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Burj Dubai, now also called the Burj Khalifa, opened officially to the world yesterday.

With the world’s highest level of greenhouse gas emissions and the largest market in the world by floor space, building “green” is becoming the architectural trend in China.

“A few years ago, sustainable design was not quite focused and was not seriously considered in most developments,” said William Wong, associate director of the Hong Kong office of Arup, a global firm of independent designers, engineers and consultants, China Daily reports.

Because China’s development is growing so rapidly, “all levels of government, designers, and even the general public are becoming more aware of environmental issues and how bad the consequences could be due to ignorance of sustainable design,” he said.

Building operations account for about one-sixth of China’s total carbon emissions, according to the China Greentech Report 2009, published by a business consortium, The Wall Street Journal reports.

Now more design professionals in China are beginning to adopt standards from the United States for environmentally sustainable buildings, such as certification from the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, an internationally recognized rating system designed by the U.S. Green Building Council.

The Savannah College of Art and Design’s architectural history department announces January and February lectures in its continuing series.

The architectural history lectures are free and open to the public.

“Poplar Forest: Thomas Jefferson’s Continued Pursuit of Architectural Happiness,” by Travis McDonald, director of architectural restoration at Thomas Jefferson’s Poplar Forest, will take place January 19, 2010.

Following his retirement from public life, Thomas Jefferson continued to pursue happiness and delight through architecture, including Poplar Forest in Virginia-an idealistic villa retreat of his own inspiration.

Today, after extensive research and restoration, this work sheds more light on Jefferson’s creative genius and body of work as an architect.

Travis McDonald has directed the restoration of Poplar Forest since 1989.

He is an architectural historian who serves on many historic preservation advisory boards.

Through earlier positions as chief historical architect of the National Park Service and the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, McDonald has been involved with many interesting historic building assessments and restorations.

Sixty-five-year-old Adrian Smith, a Chicago-based architect has designed the Burj Dubai, the silvery, heat-deflecting skyscraper that rises to more than 2,600 feet.

The Burj is taller than two of Chicago’s own skyscrapers – John Hancock Centre and Willis Tower – stacked atop each other.

“I was always interested in height. The Burj is like a sand castle. It just keeps going up,” The Chicago Tribune has quoted Smith, who heads his own architecture firm Adrian Smith Gordon Gill Architecture, as saying.

The $1.5 billion mixed-use skyscraper represents a “personal high point” for Smith, who led the design of three of the world’s 10 tallest buildings — the Burj Dubai, Chicago’s Trump International Hotel & Tower and the Jin Mao Building in Shanghai.

“From the foundation established in Chicago, that legacy is now being exported to other countries,” Art Institute of Chicago’s architecture and design curator Joseph Rosa said.

“There is a reason why they go to someone like Adrian Smith — he is known for building quality tall buildings,” Rosa added.

The Burj Dubai, developed by Emaar Properties, would house a hotel designed by Giorgio Armani, condominiums, offices and an observatory on the 124th of its 154 occupied floors.

It is a thin, three-winged tower that rises so high that the temperature outside its top has been known to be 20 degrees cooler than the temperature on the ground.

Smith’s portfolio also includes the Art Deco-influenced 37-storey NBC Tower in Chicago and the pagoda-inspired, 88-storey Jin Mao building in Shanghai, which put him on the global map.

It was, until recently, China’s tallest building and led Emaar to ask Smith and SOM to take part in a 2003 design competition for the Burj Dubai.

he Burj Dubai, by far the tallest building in the world, will open as planned next month in its namesake city. It has topped out four stories taller than half a mile high—2,684 feet—a chilling figure that was known to very few until it was reached. The tower’s Chicago-based architect, Adrian Smith, confided three years ago that this secrecy was not a marketing gimmick (though it did stir up the press); it was a practical response to some brutal intramural competition. Emaar Properties, the Dubai-based developer that built the tower, was trying to best its rival, Nakheel, most famous for its land-reclamation projects, the Palm islands and the World, which dredged up miles of luxury from the silt of the Persian Gulf. As soon as the final height of the Burj Dubai was known, Emaar feared, Nakheel would unveil plans for something even more ambitious.

Sure enough, as the final height of the Burj Dubai became clear, renderings of the expected counterbuilding were made public. Nakheel’s response, defiantly named Al Burj (The Tower), had a projected height of 4,600 feet.

