Mophosis Architects have just released their design for the Casablanca Finance City tower in Morocco. The building's iconic crown, coupled with the way the building interacts with ground-level public space, creates an "inverted double-crown" that will serve as social symbol and meeting place. Following the model set in Paris' La Defense district, the project will anchor a new business district (Casablanca Finance City) and embody "Morocco’s vision for the future and setting precedents in building performance, scale, and style for a city that does not yet exist." Slated for completion in 2017, the 226,042 sq. ft building broke ground in December of 2014.

Read on to learn more about Morphosis' brise-soleil-wrapped tower. 

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MuuM has unveiled the design for the LOSEV Natural Life Center & Drugless Therapy Institute in Çankiri, Turkey. Located in the central Anatolian plains, the project will be built on a site that has a series of artificial ponds from its former function as a fish farm. Due to the presence of the ponds, vegetation in the surrounding landscape has thrived in recent years, creating a lush oasis in land usually deprived of water. Learn more about the project, which is shortlisted for the World Architecture Festival Awards in the Health category, after the break.

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Rome-based SET Architects has been announced as the winner of the international design competition held by the Jewish Community of Bologna to design a Holocaust memorial in Bologna, Italy. The winning design—called the Shoah Memorial—is a representation of the wooden bunks from concentration camps where prisoners were kept, and thus is comprised of a “narrow and cold passage between two equal and symmetrical elements.”

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Fernando Romero EnterprisE (FR-EE) has revealed their proposal for the “Museo Mazatlán” in Mexico, which will be dedicated to the local culture of Mazatlán. Inspired by Mazatlán’s nickname, “The Pearl of the Pacific”, the design resembles an oyster with a pearl at its centre. This “pearl” is a geodesic dome, bringing together views of the sky with views of the city and sea.

Neutelings Riedijk Architects has begun construction on the Herman Teirlinck Building, which, when complete, will be the largest passive office building in Belgium, serving as a mixed-use center for the Flemish government.

The 66,500 square-meter building, located in Brussels, will be built along the canal on the site of Tour & Taxis, one of the last large-scale development locations in the heart of the city, in hopes that it will transform the area into “a new high-quality green urban district with mixed functions.”

MuuM's Erciyes Congress and Cultural Center has been shortlisted for the World Architecture Festival Awards in the Culture category for Future Projects. Located in the city of Kayseri, near Turkey's Erciyes Mountain, the Center is part of Kayseri Metropolitan Municipality’s Master Plan, which aims to improve the area for better year round (rather than just seasonal) use.

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KUAN Architects (UCD) have unveiled their design for The Antique Fish, a shopping center, and the first large-scale commercial construction in Qinshui, a developing city in the Shanxi Province in China.

Located at the crossing of two rivers and surrounded by mountains, the project is designed to mimic its surroundings, as well as traditional Chinese art, taking on a long, fish-like shape and using traditional materials such as blue stones, green tiles, white jade, and wood.

As a result of a public competition, the Chilean Regional Government has commissioned Ennead Architects to collaborate with Chilean architects Cristian Sanhueza and Cristian Ostertag on the design of the Cape Horn Sub-Antarctic Center. Planned for a site within the UNESCO Cape Horn Biosphere Reserve in Puerto Williams, a town on Navarino Island in the Chilean Sub-Antarctic Province, the center will provide a home for the Biocultural Research and Conservation Program led by Dr. Ricardo Rozzi, Professor at the University of North Texas, the Universidad de Magallanes and the Institute of Ecology and Biodiversity.

Rojkind Arquitectos has shared their latest project, Foro Boca, which broke ground yesterday in Veracruz, Mexico. Part of a masterplan that seeks to reinvigorate the surrounding area, the project is catalyzing the renovation of infrastructure. The building will hold an 850-seat concert hall, rehearsal space, a music library and offices. The architects contend that "The building appropriates the timeless expression of the concretes cubes formed by ripraps in the breakwater, assimilating them as its origin and re-interpreting them in a building made of apparent concrete, forming various areas of volume that contain the concert hall."

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Chilean architects, Guillermo Hevia García and Nicolás Urzúa Soler, have been selected as the winners of the 2015 Young Architects Program (YAP) Constructo in Chile for their installation proposal, “Your Reflection." The installation will be inaugurated in March 2016 in Santiago, and aims “to build an uncertain experience, a situation of estrangement” so that the visitor is waiting to see “what is going to surprise them in the next place."

Along with New York, Istanbul, Rome and Seoul, Yap Contructo (Chile) is one of five versions of the Young Architects Program (YAP), carried out by MoMA and MoMA PS1, which aims to “support research in innovative design and promote emerging talent.”

Learn more about the proposal after the break. 

