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Here are some of the stories that appeared on CLAD this week, from the Serpentine Pavilion’s next architect to the world’s first ‘bird airport’. Monday • In an exclusive interview with CLAD, the architect who oversaw the creation of Lisbon’s sparkling new Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology explains the inspiration behind the acclaimed design. Read here. • Architecture studio HKS have been brought on board to design h.Club LA; [more...]

Architects Rem Koolhaas and David Gianotten of international studio OMA have been announced as the high-profile designers of the 2017 MPavilion in Melbourne, Australia. The duo will work together to create the temporary landmark and events hub, located in Queen Victoria Gardens, which will host a free, four-month programme of talks, workshops, performances and installations. The MPavilion project began in 2014, and is inspired in part by the annual Serpentine [more...]

Diébédo Francis Kéré, the award-winning architect from Burkino Faso, has been commissioned to design the Serpentine Pavilion 2017. The Serpentine Pavilion programme, which began in 2000, sees an architect who has never built in the UK create a temporary summer pavilion in Kensington Gardens. Herzog & de Meuron, Jean Nouvel, Sou Fujimoto, SANAA and Bjarke Ingels Group – whose ‘unzipped wall’ structure was visited by more than 250,000 people in [more...]

We wrap up our CLAD review of 2016 with a look at some of the most significant new cultural buildings that have opened this year. We have compiled a separate list for museums – of which there have been many spectacular examples in the last 12 months – so this one focuses on other typologies, from concert halls to theatres and arts centres. No such list can ever be truly [more...]

British architect and academic Sir Peter Cook has blasted the “conspiracy of boring” he believes is preventing the creation of interesting and risk-taking contemporary buildings. In a passionate address delivered at the World Architecture Festival in Berlin earlier this month, the founder of avant-garde collective Archigram bemoaned the “lack of imagination” stifling the industry. “I believe there are some architects, even in this room, who really prefer it if buildings [more...]

The new leadership of London's Serpentine Galleries have announced they are expanding the art museums’ famous pavilion programme and launching a Zaha Hadid exhibition focusing on the late architect’s design notebooks. In their first joint press conference, newly-appointed CEO Yana Peel and artistic director Hans Ulrich Obrist announced “an exciting new chapter” in the development of the Serpentine, with a new emphasis on technology, partnerships, innovation and accessibility. A new [more...]

Northern Irish architects have been given the opportunity to follow in the footsteps of Bjarke Ingels and design an architectural pavilion that “uplifts the soul and impacts on wellbeing.” Inspired by the annual Serpentine Pavilion in London’s Hyde Park – which has been created this year by Ingels and his studio BIG – the Royal Society of Ulster Architects (RSUA) have launched a design competition for a temporary public structure [more...]

The four summer houses created to surround Bjarke Ingels’ “unzipped” Serpentine Pavilion have been put up for sale. Specialist architectural estate agency Modern House has listed the quartet on its website. Berlin studio Barkow Leibinger’s looping wooden structure is priced at £125,000 (US$164,700, €145,500), while the mini pavilions designed by Kunlé Adeyemi, Asif Khan and Yona Friedman each cost £95,000 (US$125,200, €113,000.) The sales will be completed when the Serpentine [more...]

Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) have created an inflatable beer pavilion for the Roskilde Music Festival which is part sculpture, part bouncy castle. The structure – called FOAM and is sponsored by beer brand Tuborg – is a giant “bubble-like cloud” which is illuminated by purple LED lights at night and can be inflated in seven minutes. BIG were tasked with creating a 120sq m (1,300sq ft) mobile pavilion which could [more...]

This year's Serpentine Pavilion, designed by the Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG), has opened in Hyde Park, London. At the press launch yesterday (7 June), BIG founder Bjarke Ingels said that designing the pavilion had allowed the practice to demonstrate their values in a way that their more traditional building work cannot. “As architects, we almost always work in situations that are so saturated with existing constraints that the project becomes [more...]

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 [more...]

Studio Gang founder Jeanne Gang has been named Architect of the Year at the Women in Architecture awards, with Gabriela Etchegaray winning the Moira Gemmill Prize for Emerging Architecture. The judges heralded the duo for demonstrating “excellence in design and a commitment to working both sustainably and democratically with local communities.” While the judges particularly praised the architects for their social and commercial work, both have also designed a number [more...]

The first images have been revealed of the Serpentine Gallery’s 2016 pavilion programme, featuring four summer houses by international architects and a centrepiece created by Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG). BIG’s hotly-anticipated pavilion – the studio’s first UK structure – has been described as an “unzipped wall”. The structure – formed by a series of box-like fibreglass frames stacked in a brick-wall pattern – will host a Harrods-run cafe and events [more...]

When architect Étienne Duval decided to apply for his dream job – a position at Bjarke Ingels’ studio BIG – he chose a rather unorthodox alternative to a traditional cover letter. In a bid to stand out from the crowd, Duval posted a special rap on YouTube in which he sets out his suitability for the practice – who are perhaps in need of extra staff having announced a host [more...]

Teams from some of the world’s leading architectural practices swapped CAD for cakes on Saturday (27 June), as they locked horns in the Great Architectural Cake Bake-Off. Teams from Zaha Hadid Architects, Rogers Stirk Harbour and Partners, Squire + Partners, ARUP, HOK, BDP and Foster + Partners gathered for one of the more light-hearted events to feature during the London Festival of Architecture. The competition was conceived and hosted by [more...]

Spanish architecture studio SelgasCano’s colourful Serpentine Pavilion in London’s Kensington Gardens is to open this week. It is the fifteenth incarnation of the pavilion commission, with different architects creating a temporary structure outside the Serpentine Gallery every year. The aim is to both celebrate innovative designs in contemporary architecture and provide a space for people to meet and experience live events. Led by husband-and-wife duo José Selgas and Lucía Cano, [more...]

Madrid-based SelgasCano architects have unveiled their designs for this year's Serpentine Pavilion in London, featuring an explosion of colour. To be constructed from ETFE, translucent fluorine-based plastic, the lightweight structure will be double-skinned, consisting of multi-coloured panels wrapped in webbing. Internally, the experience will be like passing under sheets of stained glass. When describing their design in a company statement, SelgasCano said they wanted to explore ways a visitor could [more...]

Madrid-based architecture practice, SelgasCano Studio, has been chosen to design the 15th Serpentine Pavilion in London’s Kensington Gardens. Announced on 4 December, the spanish practice's appointment follows on from last year's Pavilion designed by Smiljan Radic. As a much-anticipated landmark in London over the summer months, the Pavilion is one of the top ten most visited architectural and design exhibitions in the world, according to the Serpentine Gallery. Although well-known [more...]

The opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympics in London showcased some of Britain’s greatest creative talent, with one of its defining moments being the Olympic Cauldron by Thomas Heatherwick. The Museum of London (MOL) is set to open a new gallery to house the monumental piece of sculpture that captured the minds of millions of people all over the world when it folded into a flaming tower that burned throughout [more...]