As May closes and we enter June, we reflect on the articles that made headlines this month. The "Top 10" list below is an even mix of news, awards and project articles, all of which came in fast and aplenty throughout May.
Click through to see what you’ve missed or for a refresher on what the design and construction industry found most pressing this month.
The University of Technology Sydney continues its enthusiastic development of its City Campus at Broadway, lodging its sixth major Development Application in as many years for a new building and upgraded podium for the infamous UTS Tower. It has been designed by Francis-Jones Morehen Thorp with Lacoste+Stevenson I Daryl Jackson Robin Dyke.
Seventy buildings of all shapes and sizes have been shortlisted for the 2016 Victorian Architecture Awards ahead of the awards ceremony in late June. Nearly 130 of the 198 entries were trimmed by the 45-strong jury after an intensive schedule of site visits and presentations.
Quality economic, social, cultural and environmental outcomes are the key themes present among the projects shortlisted for the 2016 NSW Architecture Awards, announced 20 May. A total of 79 projects from a pool of more than 170 entries have been shortlisted, selected by a team of 19 jurors through a process of presentations and site visits.
Invisible House by Peter Stutchbury Architecture is among 30 projects in the running to win the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) first global architecture award, The RIBA International Prize.
From hundreds of entries, RIBA has announced a selection of 30 buildings based in 20 countries to be visited this summer in contention for the award.
A recent upgrade was to an ageing amenities building at Marks Park, between Sydney’s Tamarama and Bondi, was our top project article for May. In charge of the renovation was Sam Crawford Architects (SCA), the team behind a number of other freshly upgraded and new amenities buildings dotted around Sydney.
A new hybrid building under construction in Vancouver to house University of British Columbia students will become the world’s tallest timber tower when completed in 2017. Designed by Acton Ostry Architects with Architekten Hermann Kaufmann of Austria as tall wood advisors, the $51.5 million project will rise to a height of 53 metres to accommodate 404 students.
Australia’s first cross-laminated timber (CLT) manufacturing plant will be built in the Albury Wodonga region by mid-2017.
The facility will produce 60,000m3 of CLT each year and will be owned and operated by Xlam, a CLT company who’ve been manufacturing the building material at the their New Zealand-based plant for the past five years.
A team of RMIT University researchers has successfully demonstrated a more energy-efficient way to manufacture fired-clay bricks using cigarette butts. In doing so, the research team led by Dr Abbas Mohajerani has also found a solution for a significant global littering problem.
A recent research report prepared by the University of Technology Sydney for the NSW Architects Registration Board suggests the value of architectural services to the economy is structurally underreported by around $1 billion per year.
2016 Pritzker Prize laureate Alejandro Aravena has made four of his much-celebrated social housing designs open source and free to download.
Aravena, who is also the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale creative director, has given the public domain free access to the lot layouts and divisions, plans, sections and elevations of four of his public housing designs to help counter the global housing shortage in a humane way.
