With 1,305 projects submitted, 44 winners, 49 runner-ups and 61 special mentions have been selected in the Europan 13 competition. Held annually, Europan is a European competition to design urban and architectural projects for implementation. Europan 13 was done in partnership with governing bodies of cities across Europe in collaboration with 15 European structures, under the theme “The Adaptable City: Self-Organization – Sharing - Project”, with participants called on to address the economic and ecological issues of sustainability in European cities.

As part of the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP21) in Paris, Tomás Saraceno has revealed a sculptural installation, “Aerocene - Around the world to change the world," at the Grand Palais and Palais de Tokyo. The project features a series of air-filled sculptures that float without burning fossil fuels or using engines, solar panels or batteries.

The Cradle to Cradle Innovation Institute (C2CPII) has announced the winners of its 2015 Product Innovator Awards. Focusing on leaders in industries that are designing with upcycling and closed-circuit lifespans in mind, the award recognizes innovation in the practice of sustainable, circular-economy design. See the winners after the break.

Following the demolition of the original lifeguard station at the La Jolla Shores beach in San Diego, RNT Architects was commissioned to design its replacement. The project began with several models proposing different directions for the project – its final iteration began with a single, miniature staircase leading to a small shelter on top.

Established in 1974 by the AIA Dallas Chapter, the Ken Roberts Memorial Delineation Competition (KRob) is “the world’s longest running architectural drawing competition of its kind”. Named after architect Ken Roberts, famous for his ink perspective drawings, the competition recognizes innovations in both hand-drawn and digital architectural drawing. The winners and shortlist each year serve as an inspiring reference for architects, and showcase the intersection between technology, design and culture.

In 2015, the new award for “Excellence in Architectural 3D Printing” was added, and with a total of 424 entries from 28 countries, this year’s competition was the largest to date. The 2015 jury consisted of Michel Rojkind, Paul Stevenson Oles and John P. Maruszcak. The competition culminated in an awards ceremony and panel discussion at Alto 211 in Dallas. See the winners after the break.

All over the world, projects are being built. From pavilions to skyscrapers, the range of scales is tremendous, and even among the multitude, some projects stand head and shoulders above the rest in terms of sheer size, cost, and ambition. The following infographic collects eight of the largest projects that are currently in construction all over the world. With countries like Egypt, the United Kingdom, China, and The United Arab Emirates represented, they showcase a definite diversity while supporting the trend of extreme growth throughout Asia and the Middle-East that has been prevalent in the past decade - the UAE alone hosting three of the eight projects.

Some projects comprise multiple buildings – the Yas Island Complex in Abu Dhabi already features landmarks like the Yas Island Yacht Club and the Yas Hotel - while others are a single, massive piece of infrastructure like the Great Man-Made River Project in Libya. See them all after the break.

Now in its second year, DesignCurial has revealed the results of their annual “Top 10 Public Toilets” award, recognizing outstanding lavatory design across the world. The top 10 emerged as exemplars among over 1,000 public toilet designs, evaluated on “design, innovation and the relationship with surroundings”. “The aim of the list was to bring international design to the fore, especially unique architecture that may be overlooked due to the structure’s mundane stereotype,” said Katherine Houston, web editor at DesignCurial. “This list is well geographically spread, with distinctive designs emerging from Japan, Australia and the UK to name a few.” See the world’s best public toilets for 2015 after the break.

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Hiroshi Nakamura, architect of the Ribbon Chapel in Japan, describes the design ideology and his personal favorite elements of the project in this stunning new video by Matthew Allard ACS. Shooting the chapel at various times during the day, its changing characteristics are captured in the movement of the light and camera, the twisting concrete forms seeming to dance.

The Flatiron Public Plaza has unveiled its centerpiece for this year’s “23 Days of Flatiron Cheer” – SOFTLab’s Nova, the winner of a closed-competition hosted by the Flatiron/23rd Street Partnership Business Improvement District (BID) and Van Alen Institute. The project will become the center of the neighbourhood’s festivities for the holiday season, as well as “a highly visible landmark” in the heart of New York.

