Articles by Niall Patrick Walsh

The Aranya Art Center in Qinhuangdao, China has been completed, designed by Neri&Hu. Situated in a seaside environment, the scheme was designed to evoke notions of space for art versus communal space. Despite the straightforward brief for the art center, the scheme reaches further to become a communal space for residents in the deeply spiritual community.

UNStudio has unveiled its design for Bangalore’s Karle Town Center Masterplan, a new innovation and tech campus for India. Situated in an area earmarked as the Silicon Valley of India, UNStudio’s scheme will also contain sensorial technologies designed by its tech company UNSense, collaborating with Karle Infra.

The Van Alen Institute is collaborating with the City of North Miami to announce a request for qualifications for transforming the city’s flood-prone vacant lots. The competition asks how can we reimagine underutilized communal spaces to bring the community together and adapt to climate impacts over time, and to repurpose the sites to reduce the cost of flood insurance.

Media channel the slowdown has released the latest episode in their Time Sensitive podcast series, featuring an interview by Andrew Zuckerman with BIG founder Bjarke Ingels. The episode, titled “Bjarke Ingels to Cities: Take a Longer View,” sees Ingels communicate the value and world-changing potential of architecture, and reflect on his own career.

Non Architecture Competitions has launched the latest in their three-year-long run of competitions, titled the “GoT Architecture 21st Century” competition. Starting from June 1st, participants in the competition will have two months to represent, in one image, an iconic Game of Thrones fortress or palace. They will be challenged to imagine how the building selected would look in a 21st-century context.

One month on from the devastating fire at Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris, the architectural community as generated a bounty of responses focusing on the future of the landmark. While some have taken the opportunity to re-imagine the purpose of the monument, from urban farming to recreational parkland, others have focused on sensitive restoration.

The TWA Hotel has opened at JFK Airport in New York. Centered on the careful restoration of Eero Saarinen’s landmark 1962 former Trans World Airlines terminal, the hotel features 512 soundproof guest rooms, restaurants, and retail outlets. The project was led by Beyer Blinder Belle Architects & Planners, with two new hotel wings designed by LUBRANO CIAVARRA Architects and Stonehill Taylor, and a 50,000 square meter events center by INC Architecture & Design.

OMA and KOO LLC has been announced as winners of an international competition to design an innovative Center for the Arts on the University of Illinois at Chicago campus, serving as a gateway between UIC and the world. The scheme was one of three proposals chosen as finalists for the center, joining Johnston Marklee/UrbanWorks and Morphosis/STL.

Lebanon-based firm JPAG has created a short architectural movie titled “Coming Back to Life” which uses an abandoned icon from the Lebanese civil war to generate a modern day fairy tale. The Burj El Murr (Tower of Bitterness) has been reimagined in a cinematic narrative loaded with emotional content and dramatic sceneries, in an attempt to generate new understandings of what an architectural concept is.

Construction has been completed on the Al Janoub Stadium, the first stadium commissioned for the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar. Designed by Zaha Hadid Architects and Aecom, and situated in the city of Al Wakrah, the stadium underwent a design process beginning in 2013, and was inaugurated on May 16th 2019.