Cultural Center: The Latest Architecture and News

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Marc Koehler Architects (MKA) has taken first-place in the Open Oproep 28 design competition to design a leisure center, dubbed "The Missing Link." The competition challenged them to develop a community center, art center, and library for a municipality in Belgium. Located in suburban Edegem, the design strives to become the region's cultural hub and form a cohesive connection between its established public spaces.

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Flohara by XTU Architects envisions an inhabitable desert wall that constructs itself from the natural processes of its environment. Featured at the Venice Biennale's Morocco Pavilion exhibition entitled “Fundamental(ism)s,” this ecological phenomenon defies the conventions of housing, offering shelter from varying climatic conditions and supporting both human and plant life in the harsh desert.

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“The splendor of the Italian cities are beautifully represented by their domes,” says Miralles Tagliabue EMBT. Embracing this notion, EMBT has designed a wooden dome for COPAGRI, a confederation of agricultural producers that brings together hundreds of Italian farmers, to showcase their products at the 2015 Milan Expo.

“The design started from the observation of Italian landscapes, both natural and man-shaped,” said EMBT in a press release. “In our project the domes are not only representing the magnificence of the Italian past, but they also show us potential for the future lying in the construction of domes.”

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The first phase of Skidmore Owings & Merrill (SOM) and Renzo Piano Building Workshop's (RPBW) expansive Manhattanville Campus plan for Columbia University is making significant progress; completion is nearing on a highly-anticipated portion of the project - RPBW's LEED platinum Jerome L. Greene Science Center, which is scheduled to open in Fall of 2016 just six miles North of the practice's soon-to-open Whitney Museum.

More on the mixed-use structure after the break.

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The winning design of an international competition in 2010 to house the world-renowned Sinfonia Varsovia Orchestra, Austrian firm Atelier Thomas Pucher's Sinfonia Varsovia European Music Center has been approved to begin construction. As part of a larger campaign to revive Warsaw's historic character and inspire cultural exchange, the Music Center has ranked high on the priority list of the Renewal Program, and is slated to open in 2020.

Read on after the break for a closer look at the Music Center.

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