Play Me, a video exploring patterns in children’s play across cultures, was produced in 1997 by Helena Bullivant, the film producer and Director of Fierce Bird Films for the highly successful international touring exhibition Kid size: The Material World of Childhood for Vitra Design Museum, Germany, co-curated by her sister Lucy Bullivant, curator, author and founder of Urbanista.org, and Jutta Oldiges, curator at Vitra Design Museum, which toured globally for a phenomenal eight year stint. Clearly, such a unique, cross-cultural, anthropological-design historical focus had rarely been applied to this absorbing, seminal topic affecting everybody around the world.

Architecture has a massive capacity for cultural agency, and yet in the last few decades it has only marginally addressed the issue of its social relevance. Until recently, global conflicts, political and ecological migration, overpopulation and the explosive formation of slums certainly did not play a central role in the research, planning and training in

In an endeavour inspired by the metabolic processes of wine production, Bodega, Enological Metabolism, one of the many Architectural Association Visiting Schools for architects and architectural students* to be staged this summer will be held in Barcelona from 12-26 July in collaboration with the ETSAB (Escola Tècnica Superior d’Arquitectura de Barcelona) and the Facultat d’Enologia

HOPE City, a £6.6 billion IT hub at Dunkonaa, a suburb of Accra, the capital of Ghana, intended to foster technological growth and attract firms in the global ICT sector to the West African country was launched earlier in March by Ghanaian President John Mahama. The Italian architectural practice OBR (Open Building Research), founded in

The Design Museum will present one of its most speculative design exhibitions to date from 1 May (to 26 August 2013), by leading avant-garde designers and educators Dunne and Raby. United Micro Kingdoms: A Design Fiction explores multiple perspectives on a fictional UK, with the country devolved into four self-contained counties or ‘micro-kingdoms’ which are

The first International Award for Public Art (IAPA) has been awarded to Tiuna el Fuerte Cultural Park, Caracas,Venezuela, a self-initiated project by Alejandro Haiek Coll, Eleanna Cadalso and Michelle Sánchez de León of the architects collective Lab.Pro.Fab (Venezuela). By occupying underused land within the city of Caracas, the project addresses the city’s lack of green space and fulfils

The third Lisbon Architecture Triennale (12 September-15 December 2013) has announced the participants in its programme. The event, entitled Close, Closer, is being prepared with a reduced budget this year due to the economic crisis, and will, according to José Mateus, the Triennale President, address ‘the complex issues posed by the crisis that plagues us.’

The award-winning Paris and Basel-based architecture and urban design practice AWP led by Marc Armengaud, Matthias Armengaud and Alessandra Cianchetta has won the competition for the post-industrial redevelopment of Orée de Crissier municipality to the west of Lausanne in Switzerland. The scheme is for the urban design of a 68,000m2 site with 390 housing units,

Toyo Ito, the 71 year old architect whose architectural practice is based in Tokyo, Japan, will be the recipient of the 2013 Pritzker Architecture Prize, it was announced today by Thomas J. Pritzker, chairman of The Hyatt Foundation which sponsors the prize. The Pritzker Prize honours annually a living architect whose built work demonstrates a

On 1 Feb 2013, the Organizing Committee of Shenzhen Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture announced its decisions concerning the curatorial positions for the 5th UABB*Shenzhen (Urbanism/Architecture Bi-City Biennale), which will open in Shekou, Shenzhen, on Friday 6 December 2013. It is the latest edition of the Shenzhen & Hong Kong Bi-city Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture founded in 2005