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Vision Zero is an initiative that started in Sweden in 1997 when the country began implementing a series of road safety measures to reach their goal of zero deaths from traffic accidents. As a result, the country managed to reduce the number of deaths to 3 people per 100 thousand inhabitants.

Since then the plan has been adopted by different cities and has inspired the creation of various organizations that are looking to make our streets a safer places. One of them being the Vision Zero Network that brings together traffic engineers, health professionals, local leaders, and policy makers.

This year, for the first time, the ArchDaily Building of the Year Awards have come to China. In tandem with our global search for the best projects published in the past year, our readers are currently voting to select the best Chinese projects over on our sister site ArchDaily China. So far, after 2 weeks of nominations and over 5,000 votes, the readers of ArchDaily China have narrowed down more than 300 projects from mainland China and Hong Kong to just 10 finalists. Read on to see the projects competing for the top prize, and make sure to vote for your favorites up until March 6th!

While large-scale 3D printing for architecture continues to be a busy area of research, France-based company XtreeE has been using 3D printed concrete in projects since 2015. Their latest creation is an organic truss-style support structure for a preschool playground in Aix-en-Provence.

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The 2017 Pritzker Architecture Prize will be announced on Wednesday, March 1st at 10am EST. Past Laureates include a rostra of architecture's most influential names, including Philip Johnson, Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas, Oscar Niemeyer, Norman Foster, Peter Zumthor, Toyo Ito and, most recently, Alejandro Aravena (full list).

New renderings have been revealed of Studio Gang’s Solar Carve Tower, located at 40 10th Avenue along the High Line in New York City, as the project gets set to begin construction. Initially conceived by the architects in 2012, the tower was presented to New York’s Board of Standards and Appeals on four occasions before finally receiving planning approval in November 2015. In the new images, the building’s interiors and roof terrace are seen for the first time, as well as its relationship to the nearby Pier 55, the proposed park along the Hudson Waterfront designed by Heatherwick Studio.

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Eight “Winter Stations” have been installed along Toronto’s beachfront, injecting new life into the shoreline during the Canadian city’s winter months. Completed as a result of the annual Winter Stations design competition, the eight projects responded to this year’s theme of “Catalyst,” which sought installations that “open up the waterfront landscape and reinvent the space for visitors” while considering how materials may be repurposed or reused for future iterations.

Plans for 555 Howard, a mixed-use hotel and residential tower to be located in San Francisco’s Transbay neighborhood, have been revealed by the city’s Planning Department. Designed by Renzo Piano Building Workshop for developer Pacific Eagle, the 36-story tower would house 69 residential units and 255 hotel rooms, as well as a publicly-accessible open-air rooftop terrace. The project represents Piano’s second project in the city, following 2008’s California Academy of Sciences.

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Architecture and urban design firm, Farrells, in collaboration with AECOM, have won the competitive tender to design the Singapore terminus of the new Kuala Lumpur-Singapore High-Speed Rail.

Sited in Singapore’s “futuristic second Central Business District” of Jurong Lake, the design was conceived as a new civic landmark and a part of the district’s new master plan currently in development by the Urban Redevelopment Authority and a team of consultants led by KCAP Architects & Planners.

While the railway station’s platforms are located below ground, the design aims to create an above-ground focal point that will mark the station as a new international gateway to Singapore.

It is often said that architecture only makes projects more expensive; that architects only add a series of arbitrary and capricious complexities that could be avoided to lower costs, suggesting that the project could function exactly the same without them. Is this true in all cases? Although they may be more profitable economically, human beings don't seem to be happy inhabiting cold concrete boxes without receiving sunlight or a breeze every now and then, or in an unsafe neighborhood where there's no possibility to meet your friends and family outdoors. Quality in architecture is a value that sooner or later will deliver something in return.

Balance is key, and a good design will never be complete if it's not economically efficient. How do we achieve this ideal? We reviewed the design process for 'The Iceberg' in Aarhus, Denmark, a project that managed to convince the authorities and investors by proposing a high-impact and tight-budget design, which seeks to respond to the objective of guaranteeing the quality of life of its users and their neighbors.

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Australian firm deciBel(Architecture))) has released images of their proposed multi-purpose theater and cultural center in the Vietnamese capital of Hanoi. The Hanoi Lotus draws inspiration from Vietnam’s national flower, creating a city-defining piece of public architecture to place Hanoi and Vietnam on the global stage.

