The new buildings will be designed by Gary Handel Architects and Roschen Van Cleve Architects, but these renderings, like the rest of it, are conceptual. Landscape starchitect James Corner Field Operations (of New York's High Line and Santa Monica's Civic Center Parks) will design "extensive open space, street-level plazas, and enhanced pedestrian circulation encompassing approximately 25 percent of the entire site." — la.curbed.com

The Land Art Generator Initiative just announced the winner of its 2012 design competition moments ago in New York City. "Scene Sensor", designed by artists James Murray and Shota Vashakmadze, is a striking piezoelectric energy-generating art project designed to be installed above and below the surface of the Staten Island park. — Inhabitat NYC

Arcosanti, some 42 years after it first was begun in 1970, is just a tiny fragment of what it intends to become — a town for a few thousand people. Right now, we’re at a population of a little less than 100. It’s pretty easy at that small scale to join architecture and ecology, but we have in mind some bigger ideas. While they certainly come from Paolo Soleri, they also come from Henry David Thoreau. — dirt.asla.org

[Zumthor] runs a small office from his mountain home in Switzerland; he doesn't give interviews by telephone; he rarely makes public appearances; and his projects—like the ghostly luminescent bathhouse he created for the Swiss town of Vals—emanate a high seriousness that could only have come from this oracle of the Alps. Yet recently, the typically solitary Zumthor has taken to palling around with another prominent designer: celebrated garden designer Piet Oudolf. — online.wsj.com

The latest update brings 25 million new building footprints to Google Maps, making Google’s map offering even more detailed and comprehensive.

The new building footprints have been created by a computer, which processed actual aerial imagery and rendered the shapes of buildings in the maps.

Users can help out and fix inaccurate building footprints in Google Map Maker, as well as assign businesses to existing buildings or even draw the entire building footprints themselves. — mashable.com

The winning design, easily the most ambitious of three finalists announced last month, calls for a repeating series of concrete arches that both refer to and exaggerate the Butler design as the bridge stretches from downtown Los Angeles on the west to Boyle Heights on the east, spanning the L.A. River and the 101 Freeway on its way. — latimes.com

Inspired by many hiking trips that the two students from China have enjoyed during their studies at ETHZ, the entry is based on the idea of a hypothetical mudflow in the Swiss Alps burying a village. The project works with columns of transparent thermoplastic planted into the earth as a metaphorical representation of the former village. Sunlight is being transmitted through the columns into the subterranean space, where they illuminate a poetic memory of the former rooms in the buried houses. — BLDGBLOG

Corner’s plan identifies five main areas in Freshkills, each with distinct offerings, designed and programmed to maximize specific site opportunities and constraints. Planned features include nature preserves, animal habitats, a seed plot, walking and bike paths, picnic areas, comfort stations, event staging areas, and every other amenity you could possibly ask for in a public park. — blogs.smithsonianmag.com

Making visible the invisible. That was the title of our interview with interactive designer George Legrady published in our Information issue and the name of one of his most known projects. Conceived for the Seattle Public Library, it visualizes the circulation of books going in and out of the library’s collection.

This issue continues to make visible the invisible conditions present around us that inform the way we engage with the city... — mascontext.com

In a few weeks, construction begins on New York’s largest development ever. Hudson Yards is handsome, ambitious, and potentially full of life. Should we care that it’s also a giant slab of private property? — nymag.com

Sometimes when you are new in a place you can really see it — Brian Eno

Terminal workers speak a florid corporate language of “space optimization” and “key performance indicators.” Longshoremen click computer mice and complain about Microsoft Windows as everyone else in the white-collar world does. — NYT

The ability to observe the private lives of strangers from the windows of my home is one reason why I’ve chosen to reside within a dense urban fabric. I am not a voyeur: I do not receive sexual satisfaction from watching the daily lives of others. But I do like to imagine the many meaningful “relationships” I have created with people that I will never meet or even recognize on the street. — Places Journal

Masdar City is a project in Abu Dhabi, in the United Arab Emirates. Its core is a planned city, which is being built by the Abu Dhabi Future Energy Company, a subsidiary of Mubadala Development Company, with the majority of seed capital provided by the government of Abu Dhabi. Designed by the British architectural firm Foster and Partners, the city will rely entirely on solar energy and other renewable energy sources, with a sustainable, zero-carbon, zero-waste ecology.