At 92 years of age, for his entire career Yona Friedman has occupied an unusual spot within the architecture world; his signature concept, the Ville Spatiale which he first proposed in 1956, combines the top-down megastructural thinking visible in later projects such as Archigram's Plug-In City with a total freedom for occupants to design and build their own homes within the structure. In this installment of his “City of Ideas” column, Vladimir Belogolovsky interviews Friedman at his home in Paris to talk about the Ville Spatiale and his theories of mobile and improvised architecture.

This is a detached single-family home located in an enviably scenic enclave in the Plana Alta district of the interior of Castellón. The owners, a foreign couple, wanted a home that could be integrated into its natural environment, adapting to the natural topography of the land, and taking advantage of the existing mountainside terraces. On the other hand, they wanted it to be fully self-sufficient with minimum energy consumption.

The National Council for Culture, Art and Letters (NCCAL) has selected curators Asaiel Al Saeed, Aseel AlYaqoub, Saphiya Abu Al-Maati, and Yousef Awaad, to design the Kuwait Pavilion at the 17th International Architecture Exhibition of la Biennale di Venezia.

With the high population density of cities and voracious appetite of the market for every square meter, it is not uncommon for urban vegetation to be forgotten. For this reason, forests, vegetable gardens, and vertical gardens have aroused much interest and figured into a variety of different innovative proposals. Using the vertical plane to maintain plants in an urban setting is a coherent and common-sense solution, especially when there is little possibility of bringing green to the level of the people on the streets.

This project was located in Hoian City, an ancient town in Vietnam. The house has an advantage of natural and cultural background because Hoian is famous for hundreds of years old houses along with diverse and unique flora and rivers. Therefore, we formed the idea to design this house based on the filtering and promoting the cultural and natural values of the locality. Specifically, the architectural form is transformed from the impression of native plants, and the architectural space is transformed from the native residential space. Besides that, we pay attention to the variation in the use of materials and in spatial design or morphology. All aimed at creating a unique and newness of the house, but it's still adapting to the local climate, comfortable and familiar to indigenous living habits.

Centennial College, Ontario's first public college, has collaborated with DIALOG, Smoke Architecture, and EllisDon to design and build the first zero-carbon, mass timber higher-education building in the country. Scheduled for completion in 2023, the new gateway structure will bring together Indigenous and Western cultures in both form and function.

Just as its alpine setting has been formed by many forces over time, Villa Courbe is a residence shaped intuitively and alliteratively by many hands – from sun and topography to brief and local zoning regulations. Seen from the water, the house appears almost at one with the wooded hills that rise gently out of the lake and, at the same time, very different to the traditional suburbia that surrounds it. The need to respond to the topography that came before, drives the design to contrast with the neighboring houses that appeared only after the glaciers and ice had done their work.

The steel frame of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art is beginning to take shape in Los Angeles. Designed by MAD Architects, the project takes its name from Star Wars creator George Lucas and will stand at the gateway to the city’s Exposition Park. The landmark project will be MAD’s first museum built in the United States.

What if hiring an international architect with great skills, qualifications, and unique insights was as easy as hiring someone from upstate New York or Indiana? Architects worldwide dream of an opportunity to enter the competitive American market and it is common for young professionals to travel internationally for study or work. At the same time, many top US firms are searching for diverse new talent, yet the cost, paperwork, and bureaucracy of hiring international candidates can be discouraging. Architect-US was created to fill that gap.

The scape Landschaftsarchitekten office was founded in Düsseldorf, Germany in 2001 by Matthias Funk, Hiltrud M. Lintel, and Rainer Sachse. The firm primarily works through a young and committed team in cooperation with urban planners, architects, ecologists, and communication designers, mainly on the planning of urban landscapes. Current projects range from master plans for entire city districts to object plans for parks, pedestrian zones, squares, and streets, to detailed planning of their own street furniture systems. One of these projects was for The Viega Group, an internationally active family business in the field of mechanical and plumbing technology for sanitary and heating systems. A new seminar center is currently under construction at their headquarters in Attendorn, and Vectorworks Landmark was used to implement the landscape architecture through a BIM process.