When news broke this week that the Museum of Modern Art in New York intends on demolishing the former American Folk Art Museum building next door, a cry went up in the architectural and preservationist community. Now, a group of advocates is not only collecting protests to save the building, but also crowdsourcing design ideas for integrating the two adjacent museum structures. — nextcity.org

Do we save the American Folk Art Museum? As an architecturally significant monument, I believe MoMA should rethink its decision to raze the structure completely. If museums aren’t interested in saving the aesthetic heritage of our city, then we should be concerned about their role in our culture. — hyperallergic.com

To be sure, I do not believe that design practices do not involve research, or that these practices do not produce new knowledge. Nothing could be further from the idea. All design draws upon knowledge, either produced by existing research or new research. But critically, design is not synonymous with research. Design cannot base its conclusions on design itself. — Plat Journal

...even for a big gun like Koolhaas, the global depression has had an impact. Thus his new furniture line for Knoll called “Tools for Life.” It’s a pretty standard track for any architect when the commissions start to dry up; have some interns fart out designs for a furniture line, ship it off to China for production, then slap a price tag on it with no less that 4 zeros and BOOM! you’re back makin’ Bentley payments and wearing Prada suits in no time. — The World's Best Ever

In June this year UNStudio will launch the new organisation of its practice as an open-source knowledge-based practice operating projects around four specialised Knowledge Platforms.

As part of the reorganisation of the studio a new interactive online knowledge platform will be launched, aimed at facilitating the open exchange of knowledge, with the ultimate goal of introducing and encouraging the expansion from a collaborative to a co-creative working model for architecture. — unstudio.com

Sources close to the project said Foster + Partners... is helping Apple on the retail store design brief. — marketingmagazine.co.uk

The City of Melbourne has been certified carbon neutral, an important step toward its goal of becoming one of the world’s most sustainable cities.

In a carbon constrained economy, councillor Arron Wood said the certification by Low Carbon Australia against the National Carbon Offset Standard (NCOS) “was a solid demonstration of the City of Melbourne’s commitment to a more sustainable Melbourne.” — DesignBuild Source

Unlike Rietveld’s complex interplay of layered planes, the Eameses, looking towards more commercial approaches to middle-class housing, created something more like the box that Rietveld was trying to escape. — ft.com

Reading this was for me an epiphany. I could see, almost in a flash, the unity of building and landscape developing throughout Mies’s building art, ultimately morphing into the podium that binds the Seagram tower to the urban landscape — plaza, platform, an oasis amid the chaos of New York. This led me to reevaluate the importance of surrounding context, in Mies’s architecture throughout his career and to understand in a new light some of his statements, drawings, and photomontages. — Places Journal

In 1967, his architectural firm, Warner Burns Toan Lunde of 724 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, won a contract to advise the Grumman Corporation of Bethpage, N.Y., for what would eventually be Grumman’s bid to construct an orbiting space station. Mr. Toan worked on the project for the next 20 years, until Grumman was bypassed as a prime contractor by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. — cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com

The latest evidence of Philadelphia’s architectural comeback? The Norwegian architecture firm Snøhetta is coming to town for a project at Temple University.

“We have a fantastic tradition of quality architeture and urbanism in Philadelphia, but we do go through low ebbs in that tradition,” says Harris Steinberg, the executive director of PennPraxis, the clinical arm of the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Design. — Next City

It is a thoroughly cynical piece of work, a building that uses a frenzy of architectural forms to endorse the idea that architecture, in the end, is mere decoration. Mayne's design appears to put innovative architecture on a literal pedestal — or a plinth, to be exact — while actually allowing it to become peripheral, noticeably separate from the heart of the museum and its galleries. — latimes.com