Last week, Broad Group announced it has received approval from the Chinese government and will break ground on the project next month, though according to Quartz's Lily Kuo, Broad Sustainable Building has pushed the building's schedule to a more modest seven months. — theatlanticcities.com

Jeffrey Johnson, an architect who runs the China Megacities Lab at Columbia, is among a number of scholars who study China's rapid urbanization. He says local governments are building museums to create a cultural life and competitive identity for their cities.

But China lost a lot of art because of its civil war in the 1940s, as well as the Cultural Revolution, looting and overseas sales. Johnson says many museums are going up faster than curators can fill them with works and audiences. — npr.org

Civil society has to get things done here - Kurt Dillon, architect, Urbio — New York Times

We’re already building the metropolis of the future—green, wired, even helpful. Now critics are starting to ask whether we’ll really want to live there. — bostonglobe.com

Unconscious perception represents the automated processes the body goes through to take in the surrounding environment and its metaphysical status. While our five senses help us perceive the physical world, unconscious perception connects us to the realm of intuition.

To shed light on how we are influenced by this dimension of our minds, artist Dan Graham spoke about his practice, which challenges our perceptions of space through performance, installations, video, sculpture, and writing. — bmwguggenheimlab.org

Back in February, we had published the winners of Gowanus by Design's second design and planning competition, WATER_WORKS. The intent of the competition, according to David Briggs, co-founder of Gowanus by Design, was to design a new community resource in Douglass/Greene Park that shares the site with a Combined Sewer Overflow [CSO] retention facility. — bustler.net

A lot of Chinese people look up to the West as an ideal, so the construction of these towns could be seen as a way of accelerating their progress; a quick way of achieving through emulation. — psmag.com

The international ideas competition series POST+CAPITALIST CITY has announced the winners of its last quarter, 4#Move. Previous installments focused on the issues of 1#Shop, 2#Work, and 3#Live. — bustler.net

With the blank slate offered by a catastrophic attack, planners, soon joined by the mayor himself, saw a chance to re-establish a great crossroads: Fulton and Greenwich Streets, tying the second World Trade Center into New York — north, south, east and west.

Now, however, they see that vision slipping away, as security concerns trump urban planning. — cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com

The 2030 Palette is an interactive online tool that puts the principles behind low-carbon and resilient built environments at the fingertips of architects, planners and designers worldwide.
Our goal is to inform the planning and design process at the point of inspiration. By curating the best information... highly complex ideas are made intuitive and accessible. Guiding principles are presented as individual “Swatches”, which together make up the larger fabric of sustainable built environments. — Inhabitat

Robert González wants to create a 3D digital replica of Downtown El Paso, using lasers.
The director of Texas Tech’s fledgling architecture program in El Paso says the student project would be part of a new historic preservation program he is developing here. The project would create a permanent record, in 3D, of El Paso’s most historic and endangered buildings. — El Paso, Inc.

It’s perched atop the depressing, low-ceilinged maze known as Penn Station, daily hive for 600,000 scuttling commuters.

The Garden’s presence is one major impediment to the 25-year-old dream of turning the decrepit and overcrowded Penn station into a smoothly operating city gateway. — bloomberg.com

Are cities becoming "greater" these days?

(Bernd Upmeyer, Editor-in-Chief, May 2013) — monu-magazine.com

BIG together with West 8, Fentress Architects, John Portman & Associates (JPA), Revuelta Architecture International and developers Portman-CMC have unveiled the urban planning proposal Miami Beach Square, the centerpiece of a 52-acre Miami Beach Convention Center District development. Portman-CMC is one of two development teams currently in the race for the project. — bustler.net