Designed by Irad Shomroni and Josef Shushan, the proposal for the Yad Le’Banim Building – Cultural and Memorial Center seeks to emphasize the duality between everyday life activities and commemoration. In a center that houses both cultural communal facilities that open daily and annual memorial ceremonies for casualties of war, the center is designed as a linear path. It gradually rises from Ramat Yishay’s main street, hovers above its surrounding garden, and eventually reaches a viewpoint towards the historical buildings of Ramat Yishay. More images and architects’ description after the break.

Taking advantage of solid timber’s unique benefits, the Timber Café by BAKOKO, an emerging Tokyo architecture practice, is a proposal for a sustainable pop-up restaurant. The temporary building can be flat packed into a standard 40′ shipping container and erected with a crane in a mere day. Once assembled, this wooden box is remarkably self-stable. It does not need a permanent foundation, making it suitable almost anywhere. More images and architects’ description after the break.

Celebrating the ninetieth anniversary of the birth of Harry Seidler, the leading Australian architect of the twentieth century, the ‘Architecture, Art and Collaborative Design’ traveling exhibition will take place January 10-February 10 in Sofia, Bulgaria at the VIVACOM Art Hall. The exhibition traces Austrian-born Seidler’s key role in bringing Bauhaus principles to Australia and identifies his distinctive place and hand within and beyond modernist design methodology. The exhibition was developed by curator Vladimir Belogolovsky of Intercontinental Curatorial Project in New York with Penelope Seidler and Harry Seidler & Associates in Sydney and sponsored by Seidler Architectural Foundation. More information on the exhibition after the break.

Organized by AIA Utah Young Architects Forum and the Downtown Alliance, in collaboration with Utah Heritage Foundation, Sixty-Nine Seventy invites design teams from around the world to re-envision the circulation areas and passages of two blocks in Salt Lake City’s downtown. The entrants will prepare comprehensive ideas for these in-between spaces, developing them into the connective tissue linking the area’s cultural amenities. SixtyNine-Seventy, The Spaces Between: An Urban Ideas Competition launches on January 10, 2013 with a party at 7:00 PM at Squatters Pub. The competition and launch party are open to everyone. For those not able to attend the opening night presentations will be posted on the web immediately following the event. For more information, please visit here.

Designed by CVDB Arquitectos, with Tiago Filipe Santos, the proposal for the Refurbishment of the Old Railway Station of Mora, Portugal is focused in the pragmatic definition of uses. These aim to bring to life the existing buildings, activate their use, clarify the functional and distributive relations between spaces, and promote new built areas that incorporate a contemporary presence through the iconographic approach of the facades.More images and architects’ description after the break.

At a time when government resources dedicated to housing production and preservation are rapidly shrinking and the cost to develop affordable housing is increasing, there is significant space and demand for innovation when it comes to lowering building and operating costs. Therefore, the ‘Lowering the Cost of Housing‘ competition is seeking to provide a new model for conceiving, siting, financing, building and sustaining, affordable housing. Selected teams will work on a specific site, proposing designs for multi-unit dwellings which present new methods for designing, building and financing housing affordable to individuals or families below 100% of Area Median Income. Submissions are due no later than January 15, with final proposals due in March. For more information, please visit their official website here.

Taking place January 11th from 2:00pm-4:30pm EST, modeLab‘s Introduction to Physics-Based Design with Kangaroo Webinar applies physical properties and forces to geometry to offer a fun and interactive way to implement physics-based constraints into your parametric workflows. Through a series of short presentations and “live” exercises, learn essential techniques for setting up and developing Simulations with Kangaroo in Grasshopper, ranging from particle systems to spring networks. This webinar will last 2.5 hours including multiple open Q & A sessions and all participants will have unlimited access to the webinar content and this video online after the broadcast. To register and for more information, please visit here.

Located in a residential street, near the lively neighborhood of Place d’Italie, the new lodge of the School Ricaut displays its large yellow cube, which replaces the old entrance, refining the main access point and offering a work space that is simultaneously visible and independent of the adjoining staff accommodation. Designed by Metek Architecture, the yellow module of the new lodge fits into the openings of the building, just like the toy building blocks used by children. Prefabricated with a light wood frame, the lodge is conceived as a piece of urban furniture. More images and architects’ description after the break.

