The questioner is: Who will be the next Pritzker Prize winners?

The Pritzker Architecture Prize is awarded annually by the Hyatt Foundation to honor "a living architect whose built work demonstrates a combination of those qualities of talent, vision and commitment, which has produced consistent and significant contributions to humanity and the built environment through the art of architecture".Founded in 1979 by Jay A. Pritzker and his wife Cindy, the award is funded by the Pritzker family and is considered to be one of the world's premier architecture prizes.

Every year, architects present their best work for the prize and wish for the best, but sometimes you can tell who will win it especially in the dark economic year that we went through. The whole construction is generally in a bad shape yet we see outstanding design as designers compete for the few jobs coming up. So who knows, we might see fewer project but better quality.

Additionally, according to the prize's site, any licensed architect may submit a nomination to the Executive Director for consideration by the jury for the Pritzker Architecture Prize. Nominations are accepted through November 1 of any given year.

2010 Jury Members:

Lord Peter Palumbo, 2005-present (Chair)

Alejandro Aravena, 2009-present

Rolf Fehlbaum, 2004-present

Carlos Jimenez, 2001-present

Juhani Pallasmaa, 2009-present

Renzo Piano, 2006-present

Karen Stein, 2004-present

Martha Thorne, 2005-present (Executive Director)

Pritzker Prize winners

Philip Johnson (1979) · Luis Barragán (1980) · James Stirling (1981) · Kevin Roche (1982) · I. M. Pei (1983) · Richard Meier (1984) · Hans Hollein (1985) · Gottfried Böhm (1986) · Kenzo Tange (1987) · Gordon Bunshaft / Oscar Niemeyer (1988) · Frank Gehry (1989) · Aldo Rossi (1990) · Robert Venturi (1991) · Álvaro Siza Vieira (1992) · Fumihiko Maki (1993) · Christian de Portzamparc (1994) · Tadao Ando (1995) · Rafael Moneo (1996) · Sverre Fehn (1997) · Renzo Piano (1998) · Norman Foster (1999) · Rem Koolhaas (2000) · Herzog & de Meuron (2001) · Glenn Murcutt (2002) · Jørn Utzon (2003) · Zaha Hadid (2004) · Thom Mayne (2005) · Paulo Mendes da Rocha (2006) · Richard Rogers (2007) · Jean Nouvel (2008) · Peter Zumthor (2009)

Buenos Aires' neighborhoods offer an impressive sampling of the city's heritage and utopian ambitions.

A French neoclassical building on Avenida Independencia in Buenos Aires. (Julia Kumari Drapkin/GlobalPost)

BUENOS AIRES, Argentina — Wander the neighborhoods of Buenos Aires and it's hard not to wonder about the mix of architecture. The house next door, the corner pizza parlor, even parking garages have features that tickle the curiosity.

Most are artifacts of the city's building boom from 1880 through the 1920s, when Buenos Aires was one of the world's richest, fastest growing cities. The capital was a blank canvas and its architects wanted to create their dream city at the beginning of a brand new century.
The resulting architectural styles reflect the utopian ambitions of the designers as well as their immigrant heritage. At the height of the great European migration to Argentina in 1914, 30 percent of the population was foreign born. Neighborhood architects built in their own styles flavored by their home country or that of their patron.
Take a tour of Buenos Aires with architecture detective Alejandro Machado, who rigorously documents the architectural heritage of edifices across the city.

A guide to Buenos Aires architecture
It's not hard to be an architecture detective in Buenos Aires. Just pick a street and take a walk. While some neighborhoods are known for certain styles, most offer an impressive sampling of the city's architectural heritage.
The overall style of a neighborhood building can tell you a lot about when it was built and the people who built it. Three styles dominate the neighborhoods of Buenos Aires: neoclassical, art nouveau and art deco.

Shawn Baldwin for The New York Times

Designers at the World Future Energy Summit in Abu Dhabi unified on saying 'yes' to fight global climate change, but the fight doesn't have to be ugly or even comfort restricting.

The fight is all about community living, returning to the good old days and the good old cities, which functioned on interaction and interconnection, and in the words of Lord Richard Rogers, "beauty and function combined is one of the great drives of sustainability."

