India based Abin Design Studio has designed and constructed a pavilion of canopies for a religious festival in West Kolkata. The design is based on the celebration of tribal life and the symbiotic relationship between the community and the forest. By highlighting the importance of the forest in their lives, the community hopes to raise awareness about conservation of the lands.

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The Google Cultural Institute have teamed up with New York City's iconic Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and completed in 1959, to open its doors through Street View. Additionally, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation has made over 120 artworks from its collection available for online viewing. "Using Street View technology, it will now be possible to tour the museum’s distinctive spiral ramps from anywhere online," the Foundation said.

The Library of Congress has announced the winners of the 2015 Holland Prize, which recognizes the best single-sheet, measured drawing of a historic building, site, or structure, completed to the standards of the Historic American Building Survey (HABS), Historic American Engineering Record (HAER), or the Historic American Landscapes Survey (HALS).

Brooklyn-based artist and designer Ekene Ijeoma has created Wage Islands, an interactive art piece that “expands New York City’s ‘tale of two cities’ by revealing the geographies of access to housing based on wages.”

In the project, a 3D map of the city is submerged in a box filled with black water, showing only the parts of the city that have affordable housing based on a wage of $8.75 and median monthly housing costs from $271 to $4001. Viewers press a button, which increases the wage on the display up to $77, concurrently raising the map out of the water to highlight the severity of the wage gap in relation to housing.

Sydney-based firm Stewart Hollenstein has been awarded an Honorable Mention in the international design competition for a new 17,000 square-meter library in Varna, Bulgaria. Their design scheme focuses on Varna's rich history as a city known for its public gardens, and seeks to make the library a cultural center of the city.

Despite often designing homes larger than 15,000 square feet for their clients, Houston-based design team Mark Schatz and Anne Eamon have designed and built a 980 square-foot house for their family of four. The couple designed and built the home largely on their own, out of leftover materials collected from projects their firm has worked on over the past few years.

Have you ever fallen in love with a city, and wished you could carry the image of the skyline with you everywhere you go? Now you can turn that longing into a reality with these cityscape-inspired rings by North Carolina-based jewelry maker, Ola Shekhtman.

MOBO Architects has won the Colombian Society of Architects’ (SCA) public competition to design an institutional building for the department for social integration in the city of Bogotá.

Designer William McDonough has unveiled the next step in cradle-to-cradle manufacturing: The Innovation for the Circular Economy house (ICEhouse) in Davos, Switzerland. The ICEhouse aims to show the “positive design framework described in the book Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things, the sustainable development goals of the United Nations, and the reuse of resources implicit in the circular economy."

The house was used as a place of gathering and discussion for the World Economic Forum annual meeting. After being used for the week, the building will be disassembled and reconstructed elsewhere.

Maya Lin has been commissioned to design a 20,000-square-feet urban mansion in New York's Tribeca neighborhood. The five-story proposal, seen first on Tribeca Trib, aims to replace a 1980s mixed-use building on 11 Hubert Street. If approved, the of metal, glass and limestone building would rise 70-feet and house five bedrooms, 11 bathrooms, a dog room, wine closet, screening room, landscaped courtyard, 5,000-square-foot fitness center, basement, garage and more.

Dublin-based heneghan peng Architects has won a competition to design the Canadian Canoe Museum in Peterborough, Ontario. Chosen over four other shortlisted proposals, heneghan peng's winning design "embraces aboriginal wisdom to live and build lightly on the land," says the Museum, by "organically" integrating an elongated glass pavilion topped with a two-acre rooftop garden alongside the Trent-Severn waterway.

The practice will work with local firm Kearns Mancini Architects to realize the $45-million building. It is planned to rise on the city's 1904 Peterborough Lift Lock National Historic Site by 2020 and house the world's largest collection of canoes and kayaks.

According to the jury, the heneghan peng/Kearns Mancini team "stood out from the other submissions as the design works organically with the land rather than overwhelming it."

Following years of extensive planning, the Boston Redevelopment Authority Board of Directors has approved the construction of two towers on the site of the Government Center Garage -- a 486-unit luxury apartment building designed by CBT Architects, and a one-million square foot, 43-story office tower designed by Pelli Clarke Pelli. These towers are the first phase of a six building, $1.5 billion redevelopment plan to replace the dated brutalist era garage.

Adjaye Associates, SHoP Architects and Snøhetta have been shortlisted for a new National Veterans Resource Complex (NVRC) at Syracuse University. The three practices, all of which were among seven recently shortlisted to design the Obama Presidential Library in Chicago, were selected over 28 considered firms by a group of faculty, staff, students and design professionals, including Martha Thorne.

