At the upcoming 14th Venice Architecture Biennale, the United States pavilion will set the stage for OfficeUs, a project by New York's Storefront for Art and Architecture and PRAXIS. OfficeUs provides an intellectual sandbox to understand the past and future ways in which every architecture office, big and small, corporate and 'avant-garde', contributes to the global architectural unconscious of economic, social and political forms. Last week the project was announced with a big bang during a press conference in New York.

Volume's 36th issue, Ways To Be Critical, discusses the role of critical thinking in a world dominated by tweets and likes. Dutch artist Dadara wants to question the meaning of the 'Like' with his latest installation, a giant Facebook thumb that was burned during this year's Burning Man festival in the desert of Nevada.

On Thursday October 17, The New Institute sets the stage for the Critics Night, an event organized by ArchiNed and Designplatform Rotterdam that wants to discuss the opportunities for new forms of criticism in the digital era.

After two successful cycles, the Zagreb Society of Architects set the stage for the third edition of international series of concept-based architectural competitions entitled Think Space. Featuring a number of established architects and curators, the program continues to re-think space in the 2013/2014 season. The new theme of Think Space, MONEY [The Echo of Nothing], was devised by architects, publishers and bloggers Ethel Baraona Pohl and César Reyes Nájera of dpr-barcelona.

Design magazine Frame dedicates its November issue to student work from design schools all over the world. As introduction to this dossier Frame organized a discussion between Design Academy Eindhoven Director Thomas Widdershoven, Leiden University Professor Design and Theory Timo de Rijk and Volume’s editor-in-chief Arjen Oosterman. Frame also asked each for three private picks plus short comment.

This Friday, managing editor Brendan Cormier and editor-in-chief Arjen Oosterman will be visiting Winy Maas, co-founder of MVRDV, on the role of rules in urban design. Are there any questions you'd like asked? Please send them to bc@archis.org!

It's raining triennales this fall! Last week the 2013 Lisbon Architecture Triennale was officially opened, and this weekend the design world looks at Oslo where the Nordic region’s biggest architecture festival will kick off. Volume's editor-in-chief Arjen Oosterman will be one of the professionals who will guide visitors along selected items in the exhibition.

Remember our 35th issue, Everything Under Control? For a forthcoming exhibition at The New Institute in Rotterdam, curator William Myers has selected dozens of projects that illustrate new ways to harness living systems for art, design and production. Biodesign: On the Cross-Pollination of Nature, Science and Creativity will run from 27 September through 5 January. The quest to integrate natural processes with design is as old as wood houses. However, the changing climate and rapid depletion of resources heighten its urgency, as humans face the necessity of reshaping their relationship to nature. Clever, usable new ideas present the prospect of a sustainable future and may provide ways to ease the long-running conflict between economic growth and environmental protection. Biodesign: On the Cross-Pollination of Nature, Science and Creativity will glimpse into our possible future and provide inspiration for designers, artists and scientists in the form of varied, in-depth information on new materials and potential biological applications in architecture and design.

Between modern architecture and history exists and ultimately complicated relationship that goes far beyond the superficial contradictions of past and future, tradition and modernity. On Thursday September 5, Dirk van den Heuvel will further elaborate on this in a lecture at the New Institute (former Netherlands Architecture Institute) in Rotterdam. The event is part of the Institute's summer program The Ruin.

During the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2010, Amsterdam-based design studio Rietveld Landscape successfully showed the world that thousands of inspiring public buildings in the Netherlands lay vacant. Many of these buildings have great potential, but focusing on re-development would be a long and difficult process. The real chances are in extreme temporary use, but the legal circumstances in the Netherlands are not fit for temporary use of buildings. After the Vacant NL exhibition, Rietveld Landscape continued their research on vacancy with a two-year long master program called Studio Vacant NL, that was organized in collaboration with the Sandberg Institute. Last month the program came to an end with a graduation exhibition in Amsterdam, which featured projects by seven master students.