When I first heard of Paju Bookcity, I imagined a bibliophilic paradise of human-scaled buildings with legible facades nestled side-by-side like volumes on a shelf. When I traveled to the real Paju Bookcity, I found an industrial estate created by companies related to all aspects of book manufacturing, sited north of Seoul in the marshes near the Demilitarized Zone. But if Bookcity is not the fairy tale I envisioned, it is a kind of Cinderella story: this is the industrial park remade. — Places Journal

Even the smallest architectural design proposes to make an intervention in the known world, it dares to change things as they are, and to venture how they might be. It envisions a possible future, sometimes a fantastic one, and then sets out to make it manifest. If that’s not a rich subject for children’s books, I don’t know what is. But such books should also make us question what we want architecture and architects to be. Not just in fairy tales, but in real life. — Places Journal

A $300 million renovation of the New York Public Library’s ornate marble palace in midtown Manhattan will start by evicting 1.2 million books.

The plan, unveiled today and overseen by the London firm of Foster & Partners, keeps more books onsite than had been suggested in earlier proposals. Books will be stored in space under Bryant Park and in a Princeton, New Jersey, facility. — bloomberg.com

The budding industrial designer also gave his top picks from the fair, which unsurprisingly all feature bright swaths of primary colors: a Charlotte Perriand bookshelf from Galerie Downtown accented with yellow squares; a Pierre Guariche chair from Demisch Danant, a Riteveld chair from Galerie Vivid; and a desk from Galleria Rossella Colombari by Gio Ponti, whom he was so delighted to have discovered: “He tried to make the office fun!” — blogs.artinfo.com

A literal advertisement for reading: MVRDV completes Book Mountain and Library Quarter Spijkenisse. — mvrdv.nl

University presses will endure as long as they are in a position to offer significant value to academic authors and their readers, and as long as they have the support of their home institutions. In the present and near future, we will see new models for the university press including funded open access models, collaborative publishing models, and global partnerships to develop and disseminate high quality scholarship worldwide. — chronicle.com

The hottest cultural controversy of this already hot summer concerns the New York Public Library (NYPL), and a plan to disembowel its main building – a plan that will slice open the stacks and "replace books with people", in the words of the NYPL system's CEO, Tony Marx. It's enraged writers and professors, demoralized a staff already coping with layoffs, and called the entire purpose of the system into question. — guardian.co.uk

A UK friend is writing "a little book" on architectural losers. Such a British idea. He's collecting the under-talented and the under-appreciated, the beaverers-away in an unappreciated style. To which my predictable response is: how many volumes can you run to? How, from the myriad, will you choose? — theage.com.au

This is John Hill’s element, and these are his people. Hill has begun to emerge, in the past five years or so, as one of New York’s great architectural communicators, an exquisitely informed tour guide for the layman design enthusiast. His main platform has been his website, A Daily Dose of Architecture, which, if it does not quite stand astride the world of design blogs, nevertheless lords over a small sub-fiefdom of largely unstaffed, noncommercial sites. — capitalnewyork.com

The Case Study program, in case it still needs any introduction, was a pioneering effort sponsored by L.A.-based Arts & Architecture magazine and its ambitious editor, John Entenza, to develop new and unapologetically modernist prototypes for the postwar American house. — latimesblogs.latimes.com

Scott Erdy, designer of the new library, says open, flexible space — the furniture is movable and the walls act as one giant whiteboard — allows student and staff "knowledge transfer," a concept reinforced by Danuta Nitecki, dean of Drexel's libraries. "We don't just house books, we house learning," she says. — time.com

The top may not reach unto heaven, but the Argentinian artist Marta Minujin's 25-metre tower is made of 30,000 books in languages from all over the world. Built in San Martin Square, Buenos Aires to mark the Argentinian city's naming as 2011 World Book Capital, the artist suggested that in 100 years people will say 'there was a Tower of Babel in Argentina ... and it didn't need translation because art needs no translation' — guardian.co.uk

“Voiture Minimum: Le Corbusier and the Automobile” ($49.95) focuses on Le Corbusier’s design for a “minimum car,” a two-seat, bare-bones people mover with a sheer, angled front. His design existed only in drawings during his lifetime, but became probably the most famous of all automobile designs contributed by architects. — NYTimes.com