Six finalists for one of Great Britain’s top architecture awards, the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) Stirling Prize, were unveiled today.

The remarkable development boom in Dubai and Abu Dhabi, both located in the United Arab Emirates (U.A.E.), is completely transforming these cities’ skylines and attracting the world’s top architects. But it is also exacting a serious cost. Human Rights Watch (HRW) alleges that the migrant workers vital to constructing these projects are subject to “abusive labor practices”—and architects, it contends, are complicit in the problem. In a report titled “Building Towers, Cheating Workers,” published last November, HRW catalogued a host of abusive practices including nonpayment of wages, squalid or dangerous working and living conditions, and the denial of proper medical

The Burj Dubai realized its “tallest high-rise building in the world” claim on July 21, according to developer Emaar Properties, when the concrete floors were poured and set on the skyscraper’s 141st story. At 1,680 feet tall, the still-incomplete tower surpassed the previous height record of 1671 feet, established by Taiwan’s Taipei 101, and surges toward an undisclosed height rumored to be 2,300 feet, some 160 stories, when the tower is finished in 2008. Photo: Courtesy Emaar Properties The Burj Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, reached a milestone on Saturday when construction workers poured concrete for the 141st floor--making

How should a city manage residential development in a way that protects its historic manufacturing zones? Not surprisingly, perhaps, Donald Trump has exposed this planning dilemma with an opulent condominium-hotel tower designed by Handel Architects and David Rockwell, slated for a largely industrial block on the fringe of New York City’s trendy SoHo neighborhood. The conundrum is as much architectural as it is economic. Although cities nationwide are welcoming residential development to create a 24/7 environment downtown, these projects often displace small-scale industrial uses that contribute greater tax revenues. Preservationists also complain that these buildings—usually glass-walled towers—are out of character

Several large urban redevelopment projects are getting underway across California. In Los Angeles, the City Council’s Ad Hoc River Committee is seeking funds from federal, state, and local sources for the Los Angeles River Revitalization Master Plan. The document, which was developed over the past two years by a team including the city’s Bureau of Engineering and Tetra Tech, received council approval in May. It calls for lowering, terracing, and greening much of the waterway’s concrete channel barriers as well as redeveloping surrounding areas into parks: a total of 239 projects along 31 miles of the 51-mile-long river. Image: courtesy

Editor’s note: You may read the news digest below or listen to it, plus other news headlines from ArchitecturalRecord.com, as a podcast by clicking this link. Click the play button to begin | Click here to download “Confrontational and controversial” architecture is what Gehry Partners’ Edwin Chan hoped to find among the five designs unveiled this week for the new Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University, in East Lansing, Michigan, according to a July 18 article in City Pulse. With an avant-garde roster of finalists, it’s likely that Chan, one of the university’s eight jurors, got

  Andres Lepik Photo:Courtesy the Museum of Modern Art Andres Lepik, a German curator and historian, joined the Museum of Modern Art as curator of contemporary architecture on July 1. He becomes the newest member of the Architecture and Design Department, headed by Barry Bergdoll, who was appointed last summer. Lepik most recently served as chief curator of the 20th- and 21st-century architecture collection at the Kunstbibliothek, in Berlin. Working in that capacity since 2004, he staged a series of small exhibitions that explored the designs of Berlin-based architects who have had commissions around the world but not in Berlin.

Columbia University continues to encounter hurdles in its plans to build a new 17-acre campus in Manhattanville, a scheme created by the Renzo Piano Building Workshop and Skidmore Owings & Merrill. Roughly 400 people turned out a public hearing last week to support plan 197-A, a modest community-backed alternative to the school’s proposal. Named for a clause in New York City’s charter that authorizes communities to create and submit their own development plans to the City Council, and developed over the past three years with the help of experts at the Pratt Institute, the 197-A plan is intended to integrate

Coop Himmelb(l)au’s much anticipated first project in the Americas, the Akron Art Museum’s John S. and James L. Knight Building, opened yesterday to mixed critical reviews. The $35 million, 63,000-square-foot wing adds to a Renaissance revival structure dating to 1899, tripling the museum’s size and giving it more galleries for exhibiting its collection of 19th- and 20th-century art. Photo: © Roland Halbe Coop Himmelb(l)au¹s addition to the Akron Art Museum. The Austrian firm Coop Himmelb(l)au won the Akron commission in September 2001. Architecture principal Wolf Prix has advocated the creation of “architecture out of frozen air that you can enter”

George Yu, a pioneer in digital architecture, died in Los Angeles of a type of lung cancer that afflicts nonsmokers. He was 43 years old. As both a designer and teacher, Yu helped shape the way that architects envision and use new technologies such as digital imaging and fabrication. But his work always kept the human user in the foreground, never turning technology into an ideology or fetish. He was able to do this, in part, by developing a keen sense for materials, light, and space. Photo © Gary Leonard George Yu Related Links: George Yu Exhibits in the 2004