Year in Architecture 2015

Week 1: The Daily News was on vacation, hungover from New Year's celebrations.
Week 2: The AIA announced its Honor Awards; Bjarke Ingels gave "advice to the young"; Christo's "Over the River" surmounted a legal impediment.
Week 3: The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston unveiled its expansion designed by Steven Holl; Jean Nouvel protested the Philharmonie opening in Paris.
Week 4: Antoni Gaudï's unbuilt Our Lady of the Angels found a future home in Chile; Snøhetta selected to design Le Monde headquarters in Paris; Architecture for Humanity closed; Zaha Hadid and critic Martin Filler settled in a lawsuit over the latter's comments in a book review. 
Week 5: The Storefront for Art and Architecture got shrinkwrapped; Aaron Betsky named dean of Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture; the Pompidou and Smithsonian announced new venues; Buildings of the Year announced.

Selected Insight: Learning from BAU Blog
Selected Product: Vipp's "PanoramAH!" View

Week 6: Ten Frank Lloyd Wright buildings nominated for UNESCO status; Frank Gehry's UTS building opened in Sydney; MoMA selected Andrés Jaque for PS1 installation; Morphosis chosen for controversial hotel in Vals, Switzerland.
Week 7: Brian MacKay-Lyons won the RAIC Gold Medal; 40 projects shortlisted for the EU Mies Prize; architect Jon Jerde died; we rounded up a bunch of monographs.
Week 8: Atelier Bow-Wow, with students and faculty at Rice, completed "Learning from Houston"; London's Design Museum announced nominated Designs of the Year; we looked at some winners of the 2015 Wood Design Awards. 
Week 9: Lifetime Achievement Award given to LA architect Lawrence Scarpa; 5 finalists announced for EU Mies Prize; Google hired Bjarke Ingels and Thomas Heatherwick for their new headquarters.

Selected Insight: Exhibition Review: HOT TO COLD
Selected Product: Zahner Clads a Morphosis School in Los Angeles

Week 10: We visited ikon.5 architects' office in Princeton, New Jersey; a Frank Gehry house in Minnesota that moved once had to move again; Ennead Architects won a competition for a planetarium in Shanghai; they tried, but Paul Rudolph's Orange County Government Center was not saved.
Week 11: Frei Otto named the Pritzker Architecture Prize recipient one day after his death; AIANY announced its Design Awards; we caught up with Toyo Ito's award-winning Home-for-All program; James Corner selected to design Miami's "Underline"; postmodern architect Michael Graves died at the age of 80; David Chipperfield selected to design a new wing for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Week 12: We looked at the Supertall phenomenon; World-Architects hosted tours at ISH 2015; the 2014 Serpentine Gallery Pavilion moved to Somerset.
Week 13: We got a sneak peek of the Latin America in Construction exhibition at MoMA; Morphosis unveiled plans for an 82-story tower next to Peter Zumthor's Therme Vals; Zumthor simplified his design for the LACMA expansion; the Glasgow School of Art selected Page\Park to restore Charles Rennie Mackintosh's fire-damaged masterpiece.

Selected Insight: Skeletons, Soap Bubbles and Spider Webs​
Selected Product: The Coded Facade

Week 14: Winners of the eVolo 2015 Skyscraper Competition were announced; a team led by Sou Fujimoto won a competition for a learning center in Paris-Saclay.
Week 15: We found a vase that resembled Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim; Facebook revealed plans for two more Gehry buildings; Amanda Levete selected to design second MPavilion in Melbourne; the new Australian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale was unveiled.
Week 16: Patrik Schumacher took to Facebook for a one of his rants; Studio Gang unveiled Wanda Vista Tower in Chicago; SANAA and Snøhetta tied in Budapest museum competition.
Week 17: Jean Nouvel lost a court case over changes to his design of the Philharmonie in Paris; winners of the 4th Global Holcim Awards were announced; we watched a video of the elevator ride to the top of One World Trade Center; we visited the new Whitney designed by Renzo Piano.
Week 18: Six finalists named in the Guggenheim Helsinki competition; we took a year-by-year look at recent Chicago architecture; news broke that Bjarke Ingels would replace Norman Foster in designing 2WTC.

