We’re already building the metropolis of the future—green, wired, even helpful. Now critics are starting to ask whether we’ll really want to live there. — bostonglobe.com

For the first time since Henri Labrouste (1801-1875), currently the subject of an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, formulated the conception of the new, democratic library, the central library is fighting for survival. The relevance of these gloriously inflated book boxes is being questioned in an age that looks to the Internet for its intellectual resources. — online.wsj.com

Robert González wants to create a 3D digital replica of Downtown El Paso, using lasers.
The director of Texas Tech’s fledgling architecture program in El Paso says the student project would be part of a new historic preservation program he is developing here. The project would create a permanent record, in 3D, of El Paso’s most historic and endangered buildings. — El Paso, Inc.

Design studio Nonotak—Noémi Schipfer and Takami Nakamoto—have created an installation, called Isotopes v.02, which is a reaction to the Fukushima nuclear meltdown that happened back in 2011.

The piece featured at Geneva's 2013 Mapping Festival and consists of projected light which entices the viewer to investigate further. But, once the unsuspecting visitor has headed towards the light like a moth to the flame, they become trapped in this beguiling maze... — thecreatorsproject.vice.com

Lootah said the project is a complete glass, transparent structure resembling a huge window frame intended to highlight the attractions of the city so visitors can view the skyscrapers on Shaikh Zayed Road from one side — symbolising modern Dubai — while the other side of the frame will show the old Dubai landmarks of Deira, Umm Hurair and Karama.

“The electrical panoramic elevators will help visitors move through its facilities as if they are moving in the sky inside the glass frame,” — khaleejtimes.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

Winners of the 2013 National Design Awards, selected from a variety of disciplines, were unveiled today by the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum in New York City. — bustler.net

“Part of the research I did for that game is I went around to Alcatraz in San Francisco because I wanted to have a level where you break into a prison,” Chris Delay, one of Introversion’s co-founders said in an interview.

“I started working on how to simulate a prison and how it was going to work. It was then that it occurred to me that building a prison was quite good fun, and that it shouldn’t be, but it is.” — business.financialpost.com

This film was shot in October last year when the Internet Archive celebrated a landmark --10 petabytes of stored media. Tour the space, which still looks more like a church than a library and see where millions of books are digitized and stored in a facility in Richmond, CA. — theatlantic.com

*This screed is awesomely entertaining and full of cool links, even though it’s almost entirely implausible..There’s also the occasional built-from-scratch Brasilia. So, some people might build a city like this in some central-planned, high-tech rush, before realizing that urban drones, bacteria, and 3DPrinters are fated to become as old-fashioned and pokey as swoopy, Space Age Brasilia is right now. - Bruce Sterling — Co.Exist. - Fast Company

"OpenStreetMap is not about crowdsourcing, OpenStreetMap is about community collaboration. This is not you being a mindless crowd adding data to some big company’s map. This is about you putting in data in your own neighborhood, working with your neighbors, working with a larger community to refine and make a really cohesive map. That's the kind of experience that was so successful with Wikipedia." — Atlantic Cities

Staples, the world’s largest office products company and second largest e-commerce company, today became the first major U.S. retailer to announce the availability of 3D printers. The Cube® 3D Printer from 3D Systems, a leading global provider of 3D content-to-print solutions, is immediately available on Staples.com for $1299.99 and will be available in a limited number of Staples stores by the end of June. — businesswire.com