Stockholm City Council has approved David Chipperfield’s controversial design for a permanent home and museum for the Nobel Foundation. Under the proposals, a 25,000sq m (269,000sq ft) golden, cuboid facility will be constructed to house nearly all the foundation’s activities, including the Nobel prize ceremony, and to stimulate ideas and knowledge through a museum. However, the new headquarters will be located in an inner-city Blasieholmen district surrounded by many of

The longest treetop walkway in the UK has opened to the public in a botanical garden in Gloucestershire. The twisting 300m (984ft) route weaves through the National Arboretum at Westonbirt, starting and ending at ground level and rising 13m (88ft) in height as it follows the valley floor below. Named the STIHL Treetop Walkway, the installation has been designed by Glenn Howells Architects with engineers Buro Happold. The £2m (US$3m,

HBO has turned to the world of art to promote its latest series of Game of Thrones, hosting a temporary immersive art experience influenced by iconic moments in the hit TV series. Taking place in New York’s Angel Orensanz Center, Art the Throne featured five Game of Thrones -inspired art installations on display throughout the gothic space. For the exhibition, HBO selected a diverse group of artists to reinterpret scenes

The team behind Rio’s recently opened Museum of Tomorrow has said that they want the museum to act as a hub of culture, information and science, inspiring the local community to great things and to leave a lasting legacy in the build up to this year’s Olympic and Paralympic Games. Speaking exclusively to CLAD, Luiz Alberto Oliveira, chief curator at the museum, said that the Santiago Calatrava-designed structure was a

Sheila E, long-time collaborator with Prince, has said there are plans to turn his Paisley Park home and recording complex in Chanhassen, Minneapolis, into a museum dedicated to the musician’s career. First opened in 1988, the studio was designed by California-based architecture firm BOTO Design and was the home of Paisley Park Records until the music label folded in 1994. After its closure, Prince continued to live and record at

Italian architecture studio Lissoni Associati have won a design ideas contest for a new aquarium and public waterfront park in New York. The competition was launched by organisers Arch Out Loud in January 2016 in a bid to receive proposals for an "iconic new destination" to revitalise the borough of Queens. The winning design, called Aquatrium, creates an environment whereby visitors feel that they are entering the water to discover

The second phase of a 15-year restoration and redesign programme at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) is nearing completion, with construction progressing on the new entrance, open courtyard and underground gallery designed by architecture studio AL_A. The £49.5m (US$71.4m, €63.5m) Exhibition Road Building Project – the V&A’s largest architectural scheme in the last 100 years – is expected to open in 2017 now that 95 per cent of its

Kengo Kuma has won the first prize in an architecture design competition to create a new fairytale-themed home for the Hans Christian Andersen Museum in Odense, Denmark. A peaceful garden and tall trees will surround cylindrical timber-clad volumes that house 6,000sq m (64,600sq ft) of new floor space, including an underground level. The complex, which will also include the Tinderbox Cultural Centre for Children, is designed to create empathy, imagination

Entertainment mogul David Geffen has donated US$100m (€89m, £69.5m) to New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the largest donation yet to MoMA’s funding campaign for its large-scale expansion. MoMA unveiled revised US$445m (€407.3m, £310.6m) plans to redevelop and expand the facility in January, with the design by Diller Scofidio + Renfro streamlining the museum experience to work better for both visitors and curators. Geffen – who has a net

A shortlist of eight celebrated and emerging architecture practices has today (21 April) been announced for the final stage of an international architecture competition to design a waterfront arts district in Doha, Qatar. The studios of Pritzker winners Alejandro Aravena and Renzo Piano are in the running for project, called Art Mill, alongside other big names including EAA Emre Arolat Architecture and Atelier Bow-Wow. The site of the new district

An open international architecture competition has been launched to design a future Science City in Egypt. The Bibliotheca Alexandrina, a major library and cultural centre, has organised the single phase, open contest to receive conceptual designs and masterplans for a 125,000sq m (1.35m sq ft) scientific complex designed to promote scientific knowledge to the public. The city will house interactive science exhibitions, a museum, a planetarium, an observation tower, research

The project architect responsible for Zaha Hadid’s Messner Mountain Museum Corones in Italy has told CLAD that cultural buildings have an important role to play in the reinvigoration of ski resorts. Peter Irmsche, who is interviewed in the latest issue of CLADmag, explained how Hadid’s museum – one of her final completed projects before her untimely death on 31 March this year – has increased the popularity of Italy’s Kronplatz

The Association for the Promotion and Exhibition of the Arts in Lebanon (APEAL) has revealed the shortlist for an architectural design competition to build a new “modern and contemporary” art museum in the heart of Beirut, Lebanon. The contest was open to architects of Lebanese origin from around the globe, and 66 submissions from 16 countries were received. These were whittled down to a final shortlist of 13, who are

The city council of St. Petersburg in Florida, US, has officially approved both the funding and design for a US$20m pier designed as the centrepiece of a new 34 acre waterfront leisure district. The St. Petersburg Pier – designed by ASD/SKY, Rogers Partners Architects + Urban Designers and Ken Smith Workshop – will extend into Tampa Bay, providing multi-level observation platforms, cycling routes, restaurants, a 4,000-capacity events space, a cafe

