Magazine

Rem Koolhaas and the Office for Metropolitan Architecture have unveiled their redesign of Berlin's historic Kaufhaus des Westens (KaDeWe), which makes the large department store comprehensible by breaking it into four quadrants, each with its own atrium. John Hill, Katinka Corts

New York's Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) has unveiled its latest design for the transformation of McKim, Mead & White's James A. Farley Post Office into the Daniel Patrick Moynihan Train Hall across the street from Penn Station. John Hill

Less than a year after Bjarke Ingels's firm redesigned Two World Trade Center for 21st Century Fox and News Corp, the companies have decided to remain in Midtown Manhattan until 2025. John Hill

The American Institute of Architects (AIA) has announced the recipients of the 2016 Institute Honor Awards, 18 projects from approximately 500 submissions in three categories: architecture, interior architecture, and regional and urban design. John Hill

The motto of Expo 2015 in Milan, "Feeding the Planet, Energy for Life," was translated in the French pavilion into a built landscape designed by Parisian architecture firm XTU, with lighting design by Bonn's Licht Kunst Licht. John Hill, Thomas Geuder

David Maisel's series of photographs, The Fall, now on display at Haines Gallery in San Francisco, explores from above the landscape between Toledo and Madrid, Spain, to reveal the not-so-subtle interactions between humans and nature. John Hill

According to the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH, the official international arbiter of skyscraper heights), the total number of "supertall" skyscrapers reaches 100 with the completion of Rafael Viñoly's 432 Park Avenue in Midtown Manhattan. John Hill

The Hyatt Foundation has announced that Alejandro Aravena of Chile has been selected as the 2016 Laureate of the Pritzker Architecture Prize.  John Hill

A team consisting of Robbrecht en Daem, Dierendonckblancke Architecten, VK and Arup, in collaboration with Bureau Bas Smets, Muller Van Severen and Grontmij, has been selected to design the new media building for VRT, the Flemish Radio and Television Broadcasting Company in Brussels. John Hill

Architect Steven Holl and choreographer Jessica Lang collaborated last year on Tesseracts of Time, which premiered in November at the Harris Theater for Music and Dance in Chicago. Watch the two discuss their collaboration, and watch excerpts from the first performance. John Hill

On Sunday, the exhibition Global Citizen: The Architecture of Moshe Safdie, closed at the National Academy Museum in New York. World-Architects eMagazine Editor in Chief John Hill visited the exhibition on the 2015 AIA Gold Medal winner and filed this report. John Hill

Is this a ceramic tile pattern? A painting? A quilt? No, it's a "public domain remix" of a small fraction of the 187,000 items the New York Public Library has made available for high-resolution download. John Hill

Governor Andrew Cuomo announced a $22 billion plan to modernize transportation infrastructure throughout New York state, with $3 billion going toward a renovated Penn Station, the busiest – and considered the worst – train station in New York City. John Hill

Munich's HENN has won first prize in a competition to design a nearly 200-meter-tall office tower for software company Kingdee in Shenzhen, China. John Hill

Laurent Kronental's Souvenir d'un Futur, which documents senior citizens living in the "Grands Ensembles" around Paris – some of them designed by Ricardo Bofill in the 1980s – earned the photographer a 2015 Emerging Talent Award (Bourse de Talent) from the... John Hill

In 2013 and 2014, the Building of the Week on American-Architects took a state-by-state look at American architecture, but last year we went overseas to see how US architects design for other countries – and the inverse, to see how foreign architects build in North America. Now it's... John Hill

The campus of the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) is known best for SANAA's Rolex Learning Center built in 2010. Dominique Perrault has just completed an adjacent building whose facade dissolves through the use of a custom, movable aluminum mesh. John Hill, Thomas Geuder

The Louisiana Museum of Art profiles Copenhagen's Henning Larsen Architects in "Building Ambitions for Soceity," a twenty-minute film from the Louisiana Channel. John Hill

One week after revealing the two finalists in the second design competition for the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Stadium, the Japan Sports Council has selected the winner, a wood and steel structure designed by Japanese architect Kengo Kuma. John Hill

Today the Barack Obama Foundation issued RFPs (Requests for Proposal) to seven potential architects to design the future Obama Presidential Center (OPC) on Chicago's South Side. John Hill

For our last Insight feature of 2015, World-Architects looks back – month-by-month, and week-by-week – at some of the headlines, projects, competitions, features and products of the last year, while we glance ahead to some projects slated for completion in 2016. John Hill

The Japan Sports Council has unveiled two competing designs for the 2019 Rugby Cup and the 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo, following the shelving of Zaha Hadid's competition-winning design earlier this year. John Hill

Lincoln Center and New York Philharmonic have announced that Heatherwick Studio and Diamond Schmitt Architects have been selected to redesign David Geffen Hall, the home of the Philharmonic and the largest concert hall in the Lincoln Center complex. John Hill

To celebrate the holiday season, the Lab at Rockwell Group has created "Luminaries," an interactive light installation amongst the palm trees inside the winter garden at Brookfield Place, the former World Financial Place in Lower Manhattan. John Hill

Following mentorships by Japan's Kazuyo Sejima and Switzerland's Peter Zumthor, British architect David Chipperfield has been selected as the architecture mentor for 2015-16 in the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative. John Hill

Assemble, the architecture and design collective from London, has won the Tate's prestigious Turner Prize, beating out three finalists with a community-based project based in the Granby Four Streets area of Toxteth, Liverpool. John Hill

The Yale School of Architecture (YSoA) is celebrating its centennial and the tenure of outgoing Dean Robert A.M. Stern with the exhibition "Pedagogy and Place: Celebrating 100 Years of Architecture Education at Yale" that just opened inside Rudolph Hall. John Hill

The Museum of Modern Art has selected five finalists for its annual Young Architects Program at its MoMA PS1 outpost in Long Island City, Queens, and it has appointed Sean Anderson as Associate Curator, Department of Architecture and Design. John Hill

The American Institute of Architects has named the influential Postmodern architects from Philadelphia the 2016 recipients of the AIA Gold Medal, the first duo to receive the honor since the AIA allowed collaborations two years ago. John Hill

Schmidt Hammer Lassen Architects has won the international competition to design an 87,000 m2 masterplan in the area of Skøyen in central Oslo; they contend the scheme "will become a unifying urban development icon." John Hill

Strelka KB has announced a shortlist of six design teams that will take part in the second phase of the the international architectural competition for the new Nanoscience and Nanotechnology Center at Tel Aviv University. John Hill

Last week Wandsworth Council announced that the team led by Denmark's Bystrup Architecture Design and Engineering won the two-stage competition for the Nine Elms to Pimlico cycling and pedestrian bridge crossing the Thames in London. John Hill

The Louisiana Channel, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, visits Peter Zumthor at his studio in Haldenstein, Switzerland to present an illuminating, one-hour-long biographical video on the Pritzker Prize-winning architect. John Hill

After tying with Snøhetta in April of this year in the restricted international competition for the New National Gallery–Ludwig Museum in Budapest's 200-year-old City Park, SANAA has been selected to design the museum. John Hill

Strasbourg's Urbane Kultur has renovated one of France's "1,000 Pools" from 40 years ago, a distinctive dome set in the townscape. The dark exterior gives way to a light and bright interior covered partially with HI-MACS® acrylic stone. John Hill

The BigMat Group, distributors of construction materials, has announced the winners of the second BigMat ’15 International Architecture Award, with the Grand Prize going to Alberto Campo Baeza's office building in Zamora, Spain. John Hill