A superhero among urban planners and designers, Lord Rogers is a British architect, who has in his portfolio iconic buildings such as the Pompidou Centre in Paris, the Millennium Dome, the Lloyds Bank in London and the terminal four of Madrid Airport. His message to Abu Dhabi? Build a city that everyone can enjoy. "There is a direct link between social inclusion and a beautiful environment. If you live in a slum, life will be very difficult and it will brutalise you," said Lord Rogers. With population growth expected to reach 80 per cent by 2050, and the threat of climate change, which may lead to death, poverty, migration and wars, future urban planning must be sustainable. One element of sustainability that Lord Rogers emphasised on was public transport. Individual cars are not just big polluters and "infesters" of carbon emissions, but they also slow down the economy, as people get stuck and waste hours in heavy traffic.

"In Mexico City the congestion is bringing the traffic to a standstill and this will happen in Abu Dhabi too if the public transport is not developed," he warned. Gerald Evenden, also an architect and senior partner at Fosters and Partners in UK, could not agree more.

"When cars dominate, people become second," he said.

"Even well designed, electric cars will create congestion."

For Evenden, who is involved in the urban design of Masdar city, the cities of the future look more like the cities of the past. This means that the city must be built, sustainably, for a community, not a bunch of individuals, with easy access to public transport, pedestrian walkways and attractive public spaces.

"When designing sustainable buildings, two big elements must be considered the orientation and the shading of buildings," added Evenden.

For Masdar, he proposed two such types of buildings a high rise structure that absorbs light and disperse it indoors to create evermore pleasant spaces for people, and low buildings, ideal for homes, with lots of shading that keep them cool and reduce energy consumption. For the award-winning architect, author and professor of architectural engineering, Susan Roaf, who has conducted a lot of research and studies in the Middle East, this is not good enough.

Back in the 60s, western travellers coming to the Gulf used to say that the best way to cool off in summer days was to hide in mountain caves and beat the drum to scare off the heat.

Anecdotes apart, Roaf pointed out that back then, people's houses here were built in such a way that it kept them cool enough. "Leed buildings do not save energy, they are just more efficient consumers of air conditioning," she said.

Leed certified buildings are supposed to use resources more efficiently when compared to conventional buildings, but they concentrate primarily on the efficient use of fossil fuels, rather than sustainable alternative energy sources.

Civil Justice Centre - Manchester 301 Chapel Steet - Salford, Manchester

Along the National Mall in Washington, D.C., memorials honor the service of Americans in wartime, but the site’s newest addition will be one that fosters conflict resolution and peace. The 150,000-sq-ft permanent headquarters for the U.S. Institute of Peace, being built at the mall’s northwest corner near the Lincoln Memorial and the Theodore Roosevelt Bridge over the Potomac river, will greet visitors with a dramatic new structure that its designers say both respects the context of its historic surroundings and offers a strikingly modern contrast.

Photo: Clark Construction, By Bill Fitz-Patrick

The New York City office of Moshe Safdie and Associates, Somerville, Mass., designed the base of the five-story building, which is clad in precast panels to blend with its neoclassical neighbors and features a sweeping white glass roof intended to make a strong statement of the institute’s mission. Designed as three buildings connected with glass-enclosed atriums, the structure is topped with two large-span undulating roofs, including one that evokes the image of a white dove of peace in flight. “We see it as a gateway to the city from the Roosevelt bridge,” says Paul Gross, Safdie principal in charge of the project. “It respects the vocabulary of the National Mall and offers a symbolic gesture to the city.” The $108-million project is funded by public and private monies.

Bringing this visual statement to reality created significant challenges for Safdie’s design team and construction crews, led by Clark Construction Group, Bethesda, Md. German firm Seele, LP, was added to the team in late 2006 to assist design and installation of the steel-frame and glass-panel roof system. Using building information modeling with Autodesk Revit and Rhino, designers devised two grid-shell systems that would be built using preassembled pieces of roughly 400 sq ft each in surface area. The south roof has a total surface area of 12,000 sq ft and spans 80 ft between buildings. The north roof has 7,500 sq ft of surface area and a 55-ft span. Project engineer is U.K-based Buro Happold.