Detroit Zoo has debuted its new US$30m (€26.5m, £21.1m) penguin habitat, with the state-of-the-art enclosure offering a face-to-face encounter with the antarctic birds. Home to 69 penguins – gentoos, macaronis, king and rockhoppers – the Polk Penguin Conservation Center, designed by the architectural team of Albert Kahn Associates and Jones & Jones Architects, features an underwater gallery and two acrylic tunnels for visitors to see the birds fly through the

Acclaimed artist Cornelia Parker has taken inspiration from the paintings of Edward Hopper and the ominous Bates mansion from Alfred Hitchcock’s film Psycho to create a large-scale roof garden commission for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. For the fourth year running, the Met has organised a site-specific rooftop exhibit mixing architecture, art and design. The Roof Garden Commission: Cornelia Parker, Transitional Object (PsychoBarn), which opens to the

A former Six Flags theme park abandoned in 2005 after severe flooding stemming from Hurricane Katrina could be given a new lease of life after two groups of developers laid out proposals to revive the theme park. The abandoned site in New Orleans, Louisiana, nowadays frequented by vandals and trespassers, could get a revival as an amusement park, resort hotel, outlet mall or sports complex, according to the developers. A

A floating park designed by Thomas Heatherwick for New York’s Hudson River has overcome a major hurdle after a judge in Manhattan dismissed a lawsuit seeking to halt the project. According to the New York Times, civic group City Club of New York filed the action, claiming the US$130m (€1115.4m, £91.8m) project was not transparent, had not been subjected to enough public scrutiny, and should face a new environmental review.

While the Smithsonian is stalling on plans to move to London’s Olympicopolis site, the British Museum is looking at the possibility of a satellite site at the upcoming cultural hub. For the Washington-based Smithsonian, which has 19 affiliates in the US, uncertainty over costs to open a new 3,750sq m (40,300sq ft) satellite facility within the new cultural quarter on the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park has delayed a final decision.

A controversial restoration of an ancient Spanish castle has been awarded an international architecture prize, despite being lambasted by a national heritage group as “lamentable”. Spanish studio Carquero Arquitectura’s modernist reinterpretation and renovation of Matrera Castle was the Popular Choice winner at the Architizer A+ Awards, which promotes and celebrates “meaningful architecture”. The 1,000 year-old stricture, which was falling into ruin, was propped up by a white cuboid structure, formed

The board of the Serpentine Galleries in London – famous for organising the architectural Serpentine Pavilion programme – has announced the appointment of entrepreneur Yana Peel as the organisation’s new CEO, in place of departing director Julia Peyton-Jones. Peel, previously a trustee at the galleries, is the co-founder of the Outset Contemporary Art Fund and CEO of live debate forum Intelligence Squared. In her new role, she will work alongside

Ground has broken on the latest project of Swiss architects Herzog and de Meuron: a new home for the National Library of Israel. The new building – which will replace the library’s current 1950s home, described as “outdated and barely serviceable” – is located in Jerusalem’s National District adjacent to Israel’s parliament building. When it opens in 2020, it will protect, preserve and showcase the country’s cultural and intellectual books,

Beijing-based innovators MAD Architects have designed a flowing, translucent installation for the 2016 Milan Design Week in the famous courtyard of the city’s university. The sculptural piece, called Invisible Border, forms a rippling canopy descending across the Cortile d’Onore courtyard from a loggia to the ground, establishing a shelter for people to gather, socialise and contemplate their surroundings. “Architects usually create borders by defining spaces – what is inside and

Danish studio AART Architects have been named the winners of an international competition to design a new extension for the Viking Age Museum in Oslo, Norway. The firm were chosen ahead of 11 rivals to create a “new signature, forward looking setting” for one of the country’s most popular museums – which exhibits a number of Viking Age boats and artefacts – after the judges unanimously approved the bold, circular

Daniel Libeskind yesterday (11 April) publicly revealed for the first time that he has been developing a Kurdistan Museum in Erbil, the capital of the autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan region. The Polish American architect spoke out about the secretive, long-gestating project during an appearance at Bloomberg Design Week in San Francisco. The project was commissioned by the prime minister of Iraqi Kurdistan, Nechirvan Barzani – who approached Libeskind seven years ago

Japanese architect Sou Fujimoto has designed an immersive installation called Forest of Light for Milan Design Week. A darkened space is illuminated by towering cones of light that respond to visitors’ movements. Fog and specially-composed sounds add an atmospheric effect, and mirrored walls have been installed to create the illusion of an infinite landscape, where the conical spotlights form countless abstract trees. “People meander through this forest, as if lured

Santiago Calatrava’s futuristic tower design for Dubai will ‘be a notch taller’ than the Burj Khalifa, according to its developer Emaar Properties. The real estate giant hosted an event in the city on Sunday (10 April) to officially unveil the project, now named as ‘The Tower’, two months after Calatrava was named as the winner of an international design project for the commission. According to reports in Dubai, the structure