Henk Ovink: The Latest Architecture and News

Last month the Norman Foster Foundation, created to promote "interdisciplinary thinking and research to help up-and-coming architects, designers and urbanists to anticipate the future," coincided the opening of its new Madrid-based headquarters with an international conference. Future is Now pulled together a broad collection of professionals—including Sir Jonathan Ive, Marc Newson, Olafur Eliasson, Maya Lin, Alejandro Aravena, and Luis Fernández-Galian—who addressed an audience of 1,800 (including 1,100 students) in the Spanish capital's Royal Theater.

Watch the conference in its entirety, or read a summary, after the break.

The Netherlands has many thousands of dikes. A pivotal element in the Dutch landscape and one of the oldest features of the country's extensive water management program, the dikes of the Netherlands have significant cultural, historical and environmental value. But despite their importance to the history, economy and culture of the Netherlands (and their contemporary international relevance as the world scrambles to develop and implement effective flood-control strategies), Dutch dikes have never been properly mapped out or systematically studied. Many of them fail to meet current safety standards, though they are still a ubiquitous presence in the Dutch landscape. In this book, built around research producing the first dike map of the Netherlands, the Dutch dikes are for the first time described, interpreted and portrayed in all of their surprising variety of functions and guises.