A framework of 4-in. by 8-in. hollow steel beams holds 1,500 triple-layered glass panels, the majority of which measure 4 ft by 4 ft, except for custom-sized pieces along the edges. Each panel is fritted on the exterior to give it a white appearance at all times during the day. A white translucent membrane along the interior side of the panels gives it a white glow when illuminated from inside at night.

Clark broke ground on the project in March 2008 and roof installation began in June 2009. Because the roofs would span multiple structures and be exposed to winds blowing off the Potomac, structural analysis was a critical element of the complex design. To minimize loads on the concrete-structure buildings, designers opted for a mix of sliding and spring connectors that would allow for up to 2 in. of expansion.

Portions of the roof also cascade off the edges. Along the south elevation facing the National Mall, one “wing” of the roof extends 40 ft away from the building. Three 35-ft-long steel props fan out from a horizontal structural beam along the facade and meet the roof near the middle of the cantilever, leaving the tip of the roof untouched.

“Those moving connections were the most challenging part of the design,” says Mark Goodwin, project executive with Clark Construction. “Once you allow the facade to move a few inches, then you are dealing with tie-ins to other materials such as a metal roof to the north, a PVC membrane along the roof and fixed metal flashings above it. You need to create expansion joint details to allow this structure to move significantly compared to the building.”

Since the roof is going up in vast atrium spaces, a complex scaffold system had to be designed to not only fill the void between the buildings, but also be precisely tiered to match up with the roof curvatures. The five-story, 20,000-sq-ft horizontal scaffold is fully loaded down to slab-on-grade at the parking level below the main floor. Reshoring was added in the garages to support the scaffold above. After several months of design, the scaffold took nearly six weeks to assemble.

To build the roof, sections of the shell were preassembled on the ground using mostly bolted connections to minimize welding in the field. Each piece was then picked up and placed with a tower crane. Once the entire shell is set, the scaffold is designed to allow workers to stand in each frame and receive each 200-lb glass panel as it is individually picked and placed by the tower crane. Placement of the first glass panels began in mid-October and is scheduled to finish next month. Substantial completion for the entire project is scheduled for October 2010.

As panels move into place, the signature white dove is beginning to reveal itself to city residents, commuters and throngs of tourists. “When it first came out of the ground, it looked like your typical Washington building,” says John Stranix, owner’s representative for the institute. “Now that the roof has started going up, people are taking notice. This is going to be a very important addition to the mall.”

Via archrecod

By Joann Gonchar, AIA via archrecord

“Transformable design” is the term that Chuck Hoberman uses to describe the focus of his multidisciplinary practice, Hoberman Associates. The 19-year-old New York City-based firm fuses sculpture, engineering, and product design to create objects with the ability to change size and shape. It is perhaps best known for the Hoberman Sphere, which relies on a series of scissor-like joints to collapse from an open polyhedron to a tightly packed sphere. It has been fabricated in many sizes, all the way from a palm-sized toy to a giant sculpture found at the Liberty Science Museum in Jersey City. But Hoberman’s oeuvre also includes retractable domes, medical instruments, and a stage for the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics.

The firm is also applying its expertise with kinetic objects to buildings in order to create automated and responsive enclosures that can provide shading or ventilation. Facades are ripe for such adaptive components, according to Hoberman. “The envelope plays the single largest role in building performance,” he says. “Not only in relationship to energy consumption, but also with regard to occupant comfort.”

Hoberman, who has envelope projects under way with Foster + Partners and Kohn Pederson Fox, among others, completed his first building with an adaptive skin in October—a mixed-use tower on Tokyo’s Ginza. The 15-story structure, designed by Japanese architecture firms Nikken Sekkei and Yasuda Atelier, houses a showroom for cosmetics company POLA on the lower floors and commercial office space on the upper levels. Within the 3-foot-deep cavity of its street-facing double-skin facade, 185 polycarbonate operable shutters shield the interiors behind the all-glass southeast elevation from direct sunlight. Photo sensors and a building management system control the translucent shading devices, helping cut heat gain by as much as 10 percent, says Hoberman. At night, the shutters move in concert with a colorful lighting scheme.

