The value of an institution isn’t measured in public square feet. But its value can be devalued by bad architecture...The designs have all the elegance and distinction of a suburban mall. I was reminded that Mr. Foster is also responsible for the canopied enclosure of the inner court at the British Museum, a pompous waste of public space that inserts a shopping gallery into the heart of a sublime cultural institution. — New York Times

We often see our homes as sanctuaries from the outside world. We try to leave our problems at the door and just make our dwellings a neat and comfortable place. Dutch Artist Frank Halmans’ was obviously bored by this syndrome thus he created the ‘Hoover Buildings’. The machines literally suck up dirt into the interior of a dollhouse. Halman has created functioning vacuum cleaners and dust busters in the shape of buildings in an attempt to show how ‘dirt and debris’ clutters our personal space. — ignant.de

The winners of the 34th Annual Interiors Awards, presented by Contract magazine, have been unveiled. Besides the top entries in each of 13 project categories, ranging from large and small offices to public space and adaptive re-use, the jury also chose LA-based architect and designer Joey Shimoda as recipient of the 2013 Designer of the Year Award. The 2013 Legend Award was bestowed upon Michael Graves. — bustler.net

"Sometimes if you do a competition, you know you’re taking a risk of it not happening. Many of them that we’ve done remain unbuilt for us, and unbuilt for anyone. We always look at competitions very carefully to try and determine whether it’s just emotion on the part of the sponsors or it's something real." — DWELL

The redevelopment of the Richardson Olmsted Complex will...transform the former Buffalo State Hospital from a place of healing to one of hospitality.

The design builds upon Olmsted's original intent while conserving existing resources, preserving the fabric of the space, and creating connections and purpose. — Buffalo Rising

When you walk in, you encounter what is, at first glance, a small studio apartment. Within that cube are actually 8 functional spaces. The living room and office become the bedroom with a tug of a bookshelf. Open one of the closets and you'll find 10 stackable chairs that go around a telescopic dining table for large dinner parties. An entire guest room with bunk-beds and a closet is revealed behind a wall that slides out on tracks. And of course, a well-equipped kitchen and bathroom await. — gizmodo.com

Built in 1989, the five-bedroom, five-bathroom residence has been described as "a village that looks inward." There is a main house, an office, a guesthouse and a garage-and-gym structure with a breezeway. The half-acre of grounds include a reflecting pond, a swimming pool and an olive orchard. — latimes.com

Making a mess of the built environment and the politics of space, one issue at a time. — SOILED

Mr. Ito, the Japanese architect whose team won a Golden Lion Award at the 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale for its concepts for new housing after the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, recently designed flatware called Mu. Introduced in Paris by the Italian company Alessi, the pattern complements Ku, the delicate porcelain service Mr. Ito created for Alessi in 2006. — nytimes.com

... calling the Lowline a "park" isn't totally accurate. It would be a culture park that hosts art shows, performances, and events, and it would be tied to the neighborhood gallery scene. Preliminary designs call for a densely planted "ramble," but this would be accompanied by a gallery, plaza, and connecting grassy common. The whole site is currently dotted with support columns, and the design would remove ten of these to created a 5,000-square-foot column-free plaza. — ny.curbed.com

The modernists were attempting to make architecture for a class of people who were not necessarily privileged to the architectural product... that’s very relevant for our times, because once again architecture has drifted to the fringe of being a product for the elite... when the early modernists imagined that we could build light, airy, and dignified environments for working-class, they recognized that there was a limitation on the resources and capital society had available to make the work. — artinfo.com

We seem to have lost the political capacity to grapple with the big picture, the long range, the global scale. To a degree we've even lost the vocabulary. In design circles it's as if the perceived failures of mid 20th-century planning — exemplified by top-down urban renewal and personified by the power-brokering Robert Moses — have induced a kind of conceptual paralysis, an inability to formulate the public sector, or public works, in terms not beholden to a discredited history. — Places Journal

"I'm going to be intolerant of bad architecture," he says, describing how the former head of planning was a highways engineer who "let anything and everything through – including office blocks stacked on top of multistorey car parks.

"My idea of good architecture is about creating place. It's not about providing glitzy iconic buildings, competing one against the other, but how we use the best of what we've got." — guardian.co.uk