Selected Insight: A Short Survey of Women in Architecture​
Selected Product: Dekton's 'Deep Words Light'

Week 19: Expo Milano 2015 opened on the first day of May under the theme "Feeding the Planet, Energy for Life"; the Cooper Hewitt announced the winners of its 2015 National Design Awards; Barozzi / Veiga's Szczecin Philharmonic Hall won the European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture – Mies van der Rohe Award 2015; ARQUITECTURA-G won the EU Mies Emerging Architect Prize with its Luz House in Spain.
Week 20: We dissected the controversy around London's Garden Bridge; MVRDV won a competition to to turn an old highway in Seoul into a sky garden; Diller Scofidio + Renfro's design for the U.S. Olympic Museum unveiled. 
Week 21: Chile's Elemental won a Design of the Year for its UC Innovation Center - Anacleto Angelini; FAT completed its last building, a collaboration with artist Grayson Perry; Frank Gehry's Winton House sold for $905,000 – minus moving expenses.
Week 22: The Aga Khan Park in Toronto opened; SANAA won the Art Gallery of New South Wales' Sydney Modern Project​; Grüntuch Ernst won the Porsche Tower Competition in Frankfurt.

Selected Insight: Studio Visit: Ross Barney Architects​
Selected Product: Building with Waste

Week 23: Google moved forward with its piecemeal expansion designed by Thomas Heatherwick and Bjarke Ingels; five teams were shortlisted for the transformation of a 25km-long rail corridor in Singapore; Coop Himmelb(l)au's House of Music opened.
Week 24: Winning design of Perth footbridge unveiled; we highlighted some of the installations and exhibitions from the month-long London Festival of Architecture; BIG - Bjarke Ingels Group's design for 2 World Trade Center was unveiled; the Office of James Burnett was named ASLA Firm of the Year.
Week 25: Charles Correa, considered India's greatest architect, died at 84; Cornell's NYC Tech campus broke ground on Roosevelt Island; the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion opened in Kensington Gardens.
Week 26: The winner of the Guggenheim Helsinki competition was announced; David Chipperfield won a "house of the year" award for the Fayland House; CTBUH named the best tall buildings of 2015; architect Diébédo Francis Kéré installed a Camper pop-up store within Vitra's Buckminster Fuller Dome.

Selected Insight: Designing with Solid Wood
Selected Product: Lighting the S-Bahn

Week 27: Herzog & de Meuron's controversial "Triangle Tower" approved in Paris; NADAAA's Nader Tehrani named Dean of the Cooper Union in New York; "The Beach" opened inside the National Building Museum in Washington, DC.
Week 28: David Adjaye's design for the Studio Museum in Harlem unveiled; we recapped some of our favorite installations from FAV in Montpellier and La Grande Motte; the International Architecture Awards were announced; PSA turned 20!
Week 29: Amanda Levete's MPavilion design unveiled; the shortlist for RIBA's prestigious Stirling Prize was announced; Zaha Hadid's competition-winning design for the Tokyo Olympics Stadium shelved due to rising costs; Alejandro Aravena named the director of the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale.
Week 30: Robert Venturi's iconic Vanna Venturi House hit the market; Zaha Hadid's Messner Mountain Museum opened in South Tyrol, Italy; WOHA won CTBUH's Urban Habitat Award for PARKROYAL on Pickering.
Week 31: Snøhetta won a competition for a cable car station in South Tyrol, Italy (not too far from Hadid's museum).

Selected Insight: Thomas Heatherwick's 'Provocations'​
Selected Product: A Facade of Colorful Curtains

Week 32: The winner of the Lakefront Kiosk Competition announced as part of the Chicago Architecture Biennial; Santiago Calatrava's Turning Torso won CTBUH's 10-year award
Week 33: Zaha Hadid Architects won the competition for bridge in Taiwan; news spread of a Chinese copycat of Anish Kapoor's "Cloud Gate."
Week 34: Finalists in WWI memorial competition in DC announced; Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron won the 2015 RIBA Jencks Prize; EM2N won Basel Museum/Archive competition; Zaha Hadid released a 30-minute video on their former Tokyo Olympic Stadium.
Week 35: The Obamas issued an RFQ for their future presidential library in Chicago; in turn, we looked at a selection of recent libraries, presidential and otherwise.