The ‘Sophia Library’ concept proposal for the Helsinki Central Library Competition represents the consolidation of cultural identity, democratic notion and humanistic concepts into a building. It is a clear and true space, giving place for important visions to come together. Designed by AND-RÉ, the project is not just a library, but a real space, a mental place that projects itself beyond its frontiers and limits, becoming an iconographic element of the society, its culture and humanity vision. More images and architects’ description after the break.

Designed by architecture students, Margaux Leycuras, Marion Ottmann, and Anne-Hina Mallette, from the architecture school of Nantes, they recently won a prize in a competition organized by the Foundation Jacques Rougerie. Their ‘Hydropolis’ proposal answers to this competition, in the category rising waters, by a project located in the Nile Valley which aims to exploit the phenomenon of rising waters instead of suffering the consequences. More images and the students’ description after the break.

Designed by architecture students, Ian M. Ellis and Frances Peterson, their proposal for the North Brother Island School for Autistic Children in New York City aims to provide a necessary resource for the Bronx, which is heavily underserved in terms of school for children with Autism Spectrum Disorder. The project is also designed with the intention that it will dissolve the negative stigma of the island, stabilize its naturalized growth as habitat for the birds, and introduce research and education programs to provide a cutting edge learning environment for the public, parents, and children. More images and architects’ description after the break.

Completed just last month, the Clae Pop-up Shop, designed by mode:lina architekci, is a shop for Clae footwear. Located at the Galeria Malta in Poznań, Poland, their challenge was to maximize the shopping experience using the lowest budget possible due to the shop’s temporality. To create this space, they picked worn out euro pallets used during KontenerART 2012. More images of the project can be viewed after the break.

Alderbrook Station, located slightly east of Astoria along the Columbia River, is the site of the former Union Fisherman’s Cooperative Packaging Company, which once supported a thriving salmon fishing industry. The Netshed is a 3-story timber structure which was used by fishermen to repair and store their gill nets. Inspired by the natural and man-made qualities that pervade Alderbrook Station, such as the movement of tides, the light that reflects off the Columbia River, the memories and history contained within and around Alderbrook Station, and the structure of the Net Shed itself, Robert Hutchison and Sarah Biemiller’s shared with us their proposal for an installation inside the Net Shed developed out of numerous influences. More images and architects’ description after the break.

Architect Anna Ulak, inspired by the popular James Bond films, shared with us her ‘Storming Medusa’ proposal, the new villain’s lair in our ecologically and politically precarious present. Ulak notes how James Bond movies can be considered phantasmagorias which have allowed audiences to imagine the future of architecture. But now that the Cold war is over, how can the James Bond genre be utilized again to imagine a new kind of architecture? Anchored off the coast of Cape Farewell in Greenland, the project draws on the physiological characteristics of jellyfish in order to suggest a new relationship between the built and natural environment. More images and architects’ description after the break.

Amit Khanna of Amit Khanna Design Associates (AKDA) recently did a prospective photographic essay which highlights the Kimbell Art Museum by architect Louis Kahn, and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth by architect Tadao Ando. His writing emphasizes his experiences as they relate to the architectural exterior and interior spaces, while beautifully capturing the buildings themselves. He describes such elements as organization, materiality, and unique details while comparing both works. His essay and images can be viewed after the break.

The proposal for the future Metropolitan Train Station of Suzano, designed by JBMC Arquitetura e Urbanismo, will be developed in surface, in a place already occupied by the existing station, which will be deactivated after the new station starts operating. This project includes the main building of the station, which houses platforms and mezzanine, their accesses on both sides of the railways, bike rack, technical and operating room building, and water reservoirs. More images and architects’ description after the break.

Known for being a popular location for strolls during the 19th century, the Terrasses des Ponchettes is one of Nice’s historical areas that has declined considerably since the 60’s. CAB Architects has aimed their proposal around two case studies. The first one deals with the articulation between the “Quai des Etats-Unis” and the “Cours Saleya”: “the lower part”. The second one concerning the raised terraces of the “Ponchettes” with a beautiful view over the sea: “The upper part”. More images and architects’ description after the break.