Savor that in your mind for a moment—sunset, a warm breeze, white clouds wrapping a glass-and-steel spire three and a half Twin Towers tall—because it is never going to happen: Nakheel is the development arm of Dubai World, the state-owned investment company that triggered financial panic around the world two weeks ago when it announced it would seek forbearance on up to $59 billion in debt. Real estate in Dubai had hardly been immune to the general downturn—Nakheel stopped work on its nearly mile-high tower last January—but this latest economic disaster emphatically marks the end of a golden age for those who dream in buildings.

Though they can’t do their jobs without the complicity of real money and real materials, architects are trained to fantasize. It’s what they do best. At the top schools especially, students are encouraged to let their imaginations take them to heights and breadths and topological convolutions far beyond the practical in order to define a personal style or express an idea. Their teachers tend to be architects of the hothouse variety (genus star) whose work, often reliant on very expensive engineering, is unbuildable in any but the most favorable climate.

In the last decade, real-estate nutsiness created those rare conditions all over (even at a few spots in Manhattan), but Dubai was the place where the furthest whimsies of architects—rotating towers! A carbon-neutral ziggurat for 1 million people! A hotel designed by Brad Pitt!—were finally matched by the hubris of clients. Or we might say client, since, one way or another, nearly all of the big digs in the emirate were tied to Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, the visionary ruler who responded to drying oil wells by remaking Dubai into a business and entertainment center, a corporate pied-à-terre, an oasis of capitalism between Europe and the East. Wall Street meets Las Vegas. Meets Xanadu. On crack.

Dubai was a place where people came together to test what was possible. Engineers from London worked with New York architects and Korean contractors to marshal armies of indentured Pakistanis and Indians—globalization at work—to build monuments to their patrons’ ostensibly bottomless wealth. Various marvels rose. More were imagined. But it turns out that even with loose credit, exploited labor, central control, caviar dreams, and the most venal intentions, you still cannot defy the financial laws of gravity.

When Michigan State University sought out architects to design its new Eli and Edythe broad art museum, Zaha Hadid may have been a bold choice. The British Iraqi designer has a unique sensibility when it comes to form and function that is not typical of traditionalist viewers.

After months of financial and conventional debate, the designs have finally been approved, and construction on the new museum will break ground on March 16, 2010.

The museum was made possible through a $26 million donation from MSU alumnus and noted philanthropist Eli Broad and his wife Edythe. The structure will take 23 months to construct, placing its completion date in mid 2012.

Hadid’’s design, a sort of asymmetrical rhombus comprised of steel and glass, was the winner of an international competition that ran through 2008. The artist herself is a Pritzker Prize winning architect, the first woman ever to achieve the honor, and a veteran of many international design competition, contributing plans to both the One-north Masterplan in Singapore and the City Casino in Basel, Switzerland.

Noted Architect Frank Gehry – world renowned for his unique designs on buildings like the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain – will design a new $800 million hotel, housing and performing arts complex in New York’’s theater district.

In addition to providing sustainable, low-income housing in a chic area of the city, the 59-story Signature Centre will also house a café, a bookstore and a theater that will serve as the new home of New York’’s award-winning nonprofit Signature Theater Company.

James Houghton, the founder of the theater company, hopes to use the new space to provide writers and playwrights coming through the big apple that will inspire them to create “work that engages even more artists and audiences.

“(The building) is an example of how or city can keep growing,” says New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg at the groundbreaking ceremony.

The energy-efficient project is anticipated to create 700 construction jobs in the metropolitan area according to the Associated Press.

The Venice Biennale is one of the most prestigious exhibitions in modern architecture. Each year, the event showcases the finest works of architects representing countries across the globe, and for the second year in a row the University of Waterloo will serve as the Canadian representative in the momentous presentation.

Philip Berkely, an architecture professor at UW, will helm the Canadian pavilion with his unique installation called Hylozoic Ground.

Resembling a collection of fishnets and tangles of fiver optic cables adorned with spider webs and snowflakes suspended from the ceiling, the installation is littered with thousands of sensors that detect human movements, changes in air pressure, body heat and sound. The end result is a luminous breathing room that replicates a shimmering, backlit forest setting.

“It’’s really quite stunning,” says the school’’s director Rick Haldenby, in a statement to The Record. “The thing behaves like a kind of organism. Movement in one part induces movement in other parts.”

The name hylozoic ground is a reference to a philosophical concept that believes that all matter has life

The Austin Art Alliance, a co-op of national and international artists and designers, is holding a Temporary Outdoor Gallery Space ideas competition. The competition, the groups third such event, is part of a larger partnership among local design groups including the Austin Foundation for Architecture and AIA designed to stir interest in the architecture field.