Selected Insight: Architecture as Subject for Art​
Selected Product: Covering 'The Blue Whale'

Week 36: Venice Biennale director Alejandro Aravena defines "Reporting from the Front" as the theme of the 2016 exhibition; Northerly Island – the former Miegs Field airport in Chicago – opened to the public; finalists were named for the second Finlandia Prize.
Week 37: FC Barcelona named the finalists for its new stadium; Dominique Perrault won the Praemium Imperiale.
Week 38: The Broad museum in Los Angeles, designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, opened to the public; Mecanoo was selected to renovate two New York public libraries, including the main library that Norman Foster was hired to transform in 2014; MAD refined its design for the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Chicago.
Week 39: Zaha Hadid, after losing the Tokyo Olympic Stadium commission, withdrew from the second competition; David Adjaye's design for the Linda Pace Foundation in Texas was unveiled; the shortlist for the new U.S. Embassy in Brasila was announced.
Week 40: Our Catalan-Architects platform launched; Zaha Hadid won the RIBA Royal Gold Medal; finalists were named for the Canadian Canoe Museum in Ontario; New York architect Deborah Berke was named the new dean of the Yale School of Architecture.

Selected Insight: First Look: McMurtry Building for the Department of Art & Art History​
Selected Product: Ryerson's New Prismatic Gem

Week 41: Herzog & de Meuron's design of the Vancouver Art Gallery was unveiled; RUF (Rural Urban Framework) won the 2015 Curry Stone Design Prize; the inaugural Chicago Architecture Biennial opened and World-Architects filed some reports; the MPavilion opened in Melbourne. 
Week 42: SANAA's River Building at Grace Farms in New Canaan, Connecticut opened to the public; Santiago Calatrava won the 2015 European Prize for Architecture (W-A attended the award ceremony in November); photographer Hilla Becher died at 81;  Allford Hall Monaghan Morris won the 2015 RIBA Stirling Prize for Burntwood School.
Week 43: Winners of the 2015 LEAF Awards were announced; construction of Antoni Gaudí's Sagrada Familia reached a milestone; 
Week 44: Winners of the second Vectorworks Design Scholarships were announced; we rounded up some monographs on World-Architects member firms; Fendi moved into a renovated Fascist-era building in Rome's EUR district; Chicago architect Carol Ross Barney won a lifetime achievement award; MAD's design for the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art was approved. 

Selected Insight: 'The State of the Art of Architecture' at the Chicago Architecture Biennial​
Selected Product: Light Emitting Concrete in Abu Dhabi

Week 45: Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners won a competition to design the new Terminal 3 building at Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport; Studio Gang's expansion plans for New York's American Museum of Natural History were unveiled; the Interlace in Singapore was named the World Building of the Year at WAF.
Week 46: ETH Department of Architecture's contribution to Manifesta, to be held in Zürich in 2016, was unveiled; Collective LOK won the 2016 Times Square Valentine Heart competition.
Week 47: Stefano Boeri's Bosco Verticale in Milan was named the 2015 Best Tall Building Worldwide by CTBUH; Steven Holl's Copenhagen "Gate" project (finally) received approval, seven years after he won the competition; RCR and Campo Baeza were among the winners of the Spanish International Architecture Prizes; shortlist for the new Aarhus School of Architecture was announced; Brooklyn's REX was selected to design the performing arts center at the World Trade Center (originally Frank Gehry was slated to design it).
Week 48: BIG - Bjarke Ingels Group's first building along New York's High Line was unveiled; winners of the 27th Piranesi Awards were announced in Slovenia; BigMat '15 International Architecture Awards were announced; SANAA was selected in the two-way tie in Hungary (see April); the winner of the Nine Elms to Pimlico bridge competition was announced.

Selected Insight: World Architecture Festival (WAF) Winners
Selected Product: Reclaimed Timber in the World Interior of the Year

Week 49: Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi won the 2016 AIA Gold Medal; the Museum of Modern Art in New York named the finalists in next year's Young Architects Program at MoMA PS1 and a new associate curator in architecture and design.
Week 50: "Pedagogy and Place" opened at the Yale School of Architecture; Assemble, an architecture and design collective, won the Tate's prestigious Turner Prize; David Chipperfield was named the next Rolex architecture mentor; Heatherwick Studio and Diamond Schmitt Architects were selected to redesign David Geffen Hall at New York's Lincoln Center.
Week 51: The Daily News goes on holiday break; see you in 2016!

Selected Insight: Ulf Meyer's two-part on the state of architecture in Germany: "Architecture of a Thousand Pinpricks" and "Back to the Future?"​
Selected Product: HI-MACS Inside Renovated 'Tournesol' Swimming Pool

Here are a dozen notable projects that are expected to be completed and open next year, documented with construction photos. Of course, things have a way of changing in architecture and construction, so please don't be upset with us if these buildings aren't finished by the end of 2016!