The COVID-19 Pandemic is a disruptive moment for our world, and it’s poised to spur transformative shifts in design, from how we experience our homes and offices to the plans of our cities. The webcast series Design Disruption explores these shifts—and address issues like climate change, inequality, and the housing crisis— through chats with visionaries like architects, designers, planners and thinkers; putting forward creative solutions and reimagining the future of the built environment.

Episode 2 will be streamed online on ArchDaily, YouTube and Facebook today, Monday, July 6, at 12 pm EST, and will focus on the future of the office. Our guests will be Eliot Postma, partner at London-based Heatherwick Studio, and Verda Alexander, co-founder of San Francisco-based Studio O+A.

3XN has won a competition for the design of an innovation center for health and life science companies, called "Forskaren". Providing office spaces, restaurants, cafes, and an exhibition area, the 24,000 sqm building is designed with the highest sustainability standards in mind and will pursue LEED Platinum certification.

Located between the Karolinska University Hospital and the old Stockholm city hospital, the new Center will become a part of Hagastaden district and play a major role in the development of world-class research in health, life science and treatment, attracting new talents with exciting opportunities as a hub for different scale companies of the industry.

Zaha Hadid Architects has won a competition to design and build the new Shanghai headquarters of the China Energy Conservation and Environmental Protection Group (CECEP). The 218,000 sqm project will be the ‘greenest’ building in the city with sustainability embedded into every aspect of its design and construction to achieve more than 90 credits in China’s exacting Three Star Green Building Rating system - the highest score for any building in Shanghai.

ArchDaily and Strelka Mag have launched a jointly curated section that will host projects of emerging architects and offices that promote new design ideas and bring about positive transformations in their cities.

The platform welcomes projects from Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Estonia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan.

The key criteria for selecting projects will be sustainability, flexibility, and cost-efficiency.

The opening of the 20th Serpentine Pavilion, designed by South African Studio Counterspace, has been postponed to summer 2021. "Counterspace, directed by Sumayya Vally, Sarah de Villiers and Amina Kaskar, will collaborate with the Serpentine on a series of off-site and online research projects throughout 2020, which will culminate with the opening of the Pavilion in Summer 2021," the Serpentine Galleries announced.

In the middle of February, we were invited to visit Ljubljana and attend the Matchmaking Conference organized by Future Architecture Platform -- an organization, coordinated by Ljubljana's Museum of Architecture and Design (MAO), that provides young talents with the opportunity to share their ideas -- practical or conceptual -- and meet fellow emerging architects. The three-day event gathered 25 teams from all over the world to present their projects and discuss potential collaborations.

We always appreciate the people behind great initiatives in architecture, and try to never miss the chance to share their profiles and thoughts with our readers. Future Architecture Platform is no exception -- the Leader of the great team of architects, curators, publishers, and educators, Director of MAO and architecture critic, Matevž Čelik told us about the ideas driving the Platform, challenges that emerging architects face these days, and the future of architectural education and profession.

This article was originally published on Common Edge on Dec 23, 2019.

As 2019 winds down, the media has started its annual ritual of taking stock, compiling lists, looking back. In the architecture world, the year’s biggest news story was arguably the Notre-Dame fire. The image of the cathedral’s burning roof—a wrenching sight—filled TV and computer screens around the world and occasioned an outpouring of grief, especially in France, where the building holds a central place in the nation’s collective consciousness. It was an architectural tragedy as well as a cultural one. No doubt: the April inferno struck at the very heart of France.

Seoul is considered one of the most densely-populated and over-priced cities in the world, reaching a staggering $ 80,000 per square meter. The extreme conditions of the city have forced local architects to operate, design, and build framing the city's urban issues, traditions, and history. This approach by architects has created the theoretical basis of “The Condition of Seoul Architecture”, a publication by multidisciplinary practice TCA Think Tank which sees the point of view of 18 innovative South Korean architects. In this interview, Pier Alessio Rizzardi, founder of the practice, interviewed Chi Min-suk of Mass Studies, explaining his point of view on ephemeral architecture and what influences the studio's work the most.

This summer, on the occasion of the annual Moscow Urban Forum, ArchDaily's CEO David Basulto visited the Russian capital to give a talk at the event and meet with some friend of ArchDaily. Among others, David visited Strelka Institute, our dearest longtime partner and companion, and spoke with its CEO Varvara Melnikova.

Opened in the middle of September, Tallinn Architecture Biennale 2019 (TAB 2019) explores its theme "Beauty Matters" through all possible architectural means. Wood and textiles, 3D-printed structures and VR are only a few components of the main exhibition of the biennial, curated by Tel Aviv-born, London-based architect Yael Reisner.

Renowned architecture theorist and historian, landscape designer and co-founder of Maggie's Cancer Care Centres, Charles Jencks died yesterday, as reported by RIBA Journal on Twitter. Born in Baltimore, Maryland, on June 21, 1939, Jencks was 80 years old at the time he passed away.

Hello Wood, as you may already know, is an annual festival, which gathers hundreds of people in a Hungarian village for a week. Divided into groups, the architects and students carefully selected by the team of organizers, build installations made of wood with their bare hands. The outcome is amazing — dozens of beautiful structures rise up there each year adding more and more originality to the site.

The words cannot express the vibe you get at the Hello Wood Project Village — all the "beautiful people", as they call each other, are one big family. There is no competition, the teams help each other to make sure all projects are completed before the deadline, when they all march to the neighboring village and celebrate the week spent together.

But what is the idea behind this festival? What is the secret key to building a strong community of professionals and students in such a short period of time? Watch our interview with Hello Wood team to learn how they answer these questions.

This article was originally published on Common Edge.

For the past decade, Nigeria has lived under the crushing specter of attacks by the terrorist group Boko Haram. From Maiduguri to Abuja, bombs have exploded intermittently, killing hundreds, destroying thousands of homes, and crippling public infrastructure. In recent years, the Nigerian military has liberated several captive communities and begun reconstruction work in a number of them. Sadly, the aftereffects of these violent convulsions have profoundly reshaped our cities. The attacks utterly upended lives: shattering basic civic amenities, disrupting livelihoods, and forcing residents to rebuild from scratch while still grieving for family and friends.