Ricardo Legorreta, the prominent Mexican architect known for his Camino Real hotel in Mexico City and Pershing Square in Los Angeles, among other brightly colored projects—and who just last year won Japan's Praemium Imperiale—died on Friday at age 80.

Architectural Record's first Editor-in-Chief, Henry W. Desmond: A Polymath in Publishing

There's a new user-based resource for posting, sharing, and signing up for architecture and design workshops: Design Workshops is currently in beta mode, but creators Melissa Woolford, Heather Picov, and Dominique Gonfard hope for widespread use and are working on enabling the site to process payments from workshop participants.

Perhaps we can blame the firm's roots in Denmark’s mostly flat topography, but no matter the cause, Bjarke Ingels Group seems to have a mountain fetish—witness its Mountain Dwellings, or the urban hiking trails wrapping the firm's 8 House, or its brilliant scheme for a combination waste disposal facility, power plant, and ski slope. Taking the preoccupation one step further, Bjarke and company have just released plans for a project on an actual mountain, and it combines conceits from a few of their previous designs.The firm’s plan for a ski area in Lapland in far northern Finland includes a hotel with a roof that slopes, 8-House style, down to, well, the slopes. Guests can ski—or snowboard—directly from their rooms to surrounding trails via the tapered roofs. The project also includes a cluster of new and existing resort buildings oriented around a central square. Read details from the firm after the jump.

Today, the American Institute of Architects (AIA) announced Steven Holl as its 2012 Gold Medal laureate – a pretty nice birthday present for Holl, whose 64th is tomorrow. Photo © Shu He

Image courtesy UNStudio

Frank Gehry reveals his soon-to-be-completed Signature Center

Photo courtesy of the Cranbrook Art MuseumThe Cranbrook Art Museum is reopening its doors today, after a two-year, $22 million renovation.

During this year’s Greenbuild conference, Architectural Record’s Jenna M. McKnight moderated a panel discussion about the U.S. Green Building Council’s Center for Green Schools—which has established fellowships to place “sustainability officers” in public schools around the country. Panelists included Phoebe Beierle, one of initiative’s first two fellows, as well as program director Anisa Baldwin Metzger and Sandy Diehl from the United Technologies Corporation, which is helping fund the fellowships. Watch video of the panel after the jump.

This morning, Danish rockstar architect Bjarke Ingels delivered the keynote presentation at Architectural Record's Innovation Conference. He explained his idea of "hedonistic sustainability," which holds that design does not need to make a "Protestant" sacrifice in order to be ecologically or socially attuned. After the jump, watch video of the first half of his presentation—which includes a giant silver baloon, the "periscope of democracy," and the theme music from "Knight Rider."