“The three finalist firms and their teams are outstanding,” says Thorne. “I have no doubt they will propose ideas that go beyond traditional academic buildings and make the NVRC a pioneering facility that will contribute to the University, as well as the broader community.”

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Four Masters students from Bartlett School of Architecture - Francesca Camilleri, Nadia Doukhi, Alvaro Lopez Rodriguez and Roman Strukov - have developed a new method for 3D printing large-scale, self-supporting concrete structures. With their project Fossilised, the team, known as Amalgamma, combined two existing concrete 3D printing methods - the extrusion printing method and the powder printing method - to create a form of supported extrusion that allows for "more volumetric" concrete structures.

"The supported extrusion method has therefore presented the opportunity to design forms that are more varied and more volumetric, as opposed to the very straight vertical forms so far achieved in 3D concrete practice," says Amalgamma. 

On January 15, 2015, Allan Teramura, FRAIC, was named the 77^th President of the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada (RAIC). The Ottawa architect is a principal at Watson MacEwen Teramura Architects, and has advocated for healthier, sustainable Aboriginal communities in Canada.

Despite a few volatile months, the US Architecture Billings Index (ABI) concluded 2015in positive terrain. The American Institute of Architects (AIA) reported the December ABI score was 50.9, up from the mark of 49.3 in the previous month. This score reflects a slight increase in design services (any score above 50 indicates an increase in billings). The new projects inquiry index was 60.2, up from a reading of 58.6 the previous month.

“As has been the case for the past several years, there continues to be a mix of business conditions that architecture firms are experiencing,” said AIA Chief Economist Kermit Baker, Hon. AIA, PhD. “Overall, however, ABIscores for 2015 averaged just below the strong showing in 2014, which points to another healthy year for construction this year.”

Since the foundation of ArchDaily in 2008, our goal has been to build a large database of projects, news stories and articles in order to give our readers the inspiration, knowledge and tools they need to do their best work. But just because our database is becoming increasingly complex, that doesn't mean that your interaction with it has to be overwhelming.

Seven months ago we introduced our new, custom-built publishing platform - a largely behind-the-scenes change which allowed us to bring you new organizational tools such as our faceted search for projects, events and competitions as well as an improved version of My ArchDaily to let you create your own architectural library. Since then, our development team has been working hard on a new front-end design that is worthy of the changes we have already made under the surface.

With the new design, we have sought to simplify the ArchDaily site, re-emphasizing our "less is more" motto from the last design by organizing the layout into just two main columns: one for our stream of articles and one which helps you navigate the site by suggesting related content and popular articles. In addition, our developers have updated the website technology to improve loading speeds and bring you a seamless experience on our site. Read on to find out more details about the updated site!

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The first ever Chicago Architecture Biennial closed January 3, with over half a million visitors having attended the event. An architecture exhibition of unprecedented size on the continent, the Biennial gathered 93 projects from 120 offices from over 30 countries to discuss the “State of the Art of Architecture.” We take a look at some of the Biennial's highlights after the break.

The Nordic nations—Finland, Norway and Sweden—have reached a pivotal point in their collective, and individual, architectural identities. The Grandfathers of the universal Nordic style—including the likes of Sverre Fehn, Peter Celsing, Gunnar Asplund, Sigurd Lewerentz, Alvar Aalto, and Eero Saarinen—provided a foundation upon which architects and designers since have both thrived on and been confined by. The Nordic Pavilion at the 2016 Venice Biennale—directed by Alejandro Aravena—will be the moment to probe: to discuss, argue, debate and challenge what Nordic architecture really is and, perhaps more importantly, what it could be in years to come.

We're asking for every practice (and individual) across the world who have built work in Finland, Norway and Sweden in the past eight years to submit their project(s) and be part of the largest survey of contemporary Nordic architecture ever compiled.

Update: the Open Call for In Therapy closed on the 24th January 2016.

Maristella Casciato, former associate director of research at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, has been named the Getty Research Institute's new Senior Curator of Architectural Collections. Casciato is an expert on 20th century European architecture - the Institute's most sought after content - making her an ideal choice to manage GRI's expanding archives. 

“Maristella Casciato is an exceptionally accomplished scholar and curator who is passionately committed to the study of architectural history and the preservation of architecture. She is the ideal steward for our tremendously significant architecture holdings,” said Thomas W. Gaehtgens, director of the Getty Research Institute. 

Two major tenants, 21st Century Fox and News Corp have pulled plans to relocate to the BIG-designed 2 World Trade Center - the final building planned for the 16 acre site. 2 WTC was unveiled last summer after news broke that BIG would be replacing Foster + Partners as the building's architect. According to a report on The Wall Street Journal, the two media companies based their decision on the high cost of relocating; they plan to stay in their current Midtown site until at least 2025.

The project will be placed on hold until a new tenant is found.