You've seen the pictures, visited the building, now experience the play. The Bilbao Effect by Oren Safdie is being billed as a work that 'puts contemporary architecture on trial'. Frank Gehry, whose success with the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao sent the world's city marketeers into a formulaic frenzy, isn't actually dragged into the dock, but the disguise is thin.  The plot centres on one 'Erhardt Shlaminger', who is a 'world famous architect who faces censure by the American Institute of Architects, following accusations that his urban redevelopment project for Staten Island has led to a woman's suicide.' The said project is apparently a Museum for Contemporary Contemporary Art, which one colleague describes as a 'toaster on steroids'....This is a blind preview, so no judgement on the satirical bite of its content, but alongside an architectural send-up, the play seeks to 'explore whether architecture has become more of art than a profession, and at what point the ethics of one field violate the principles of the other.'

This international competition, launched by the Lisbon Architecture Triennial, invites architects to design a single family dwelling that is radically cheap to build for Luanda, a city under extreme demographic pressure and undergoing an intense period of transformation. The family unit should be designed to house a severely deprived family of between seven and nine people. A shortlist of 30 finalists will be chosen and contacted by the Triennial to develop presentation models of their proposals that will, in turn, appear at the exhibition at the Museum of Electricity (between 28 October 2010 and January 2011).

The 1960s and 70s saw new generations of architects begin careers amidst a period of profound social change, new conditions to architecture and the city, and lasting changes to popular and critical forms of culture and its production. This exhibition tells the story of the era and re-assesses the conditions of architecture, featuring a single key early project from the likes of Archigram, Coop Himmelb(l)au, Norman Foster + Richard Rogers, Zaha Hadid, Herzog & de Meuron, Steven Holl, Toyo Ito, Rem Koolhaas, Daniel Libeskind, Cedric Price, Aldo Rossi, Alvaro Siza, Bernard Tschumi, Robert Venturi and Paul Virilio + Claude Parent, among others.

Stretching for 32 kilometres, the A10 Circular Road is the longest construction in Amsterdam. As a result of its length, the Circular cuts through a wide variety of urban environments and is currently being swamped with spatial design projects. Motivated by a desire to become better acquainted with this ‘construction’, ARCAM’s research collected unexpected perspectives of the urban landscape in the margins of the A10. From bold student plans to relevant images from the roads past & future, these initial findings are complemented in the exhibition by a series of scales models of the road’s trajectory.

The 4th IABR includes three major exhibitions (two in Rotterdam and one in Amsterdam); an extensive massive event programme at the Netherlands Architecture Institute (NAI); and a large cross-media project in cooperation with the broadcaster VPRO. Things kick off on 24 September with the opening of its main exhibition, Open City: Designing Coexistence, at the NAI in Rotterdam. Two other exhibitions will open their doors to the public: Parallel Cases//IABR@RDM on 25 September and The Free State of Amsterdam on 26 September. The 4th IABR’s curator is Dutch architect and urbanist Kees Christiaanse, professor at ETH Zurich and founder of and partner in KCAP Rotterdam.

This show features the ongoing urban research project of the urbanist, theorist and activist Kyong Park, carried out through different journeys along the intricate route between Istanbul and Tokyo. Examining the complex conditions and relations shaping the cultural, social and political territories throughout the Asian continent, Eurasia and the Middle East, this is what Park describes as The New Silk Roads. So far Park has carried out three expeditions, and he and his team of collaborators have visited and researched eight of the 20 countries that will involve the project, using the urban research method Park calls ‘nomadic practice’.

What will our future look like? This exhibition features the visions of Belgian architect Luc Schuiten, who considers that we have perhaps too quickly forgotten that we are, first of all, biological beings inhabiting a planet that is itself alive. A coherent and poetical world is gradually built, drawn from the imagery of different futurist perspectives, unfolding in time. The original proposals present a positive vision of the future, reflected through the creation of a new relationship between human beings and their natural environment. These original ways of depicting a future drawing its inspiration from multiple ecosystems are underpinned by the close relationship that the artist shares with the biologists of the association Biomimicry Europa.