Though indebted to conventional artistic methodologies, the vibrant, playful works of Jorge Prado lack traditional notions of artistic autonomy, with multiple uses straddling sculpture, furniture and architecture. Over espresso and a cigarette in the kitchen of his Los Angeles home, Pardo shares with Oscar Tuazon his processes of transforming built environments into functionally fluid sites designed to facilitate a diversity of experience. — youtube.com

Chicago has many truly great buildings. It sits firmly on the map of global architecture and is the birthplace of the skyscraper. Creating a short video about just five great buildings is doing this city a massive disservice, as there are many and this is simply my thoughts. — vimeo.com

Not every director studied the greats at film school. Joseph Kosinski spent more time with Wren than Welles. "I went to graduate school in New York to get a degree in architecture… but never got my licence." Instead Kosinski, 38, has applied his skills to virtual worlds such as "the Grid" -- the digital setting of Tron: Legacy. Now, in Oblivion, he gets to imagine Earth 60 years after an apocalyptic war. — wired.co.uk

Now Mr. Ai is answering the guards’ request in a different key. He is presenting them, and the world, with his first heavy-metal music video, one with detailed re-creations of scenes from his 81 days of detention. He also portrays fantasies he imagines flitting through the guards’ minds. Mr. Ai posted the video on a Web site, aiweiwei.com, on Wednesday morning, Beijing time. — nytimes.com

Eric Moss gets to play a real-life game of Sim City. The architect's 1986 master plan for Culver City proposed 43 buildings and half are completed today. Eric joins us along with others from across the country to discuss urban revitalization. — live.huffingtonpost.com

Slowly it dawned on me that this was not a photograph of a real building but a total digital fabrication. I was shocked, not in a moralistic way but, rather, with amazement at the masterful deception and amused pique at being fooled. — Places Journal

Iwan's photography always surprises me. It allows me to see my buildings with different eyes. His pictures always remind me how important the surroundings are... the context the building is in. - Toyo Ito — youtube.com

When I walked out to get breakfast this morning, clouds had obscured all but the topmost workings of the 1 World Trade Center site, visible through our living room window—a strange vision of machines, pulleys, cranes, and gears sort of hovering in the sky, like something out of Archigram by way of Hayao Miyazaki. — bldgblog.blogspot.com

Congratulations to New York Magazine and Iwan Baan, one of our favorite architectural photographers (and 2012 Golden Lion Winner): The American Society of Magazine Editors has chosen the cover of the November 12, 2012, issue of New York Magazine depicting the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy in New York City as "Cover of the Year" in the seventh annual ASME Best Cover Contest. — bustler.net

His office is in the mythical 80 Wooster Street basement studio of George Maciunas – a location long abandoned after its original incarnation as a hive for Fluxus gatherings with artists like Yoko Ono, Andy Warhol, and Jonas Mekas. For his first full-realized New York building, Sondersen is designing the offices of crowd-sourced fundraising website Kickstarter. — ignant.de