Designers are asked to transform an open-air art fair into a unique experience that will help introduce the element of architecture into the public consciousness while showcasing the talents of existing professionals in the architecture community.

The 2010 competition will be the first to allow participation from architecture and interior design students in addition to current professionals working in the field. Entrants are asked to submit concepts for a 10-ft by 20-ft structure, identify how the space will be installed and provide detailed illustration.

Winning selections will be judged by a panel of industry professionals. Past panels have included Goil Amornvivat of TLCs Trading Spaces, Yale professor of architecture Deborah Berke and Dana Friis-Hansen of the Austin Museum of Art.

The grand prize winner will receive $1,000, with second and third place winning $500 amd %250 respectively.

Construction has slowed to a trickle, design firms are laying off employees and the Big Plans of a few years back – iconic museums! stratospheric towers! – are gathering the digital equivalent of dust on the shelf.

Instead of gravity-defying drama, think empty lots.

It was an era when architecture became hotter and hipper than ever, yet too often was treated as a three-dimensional marketing tool. In fact, it’s the art form that shapes the world in which we live, with long-term implications for the environment and our civic culture.

Ten trends capture this tension. I’ll start with the one that matters the most.

1. Sustainability

Once a fringe movement, the quest to be environmentally friendly has been embraced by the design profession. And with each high-profile move – such as the California Academy of Sciences’ living roof – rival architects are pushed to follow suit. There’s hype in this, to be sure. But it’s the wave of the future, and it comes not a moment too soon.

2. Tall-tall towers

After the horrific destruction of the World Trade Center, architectural pundits proclaimed the end of the skyscraper era – whereupon the high-rise craze kicked into truly high gear. The most excessive example is the 2,683-foot Burj Dubai, which opens next month; whether or not San Francisco gets its 1,000-foot obelisk at the Transbay Terminal will be decided by the economy.

3. “Icon”

Speaking of our iffy-obelisk, during the 2007 competition for development rights to build the tower, the call went out for “an iconic presence that will redefine the City’s skyline.” This was right in line with a decade where every structure snazzier than a Kohl’s laid claim to icon status. Let’s hope that when architectural ambitions come back, the I-word doesn’t.

4. Glass

In the latest crop of towers, granite was passe – glass was the fashion statement for architects and developers wanting to be au courant. It’s a trend that already looks dated, even with technology that allows more variations than ever, from ultra-clear to lurid blue, both of which can be seen on our very own skyline.

5. Starchitecture

The trend entered mainstream culture after Daniel Libeskind became a celebrity by winning the competition to design the World Trade Center’s replacement. It peaked with Frank Gehry’s 2005 appearance on “The Simpsons.” By the end of the decade, every big city had its own hyped building by a star architect – often with results that weren’t “iconic,” just odd.

6. Libraries

Whatever the reason – obsolete older facilities, civic pride or both – new libraries continue to rise in cities large and small, often with community space attached. The Bay Area’s crop includes a snug delight in Belmont, a user-friendly centerpiece to downtown San Jose, an expanded landmark in Berkeley and a new one in Lafayette, with more on the way.

7. Artificial urbanism

What does a city do if it lacks a downtown? Simple: build a fake one with housing or offices atop storefronts and a multiplex at one end. Anyone who’s gaped at downtown Windsor or San Jose’s Santana Row knows what I mean; an even more surreal example is the Town Center in El Dorado Hills, off Highway 50 east of Folsom.

8. Nostalgia for modern architecture

Historic preservation became a force in America in the 1960s because people were horrified at the destruction of cherished older buildings for proudly “modern” replacements. Now, fans of modernism use preservation laws to ward off attacks on the very buildings erected without regard for history. It’s a strange world indeed.

9. Smart growth

As opposed to … and now you know why the term gained favor as a rallying cry for anyone in favor of something besides auto-dependent suburban sprawl. All sides agree it includes dense development near mass transit, and regional planning that protects valued farmlands and open space. Beyond that, one advocate’s “smart” is an opponent’s “not in my backyard.”

10. Affordable housing as high design

Again and again, the sharpest new buildings in San Francisco are ones built for low-income residents. The reason: The city is blessed with architects and nonprofit developers who not only want to do the right thing, but do it with style and with an eye to strengthening the larger urban fabric. This is one trend with no downside at all.