Shenzhen Bay Culture Square by MAD and Dorte Mandrup's PLACE Exhibition: This Week in Architecture

Key facts

• MAD Architects completed Shenzhen Bay Culture Square in Shenzhen's Nanshan district, transforming a waterfront site into a cultural landscape with exhibition halls, educational spaces, public plazas, and green roofs.
• MVRDV's Bihailou Art Village in Shenzhen, near the Hong Kong border, is under construction and applies the 'Vertical Village' concept to a mixed-use development with theaters, retail, restaurants, and a museum.
• The Danish Architecture Center (DAC) in Copenhagen hosts PLACE, an exhibition by Dorte Mandrup's office, featuring five projects in Denmark, Greenland, Norway, and Germany, including the Ilulissat Icefjord Centre and the Berlin Exile Museum.
• PLACE runs at DAC until August 16, 2026, and will then tour internationally.
• CRA-Carlo Ratti Associati and Chuck Hoberman presented a scale model of a kinetic origami-inspired roof for AGO – Fabbriche Culturali in Modena, Italy, transforming the 18th-century Sant'Agostino Hospital into a 22,000-square-meter cultural complex.
• The first phase of AGO is scheduled to open in December 2026.
• Construction began on ZHA's Z8 Tower, a 140-meter-tall mixed-use development in Beijing's Central Business District, with offices, retail, dining, cultural, and leisure spaces.
• The Z8 Tower includes terraces, galleries, and atriums along its west facade, and climate-responsive fins for solar control.
• Exhibitions in Australia, Shanghai, Barcelona, and Copenhagen explored housing, landscape, and place.
• Australia's 'Lived In' exhibition, a preparation for the 2027 Venice Architecture Biennale, analyzes over a century of collective housing based on the Australian Housing Atlas.
• Jean Nouvel's exhibition 'Without the Artist, Architecture Disappears' at the Museum of Art Pudong in Shanghai includes models, archival material, films, and a reconstruction of his Paris studio.
• In Barcelona, 'Parlour Gardens: Dreams from the Rooftop' invites fourteen landscape architects to reinterpret the tradition of salon gardens with ceramic rooftop gardens.