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The New York City Office of Emergency Management begins testing its new architecture of disaster relief. Photo © Architectural Record New York City officials unveiled a new modular post-disaster housing unit, designed by Garrison Architects. It’s nothing short of  building a city within a city overnight. That’s the fundamental premise behind a new modular post-disaster housing unit, designed by Garrison Architects, which was revealed Tuesday by New York City officials. The premise is simple but ambitious: Post-disaster housing will allow city residents to live in their neighborhood for months or years after a major disaster while their homes undergo repairs.

The 191,500-square-foot mixed-use development incorporates permanently affordable housing, pre-kindergarten classrooms, and the new Sugar Hill Children’s Museum of Art & Storytelling. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio joined with community leaders in Harlem on a rainy Monday morning to celebrate an innovative housing development nearing completion in the neighborhood’s historic Sugar Hill enclave. Designed by David Adjaye, the 191,500-square-foot mixed-use development incorporates permanently affordable housing, pre-kindergarten classrooms, and the new Sugar Hill Children’s Museum of Art & Storytelling. “It is so rare to see a city do this kind of project,” the London- and New York-based Adjaye explained at

Photo courtesy Architecture for Humanity Architecture for Humanity is currently supporting reconstruction efforts in the earthquake and tsunami-ravaged areas of Japan. AFH's Ishinomaki, Japan, office has completed 16 projects, including a new school building, above, for a kindergarten that was destroyed in the March 2011 tsunami. Eric Cesal is the new executive director of Architecture for Humanity (AFH), the nonprofit’s board of directors announced today. A longtime volunteer, Cesal joined AFH full-time in 2010 to start the Haiti Rebuilding Center in Port-au-Prince. Since 2012 he has led the organization’s global post-disaster rebuilding efforts from its headquarters in San Francisco. Cesal

While the Korean pavilion won the Golden Lion, and Chile took the silver, many other national participations in the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale offered interesting variations on Absorbing Modernity: 1914-2014, the theme set out by director Rem Koolhaas. Click the image below to view a slide show of highlights as well as a special presentation by London's Architectural Association School and a new set of drawings by Daniel Libeskind. Kingdom of BahrainFundamentalists and Other Arab ModernismsCurators: George Arbid, Bernard Khoury – Arab Center for ArchitetureThe Bahrain pavilion presents a vast library of 100 years of Modernism in the Arab world

A new archaeology campus designed by Moshe Safdie is under construction on a Jerusalem hillside. The most striking feature of the National Campus for Archaeology is a giant, concave canopy, held in place by cables and made of woven fiberglass-and-polymer fabric. In Jerusalem, the capital of a modern country enthralled by its past, a unique national archaeology campus is being built. The project—commissioned by the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) and officially named The Jay and Jeanie Schottenstein National Campus for the Archaeology of Israel—combines three major components: storage of the national archaeological treasures (some two million items); restoration labs for

 Golden Lion Winner: The Minsuk Cho-organized Korean Pavilion in the Giardini. Could it be a coincidence that minutes after reporting that Phyllis Lambert had received the Venice Architecture Biennale's Golden Lion for lifetime achievement at a ceremony earlier in the day, the radio station in my rental car (as I mbarked on a pilgrimage to Carlo Scarpa’s Brion Cemetery) broadcast the Sondheim ballad “I’m Still Here”? Lambert, 87, could have been Elaine Stritch, now 89, singing about good times and bum times, my dear. Related links Exhibition Review: Time Space Existence Venice Dispatch: Highlights from the National Pavilions Venice

A scattershot architecture show sprawls through two grand Venetian palaces during the Biennale. Installation by the University of Houston at Time Space Existence.   Time Space Existence, one of the officially-sponsored collateral events of the Venice Architecture Biennale, is a sprawling exhibition presenting projects and installations by more than 100 architects from around the world. It winds through the salons and backrooms of two grand Venetian palaces on the Grand Canal, the Palazzo Bembo and the Mora. Related links Venice Dispatch: Golden Lions for Phyllis Lambert and Korean Pavilion Venice Dispatch: Highlights from the National Pavilions Venice Dispatch: U.S.

The U.S. pavilion (1930) was designed by William Adams Delano and Chester Holmes Aldrich.  The Venice Architecture Biennale is a polyglot affair. Some countries use their pavilions as conventional galleries, displaying photographs of finished buildings. Others create architecture-based installations. A smaller number take an intellectual approach, posing and then answering questions derived from architectural theory or practice. And a very few—and these may be the ones taking the greatest risks—pose questions to which the answers are allowed to emerge, through real-time investigation, over the course of the Biennale’s six-month run. Related links Exhibition Review: Time Space Existence Venice Dispatch: