United Kingdom – SpecNews

2016: A year of grand designs

The branding of 2016 as the Year of Innovation, Architecture and Design, follows this 2015’s Year of Food and Drink status, and 2014’s Year of Homecoming.
VisitScotland’s involvement signals the belief that there’s a tourism buck to be made out of selling Scotland’s architecture – both historic and new – as an attraction.
WHEN fire tore through Glasgow School of Art’s Mackintosh building on 23 May, 2014, the shockwaves spread far beyond the confines of the creative community.
Turning the festival – and the entire Year of Innovation, Architecture and Design – into a financial success is the responsibility, ultimately, of the quango.
Contemporary structures add a new layer to our built environment, taking inspiration from and sometimes reacting against past achievements in design.

Balfour Beatty is being lined-up to build a new £350m engineering campus at the University of Manchester
The Manchester Engineering Campus Development (MECD) will be one of the largest, single construction projects ever undertaken by a higher education institution in the United Kingdom.
Balfour Beatty is one of the framework partners alongside Laing O’Rourke and Sir Robert McAlpine.
The MECD project is being delivered through the University’s Construction Partnering Framework which was established in June to deliver up to £1bn of work over the next eight years.
To share your stories email Grant Prior or Aaron Morby… always off the record
Architects Mecanoo have been appointed to the project which is set to open in 2020 and will be located opposite the new National Graphene Institute on Booth Street East.

Architects seek $2.9 billion to build ‘Lord of the Rings’ city Minas Tirith in U.K.
Crowd-sourced projects with lofty aspirations are a dime a dozen, but Jonathan Wilson’s Indiegogo proposal is asking for many more dimes — nearly $2.9 billion — to build the “Lord of the Rings” city of Minas Tirith.
If the nearly $2.9 billion goal isn’t reached by the late-September deadline, no contributors will be charged the amount they pledged.
“We settled on Minas Tirith, as we felt it represented the most realistic and sustainable project.”
Living in England’s Worcestershire County, Wilson said he came up with the idea to build the city after watching a marathon of its corresponding movies with his friends.
In addition to posting updates on the Indiegogo page, Wilson is updating fans on project progress on Twitter, via his @RealiseMinas account.