New York City was amply represented during last night's National Design Awards at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. The Landscape Design award went to PWP Landscape Architecture, the firm that won the World Trade Center Memorial design competition (with Michael Arad). PWP Principal Peter Walker thanked Mayor Bloomberg and Governor Pataki and described the last four years as "difficult," presumably for the number of redesigns and challenges with moving the project forward, but he......

He made his name in London, Paris, Madrid, and Tokyo, and now he's making his mark on New York, too, with four major projects in development. Richard Rogers, one of Britain's handful of architect-knights, has just been awarded the 2007 Pritzker Prize, architecture's top honor. For many people, Rogers' most iconic project is still the Centre Pompidou in Paris, which he completed in 1977 while partners with Renzo Piano. The inside-out building lasciviously exposed......

Los Angeles architect Thom Mayne has been awarded the Pritzker Prize, the highest honor in the field of architecture. Gothamist guesses that the awesome design for the Caltrans District 7 building in downtown L.A. tipped it in his favor this year (here's a profile of the building, see some work in progress photos here), but he's had a very storied career. As for Mayne's NYC projects, with his firm Morphosis, Mayne has designed the......

The Friends of the Highline have selected four design teams to compete for the coveted project of turning the Highline, the elevated train tracks on the West Side, into a public park. Among the finalists involved are Pritzker Prize-winning architect Zaha Hadid's firm, artist Olafur Eliasson of Weather Project fame at the Tate Modern, and a number of other top architectural firms. Curbed has details on the teams, per the Friends of the Highline......

The United Nations has chosen Pritzker Prize-winning Fumihiko Maki to design another building, which will be on First Avenue between 41st and 42nd Streets. According to the Times, "glassy, white and sheer but elegant" design is projected to cost $330 million and to be finished by 2008. Since the older Secretariat building (picture, left) needs to be renovated, Maki's building will house the General Assembly, the Secretariat and their staffs until the Secretariat is......

Dateline, Hong Kong Since I've mentioned it so many times, I took a picture of the Bank of China building that Pritzker Prize winning architect I.M. Pei designed. I happen to like it a lot. While it does use Pei trademarks of glass and pyramids, it's also different enough from other works. The building is distinctive in the skyline aginst the other very modern (and, more often than not, ugly) skyscrapers. Taken from the middle......