This week, architects and city staff met with marine scientists for the first time and heard the verdict: Maltzan's dream of a Key West-style reef with corals and easily visible sea life would remain just that in Tampa Bay waters. Now the architect is going back to the drawing board, looking for more realistic ways to present the centerpiece feature of the Lens, as the replacement of the current Pier is known. — tampabay.com

Imagine you’re a New York City building official, and the mayor’s office has decided to let an artist build a living room six stories up in the air and wrap it around a historic statue of Christopher Columbus in the middle of one of Manhattan’s busiest intersections.

Oh, and the plan is to have 100,000 people climb up stairs to view it. — New York Times

“Bat Cloud,” as her creation is called, is an unusual array of hanging bat houses installed at the refuge in May by the University at Buffalo architecture professor with the help of current and former students. — Buffalo News

This week, after a $56-million renovation, that 12-acre rectangle from the top of Bunker Hill to the base of City Hall will be christened as L.A.'s Grand Park, providing downtown with its first sizable amount of open space. — latimes.com

Dutch firm HOSPER landscape architecture & urbanism has sent us images of its latest project, GENK C-M!NE, an urban square design for the revitalized mining area C-Mine in Genk, Belgium. C-Mine houses various creative industries as well as cultural functions and is currently hosting Manifesta, The European Biennial of Contemporary Art. The design of the square was a collaborative effort of HOSPER with Carmela Bogman Art In The Public Space and ARA Dries Beys. — bustler.net

At the 1928 Amsterdam games, athletes were accommodated in spare rooms in boarding houses and aboard ships. The first Olympic Village was built in 1932, in the Baldwin Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles, but it was dismantled after the games and virtually no trace survives today. Not until the 1952 Olympics in Helsinki did host cities began to plan and develop permanent structures for housing athletes. — Places Journal

England's prestigious Cambridge University yesterday announced the team of preferred architects for a first phase of its proposed development at North West Cambridge. The architects were selected following an architectural competition and include established UK and international practices, as well as local and smaller, new practices. — bustler.net

Constructed on Sydney’s Harbour’s Cockatoo Island, the interactive 42 meter-long landscape installation, entitled Dune, is composed of hundreds of fibres that brighten according to human sounds in what Roosegaarde describes as “techno-poetry”. — Vogue

Pegasus, the company behind the scheme, had originally intended to build the huge, 15-square mile replica town near to Hobbs in the southwestern U.S. state but has postponed building work after struggling to find enough land for the project.

The $1billion city (£643million) with no residents had been billed as a testing ground for researchers developing products ranging from self-flushing toilets, intelligent traffic systems and next-generation wireless networks. — dailymail.co.uk

The 70-foot channel has for years operated as a flood-control channel, wildlife sanctuary and escape valve for treated waste water befouled with chemicals and trash. Now, the soft-bottom swath of weedy islands, dense brush and willows draped with fast-food wrappers, plastic bags and clothes is one of the newest summer attractions in town. — latimes.com

In some of the dirtiest places on Earth, author and environmentalist Andrew Blackwell found some beauty. His book, Visit Sunny Chernobyl, tours the deforestation of the Amazon, the oil sand mines in Canada and the world's most polluted city, located in China. — npr.org

Free parking on an earthquake-cleared Manchester St site is on hold while a life-sized Monopoly square moves in. — The Press

Curtain, a new sculptural project by young architects Jerome Haferd and K. Brandt Knapp, will open this Saturday afternoon with a picnic at Socrates Sculpture Park in Long Island City, Queens. Curtain is the winning entry in Folly, a recent competition hosted by the Architectural League and Socrates Sculpture Park that invited emerging architects and designers to propose contemporary interpretations of the architectural folly. — bustler.net

Revolutionary guards who are denied entry to an apartment have been known to scale a building’s walls with grappling hooks to dismantle receivers. It may seem like something out of a spy novel, but this cat-and-mouse game tells the deeper story of a complex exchange between the Islamic Republic and citizens of Tehran. In the absence of legitimate public space for discourse or demonstration, the satellite receiver opens a space for political dissent and cultural protest. — Places Journal

Another bigger picture repercussion of the Act is the cognitive and cartographic dissonance that occurs in Los Angeles where the Jeffersonian city grid abuts a pre-existing Spanish or French grid. — KCET/Departures