This week on Dezeen:Â Kengo Kuma and Toyo Ito unveiled rival bids to build the 2020 Tokyo Olympic stadium this week, replacing Zaha Hadid's competition-winning design, and MAD completed a sinuous opera house in China (pictured).
Both Ito and Kuma petitioned against Hadid's 80,000-seat stadium design in 2013, and this week the high-profile Japanese architects got their chance to submit schemes for its replacement.
Images were released of the recently completed Harbin Opera House by Beijing studio MAD, which features an undulating form that wraps two concert halls.
In other news, designer Thomas Heatherwick was given the go ahead to convert a Victorian coal yard in London's King's Cross into a canal-side shopping destination and design firm Pininfarina was bought by India's Mahindra Group.
New Zealand selected a winner in a contest to find a new national flag and the Royal College of Art announced Adrian Lahoud as the new dean of the school's architecture department.
RCA professor Neville Brody suggested design education in England should learn from the American model, where a greater emphasis is placed on private funding.
Lego released its latest architectural toy set just in time for Christmas and Adidas unveiled a trainer made from made waste plastic collected from the ocean.
Mark Foster Gage caused controversy after proposing an elaborate gargoyle-covered skyscraper for New York and aerospace engineering company Windspeed Technologies designed a bubble-shaped viewing platform for the top of commercial aircraft.
Most Loved, our latest collaboration with MINI, kicked off this week. In the first movie of our exclusive new video series, Marcel Wanders speaks about the chair made from knotted rope that propelled him to international stardom.
Popular projects this week on Dezeen included a McDonald's designed as an alternative to bright and colourful fast-food restaurants, Santiago Calatrava's science museum with a skeletal roof and a contemporary Belgian barn house covered in clay tiles.
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