The ROM’s new Bloor Street Terrace and Plaza, designed by Hariri Pontarini Architects, revealed.

In a ribbon-cutting ceremony attended by donors, board members and executives, the ROM marked the opening of the new Helga and Mike Schmidt Performance Terrace and the Reed Family Plaza. The spaces, designed by Siamak Hariri of Hariri Pontarini Architects (HPA) create a lively streetscape around the Michael Lee-Chin Crystal entrance providing a welcoming place to sit, relax, and enjoy outdoor performance programming.
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Paris, Lisbon and Shanghai-based practices Jacques Ferrier Architecture and Sensual City Studio have turned what could have been an ordinary ‘office plus car park’ into an opportunity to radically reassess the surrounding urban district of Xujiahui in Shanghai.
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The Beauty Cube (M³) locates inside the Hi-tech Waterfront City of Zhengzhou National High & New Technology Industries Development Zone. This site enjoys a very large area, while separated by several wide streets that prevent passengers from passing to the neighboring plot. The west and north side of the Project are surrounded by urban greenings, while its south and east side left undeveloped. In such an environment, what comes to a designer’s mind is how will people live and work here in the future?
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Riga, the Baltic states’ largest city, will see the mostly abandoned buildings of its historic Kimmel Quarter transformed into a thriving commercial development, and Danish architectural firm Schmidt Hammer Lassen Architects is behind the winning design to revitalize the neighbourhood.

Schmidt Hammer Lassen Architects won a competition to design Kimmel Quarter, an 11,500-square-metre area that assumes nearly an entire city block in Riga’s Central District. Kimmel Quarter is the former home of Brewery Kimmel, a 19th century beer brewery that in its wake left an industrial complex filled with buildings that, while now mostly abandoned, are rich with history. The project called for a design that realizes the vision of a vibrant new city block with deep historic roots. Schmidt Hammer Lassen was one of eleven participants, along with firms like Henning Larsen and Zaha Hadid, invited to the open competition.
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An Urban Empowerment of Cairo’s Street Children
The award-winning project is an extraction of Abdullah Al Dabbous’s Masters thesis at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL.

The project stresses the adaptability of Cairo’s unused urban spaces (e.g. spaces under motorway flyovers ) to meet the needs of street children and provide both learning and opportunities for advancement without uprooting them—in other words, by dealing with street children as positive economic assets rather than liabilities.
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With a scheme of twelve staggering skyscrapers, an elevated pedestrian network and a beautiful green urban park, Mecanoo architecten has been named the winner of the urban design competition for the Shenzhen North Station business district. The 1,36 million square metres development encompasses offices, retail space, apartments and a hotel, integrated with Shenzhen North railway and metro station.

Mecanoo’s proposal aims to create a strong identity for the neighbourhood. The main buildings of the business district are set around a central urban park and vary in height between 278 and 428 metres. By situating the transportation nodes on the subterranean levels, the public park appears as an open green space, something the area currently lacks.

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KOMPAN’s Cross Systems brings real fitness to the outdoor public space and wins two design awards. The new outdoor fitness concept is based on the most popular activities and challenges all fitness levels.

Cross Systems changes the perception of outdoor fitness from simple and easy to scalable and challenging. Central to Cross Systems is scalable resistance, allowing everyone to train according to individual levels of fitness. The intensity can be determined by adjusting the body position to add more or less resistance or opting for a light/medium/heavy weight.
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MLA+ in collaboration with Felixx Landscape Architects & Planners and Chinese partners China Academy of Urban Planning and Design (CAUPD) and Shenzhen Municipal Design & Research Institute has won the first prize in the design competition for the regeneration of the area along the G107 highway in Bao’an district in Shenzhen. The other competing teams consisted of Nikken Sekkei, KCAP, OMA and ISA- Internationales Stadtbauatelier.
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