“Engineered Paradises”, a thesis by Zarith Pineda from Tulane University, looks into a possible future for Hebron, exploring the condition where peace never comes to the West Bank, but where the mutual destruction of both sides is addressed through the creation of safe spaces for the expression of universal emotions. The thesis proposes that in this way, both parties may be unified by their plight. The project was created based on observation of the city of Hebron and on-site interviews with Hebronites. Their true stories then became the narrative dictating the program of the project.

A team of students from Austrian-based Studio Hani Rashid at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna have unveiled their conceptual design for a Cirque du Soleil Performance Center in Brooklyn, New York.

With its interior and exterior blended together, the entire building becomes a stage. Featuring large windows that allow the public to watch performances and training activities inside, people on each side are both viewers and viewed.

Dürig AG has won a competition to design a new Student Housing building for the University of Lausanne in Switzerland. Dubbed Vortex, the residential building will house 1,350 students and is also a candidate for the Athletes Village for the 2020 Winter Youth Olympic Games. For this reason, the design of the building includes a common path that spirals from the ground floor to the rooftop, creating a distinct social atmosphere that caters to students and athletes.

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When thinking of metro stations, the word quiet generally doesn’t come to mind—with all of the train and pedestrian traffic, not only is noise produced in high quantities, but it is also echoed. With this issue in mind, London-based Variant Studio created their proposal for the competition to design the new Novoperedelkino station in Moscow, Russia. Although not selected as the winning design, Variant was one of five shortlisted teams. Learn more about their silent proposal after the break.

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BIG has been selected through a competition to realize a 185-meter-tall, mixed-use tower in Frankfurt. With a shape that is "both rational and sculptural," the skyscraper is organized as a basic volume whose floor plates "shift" to provide the "best spaces for each specific program."

"Organized as a slender and rational stack of inhabited floors, the tower is interrupted by two sculptural moves where the program changes," says BIG.

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COOKFOX Architects’ new project, 550 Vanderbilt Avenue has opened for sale. The 17-storey building will be the first of four condominiums in the 22-acre Pacific Park Brooklyn development in Prospect Heights. The project aims to create a new neighbourhood of 14 buildings, all connected to 8-acres of public green space designed by landscape architecture firm Thomas Balsley Associates. Read more about this project after the break.

schmidt hammer lassen architects has broken ground on their first Chinese library. Selected through an international competition in 2013, the project will provide a new home for the Ningbo City Library's massive collection - the region's largest for historic and ancient books - on the edge of an ecological wetland area in the eastern port city of Ningbo.

"Given our great collaboration with the Local Design Institute and the client team, we are full of confidence that the Ningbo New Central Library will become a vibrant new public space for the citizens of Ningbo,” says Chris Hardie, partner and director of schmidt hammer lassen.

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Norman Foster attended the recent groundbreaking ceremony for 425 Park Avenue, which will be the first full-block high-rise office building to be built on New York City's Park Avenue in the past 50 years. Foster+Partners, in collaboration with Adamson Associates, designed 425 Park to be a new icon in the Manhattan skyline, featuring a tri-blade, sheer wall top. In addition to its LEED Gold certification, the 560,000m² tower will be the first in New York to be WELL certified.

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The Ontario College of Art and Design University (OCAD U) has commissioned Toronto firm Bortolotto to transform the university’s main office building into the Rosalie Sharp Pavilion. The office will be wrapped in a technologically-responsive layer, transforming it into a multi-use, student work and exhibition space and transforming the corner of Dundas and McCaul streets into an interactive gateway for the campus.

MAD Architects has unveiled what will be their first US residential project, 8600 Wilshire. Planned to be built in Beverly Hills, Los Angeles, the 18-unit "hillside village" will be perched atop commercial space and united by a water-efficient "living wall" that was inspired by the local flora.

As MAD says, the project "demonstrates founder Ma Yansong’s core design philosophy: to coalesce nature and community into a living environment among high-density cities." It is expected to break ground this October, and complete in 2016.

AECOM has designed a preliminary study for a mixed-use transportation development in Solana Beach, California, as part of a response for a RFP (Request for Proposal). Located near major roads and connected to railroads, the project proposal consists of a combination of retail stores and restaurants, providing transit users with leisure spaces on their travels, in addition to parking for the nearby AMTRAK train station.

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A competition entry by the architects von Gerkan, Marg and Partners (gmp) has been awarded first prize for the new Guangzhou City Museum. The commission was announced at the same time as Nieto Sobejano Arquitectos' selection for the Guangzhou Science Museum, both of which will join the city's new Art Museum by Thomas Herzog Architects to form the central cultural precinct of Guangzhou - China's third largest city.