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Bee Breeders has announced the winners of its Archhive: Architecture in Virtual Reality competition, which asked participants to design a virtual exhibition gallery to showcase future Bee Breeders competition winners. In this virtual gallery, visitors would be able to “walk” around and explore the work of selected winners and guest contributors.

The three winners of Archhive: Architecture in Virtual Reality are:

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Urban Agency and Aarhus Arkitekterne have unveiled a proposal for the expansion of the MCH Messecenter in Herning, Denmark’s largest exhibition center. According to the architects, the intent was “to create a strategy that will make the complex a more attractive and coherent structure with a new focal point.”

To achieve this, the design converges two circulation routes at the building’s new point of entry, further complimented by usable art displays and foliage, including green walls. The circular form of the roof defines the event square, with ramps serving as outdoor seating and shelter from inclement weather.

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Woods Bagot’s Shenzhen Hazens Longgang Longteng Mixed-Use project has been rated by the Shenzhen Government as one of the city’s most important projects of 2016. Located in Shenzhen’s Longgang District, the 393,000 square meter site will feature 1,500,000 square meters of gross floor area subdivided into office space, retail space, a shopping mall, residential communities and facilities, and over 90,000 square meters of green and public space.

As a part of the design, the development will rejuvenate a river park area running through the existing site, with the northern bank becoming a commercial and leisure focal point, and the southern bank featuring a community of residential towers connected by retail podiums and green spaces.

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Nashville is set to receive its newest and tallest luxury landmark, in the form of the JW Marriott Hotel, designed by esteemed Miami firm Arquitectonica to be completed in 2018. Situated in the center of downtown, the 33-storey undulating tower will offer expansive views of the surrounding cityscape from a height of 386 feet; one of highest points in the city.

ArchDaily is continuing our partnership with The Architectural Review, bringing you short introductions to the themes of the magazine’s monthly editions. In this introduction to the December – January 2017 issue—the magazine's celebration of its 120th anniversary—Editor Christine Murray discusses the legacy that comes from more than a century being one of architecture's most respected magazines, and looks forward to the future of the publication. "Looking forward, we are committed to doing things differently – which, paradoxically, is what we’ve always done," she explains.

The archive of The Architectural Review is a great cabinet of curiosities – a cacophony of voices, styles, illustrations and photographs, Outrages and Delights, personalities and proclivities, polemics, failures and fetishes. In creating this anniversary edition celebrating 120 years of criticism, we wanted to capture the diversity and eccentricity of this ongoing architectural conversation. As such, the archive content is organized not chronologically, but in perennial themes that have echoed and evolved across the decades, from technology to education – forces that have shaped the profession.

A competition for a new social housing complex in Aarhus, Denmark, has been won by WE Architecture, in collaboration with local practice JWH Arkitekter and commissioned by Ringgaarden, a Danish housing organization.

Titled “Saltholmsgade”, the winning proposal is a reinterpretation of Aarhus’ historical housing typologies along Hjortensgade, creating modern and green communal spaces. The complex consists of 38 individual apartments, offering tenants views of the city through the inclusion of rooftop gardens.

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Construction on Kengo Kuma’s V&A Museum Dundee is well underway, with the structure’s inclined concrete walls already beginning to take shape. This new video produced by the V&A Museum shows the latest progress of the building, with commentary from several figures working on the project, including Kuma himself.

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From giant squids to sunken treasure, the ocean has a way of hiding secrets better than any other place on Earth – so why not hide your personal information down there too?

That scenario may soon be our reality, as Microsoft has unveiled that, for the past year and a half, they have been testing a prototype data center that is completely submerged underwater. Devised by Microsoft engineer Sean James, the theory argues that placing the massive server farms underwater could dramatically reduce both construction and cooling costs, as well as provide a reliable source of renewable energy and even improve their performance.

For nearly 100 years, the JL Hudson's Department Store in downtown Detroit stood as a mecca of shopping – the 25-story structure at one point holding the record for world’s tallest retail building. Then in 1983, following a downturn of the Detroit economy, the department store was closed. Its implosion followed in 1998. In the years since, the important site has laid mainly vacant, save for an underground parking structure inserted into the store’s former underground retail levels. But now, plans have been revealed to return the site to its former glory.

Announced yesterday by Detroit-based development group Bedrock, the site is set to receive a brand new 1.2 million-square-foot development designed by SHoP Architects and consisting of a nine-story retail podium and a 52-story, 734-foot tower that would claim the title of Detroit’s tallest building.

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