Architecture in Cities and Public Spaces exhibition, which is on now until March 17, Bjarke Ingels, the internationally acclaimed Danish architect and founder and principal of BIG, will give a forum talk on February 24. At this free event, located at the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C, Ingels will share to the audience his views on development and challenges of sustainable design. Through a series of award-winning design projects, Bjarke and BIG have developed a reputation for designing buildings that are as programmatically and technically innovative as they are cost and resource conscious. More information after the break.

Celebrating its 50th anniversary, the biannual workshop series, Indesem (International Design Seminar) '13 is a week long workshop for students and recent graduates, accompanied by a publicly accessible lecture series featuring renowned architects and theorists reflecting on the current theme. Taking place April 19-26 at the Faculty of Architecture in Delft, the Netherlands, the fundamental idea of the seminar, with the theme of 'Scale Matters', is to create an environment where students and professionals can debate about the position of an architect. The outcome can contribute to the current architectural discussion. Competition to participate in the workshop is open for applicants until February 27. For more information, please visit here.

Taking place February 20-March 15, Grimshaw Architects will be holding their first exhibition staged in Asia, titled 'Equation'. The exhibition will explore how the natural environment provides inspiration for innovative architectural projects around the world. These projects adopt biomimicry for greater efficiency, acknowledge the importance of connecting building users to nature and work to harness natural systems which ensure that buildings conserve and replenish natural resources. Located at the Urban Redevelopment Authority in Singapore, this marks the sixth major exhibition of work from Grimshaw which continues on from this tradition. More information after the break.

This exhibition coincides with the expansion of Grimshaw’s portfolio in Asia. The practice has unveiled its latest project in the region, a biome centered development which is inspired by the world renowned Eden Project. The project will provide an innovative and immersive environmental experience that uses nature and, in particular, the world’s diverse ecosystems as a recreational and teaching tool forming a unique visitor attraction and multi-day experience. The scheme is located to the North-East of Beijing, in an area of great cultural significance and unsurpassed scenic beauty, and is situated on an existing tourist site currently under regeneration from one of China’s most progressive tourism development groups.

Architects could never explain space. When we think about space, we have only looked at its containers. As if space itself is invisible.
Rem Koolhaas 

History has granted architecture the role of dividing up space. It manifests itself in providing lodging and orienting humankind, who inhabits this fragmented whole we call space and which is interwoven with time at a tacit and essential level. 

We live in space, in these spaces, in these cities, in these fields, in these corridors, in these gardens. It is plain to see. And yet, it is not possible to quantify space or give shape to it: it is extension and connection, fact and certainty through time and movement. Space may be travelled through and narrated, experienced and actuated. Space contains and is contained, situates and signifies. 

It's that time of year again: the 2013 AIA National Convention is gearing up to provide architects with the latest technological, conceptual and design innovations over the course of a three-day conference in Denver, Colorado. This year's theme: Building Leaders, is an opportunity for architects to see leading achievements in the profession as well as build upon their own knowledge.

Parametrica [Digi Fab School] invites you to BREATHING PROTOTYPES Workshop (19-25 February 2013) to participate in the digital design build workshop, seeking to create an inventive collaborative environment. The workshop is part of a series of PARAMETRICA events aimed in promoting and exploring the world of parametric design. 

The workshop is aimed at: students, postgraduates, architects, interior, product and urban designers, engineers, anybody interested. All the details after the break.

MoMA's upcoming exhibition Henri Labrouste: Structure Brought to Light celebrates the impact of this 19th century architect on space, materials, luminosity and on great places of assembly. The exhibition will run from March 10th to June 24th, 2013 and will be the first solo exhibition of Labrouste's work in the United States.

In its third year, the AA Istanbul Visiting School, Vertical Interventions, in collaboration with Istanbul Technical University, will continue to rediscover verticality through novel generative design techniques and large-scale physical prototypes. Abstracted as a fusion of various sub-systems, each subsystem of the tower will be investigated in relation to their various performance criteria. The correlations between the separate sets of performance criteria and evaluation methods will be analyzed, leading to the generation of unified design alternatives for a vertical system typology. In addition to the custom-made digital design and evaluation tools supporting the core methodology, Vertical Interventions will also highlight the fabrication and assembly of a large scale working prototype integrating the performative characteristics of each system in examination.

As in 2012, the design agendas of AA Athens and AA Istanbul Visiting Schools will directly create feedback on one another, allowing participation in either one or both Programmes.

Following the initial challenge of amplifying connectivity, adjustability and interaction for its Correlations cycle, AA Athens Visiting School scales up its design intentions in order to investigate links among discrete individual architectural systems in its 2013 version, Recharged.

Recharged with interconnectivity on different levels, the theme of investigation will revolve around the design of semi-independent design prototypes acting together to form elaborate unified results. The driving force in Cipher City: Recharged is the synergistic effect behind complex form-making systems where interactive design patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple rules. 

Iwan Baan's name may ring a bell for all those following Hurricane Sandy's devastation across New York City and New Jersey's coast. The photographer's iconic photograph made headlines when it was featured on New York magazine's front page days after the storm, showing lower Manhattan in complete darkness, set against its vibrant counterpart uptown, as the United States' east coast was recovering from the extensive damage left in Sandy's wake. The image not only brings to mind the absolute helplessness that New York City faced during the storm, but also lends a hand in a social commentary that is notably pervasive in Baan's work. The Perry Rubenstein Gallery in Los Angeles will feature the photographer's work in a two-month exhibition entitled The Way We Live, honing in on the images that encapsulate the world of architecture, urbanism and human engagement.