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Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Antalya Mayor Menderes Turel have announced their support for Perkins+Will’s sustainable master plan for Antalya, Turkey. The master plan will revitalize and preserve the Bogacay Creek Basin area of Antalya, improving its quality as a major tourist city along the Turkish Riviera.

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In a video interview with BBC news, Issa Diabaté of Koffi- Diabaté Architects discusses the need for an improvement in the urban fabric of Africa, and specifically in the city of Abidjan in Côte d’Ivoire, where he has been working for the past 20 years. “It’s not by building one house after the next that we will have an impact on the city…I feel that the architects of tomorrow, especially in African cities, need to become developers, to actually imprint his or her vision on the city,” he says in the video. “There are no better ways of integrating issues of sustainability or issues of density than by doing it yourself.”

Watch the video after the break. 

The significance of people in architectural rendering is nothing new – the added realism, and addition of narrative elements can make or break whether a render successfully sells its project. With sites like Skalgubbar, architects and architecture students have easier access than ever before to “Render People”: PNG cut-outs of people, ready to be photoshopped into buildings.

In the early years of free, online render-people databases, there was a stark homogeneity to the people represented. As the people providing the crowdsourced images were from predominantly Caucasian, Scandinavian countries, there was a surge of such people appearing in renders in projects across the world. In wake of this, other groups have worked to produce workable databases of diverse, culturally representative render people, giving architects and architecture students the freedom to accurately depict their work in its intended context.

We’ve rounded up 5 different sites that offer free render people of a wide range of ethnicities. See them all after the break.

Following the release of their “Vertical House”, a prefabricated home designed for the tight, urban spaces of Japan, Japanese design brand Muji has showcased another set of ready-made habitats, this time a series of three minimalist “huts” at varying scales. Each hut, designed by a different designer, is intended as a retreat from urban activity and can be set-up in rural terrains.

The huts each explore a different material: an aluminum hut by Konstantin Grcic, a cork hut by Jasper Morrison, and a wooden hut by Naoto Fukasawa.

United States Artists (USA) has selected 37 artists for their 2015 “USA Fellows” – artists who will receive an award of $50,000 to fund their creative practice and development. Among the 37 artists, chosen across nine disciplines, two of the awarded fellows were architects: Jonathan Muecke, a USA Knight Fellow, and Chat Travieso, a USA Young Arts Fellow.

The International Association for Sports and Leisure Facilities (IAKS) has created an All-Time Award to celebrate their 50^th anniversary. The Award highlights outstanding examples of sports and leisure facilities that have become both landmark and influential projects over the last few decades. See the eight winners after the break.

In this new video by WIRED, Gregg Pasquarelli of SHoP Architects and Vishaan Chakrabarti of Partnership for Architecture and Urbanism discuss the biggest changes that they would make to New York City. Covering everything from public green space to transit infrastructure, the two speak at length on the Big Apple’s planning and how it compares to other massive metropolitan cities around the world. Major changes they suggest include the separation of Central Park into two large strips, for example “West Side” and “East Side” Park, with industrial areas on the outside edge and residential/commercial areas located between them.

The city of Chicago is an intersection of multiple systems – the organizational orders of its modernist buildings; the presence of the federal government; the negotiations and orders of the lives of its marginalized communities. “We Know How to Order”, conceived by Bryony Roberts, choreographed by Asher Waldron and performed by the South Shore Drill Team, brings these intersections to life in a vibrant street performance for the first ever Chicago Architecture Biennial. A series of drill routines with influences from street choreography, the project explicitly "super-imposes" its system of movement onto the organization of Mies van der Rohe’s Federal Center, calling "attention to the accessibility of public space in the US" and "how architectural systems alongside social expectations influence the occupation of common space," according to the Chicago Architecture Biennial guidebook.