To further the development of responsive facades, Hoberman’s firm has formed a 50/50 joint venture with global engineering consultancy Buro Happold. The two companies have a long history of working together on transformable structures, including a rapidly deployable shelter for Johnson Outdoors and an expanding elliptical video screen for band U2. But the new Hoberman-Happold entity, named the Adaptive Building Initiative (ABI), differs from these previous collaborations. Instead of providing services on a project-by-project basis, ABI will focus on longer-term technology development with the ultimate goal of creating unitized, dynamic envelope assemblies. The joint venture is working to form partnerships with fabricators and manufacturers so that it can “deliver not only design and engineering, but complete adaptive systems,” says Hoberman. The ABI partners hope to make such systems commercially available within three to five years.

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Mile High Illinois

Frank Lloyd Wright
1956

Frank Lloyd Wright intended his Mile High Illinois skyscraper to be the focal point of Broadacre City, the theoretical city, he began planning in the 1920s. Because the Broadacre project was an exploration of horizontal space, a one-mile-high skyscraper might at first seem out of place—but by the 1950s Wright had decided that some cities were “incorrigible,” and that even Broadacre City could use a tall building as a cultural and social hub. The foundation of Wright’s building was a massive column, shaped like an inverted tripod, sunk deeply into the ground. This supported a slender, tapering tower with cantilevered floors. In keeping with his belief that architecture ought to be organic, Wright likened this system to a tree trunk with branches. He planned to use gold-tinted metal on the facade to highlight angular surfaces along balconies and parapets and specified Plexiglas for window glazing. Inside the building, mechanical systems were to be housed inside hollow cantilevered beams. To reach the building’s upper floors, Wright proposed atomic-powered elevators that could carry 100 people.


Then came Burj Dubai (Dubai Tower) a building that made history in hard times

"We're going to need a new word. The Burj Dubai doesn't scrape the sky; it pierces it, like a slender silver needle, half a mile high. It's only because Dubai never has any clouds that we can even see the tower's top. And, judging by the images released so far, the view is more like looking out of a plane than a building. It has made reality a little less real.
The facts and figures about the tower are equally surreal – like the one about how it could be eight degrees cooler at the top than at the bottom, or the one about how you could watch the sunset at the bottom, then take a lift up to the top and watch it all over again. It's a new order of tallness, even compared to its nearest rival, Taiwan's Taipei 101, which it exceeds by more than 300 metres." The Guardian

Concrete jungle ... the view from the 124th floor of the Burj Dubai. Photograph: Imre Solt/Barcroft Media

In environmental terms, the Burj Dubai is way too tall to justify itself, but there is at least some structural efficiency to the form. Its Y-shaped plan – three wings extending from a central core, like the roots of a tree – "confuses the wind", in the architects' words, while the core stops the wings from twisting (which would give top-floor occupants nausea). For super-tall buildings – and surely there will be more, one day – this "buttressed core" design is likely to become the prevailing form.

More worrying than the tower itself, however, is what's around it. In 1956, Frank Lloyd Wright unveiled a scheme for an elegantly preposterous mile-high skyscraper for Chicago, safe in the knowledge that he'd never have to figure out how to build it. It was undoubtedly an influence on the Burj Dubai. It even had a similar triangular structure. But Wright's intentions with his mile-high skyscraper were to create a concentrated human habitat, the better to halt Chicago's unstoppable urban sprawl, and free up ground space for parks, nature and leisure.

The Burj Dubai, by contrast, has become the tentpole for several more acres of anonymous, soulless, energy-hungry cityscape. You can apparently see for 60 miles from the top, but when you look down, the immediate landscape is the same schematic real-estate tat you see everywhere else in Dubai: vast shopping malls, bland office towers, sprawling residential developments semi-themed to resemble "traditional" Arabian villages, outsized ornamental fountains. The Burj Dubai might be a triumph vertically, but what about the horizontal?