News
Archinect 3.0 launches. Thanks to all the hard work by Paul, Alex and Theo! Report bugs, and discuss new version here.

Coinciding with the 3.0 launch was a raft of new features. These included:

5 (student) Projects: by Alexander Maymind

5 (student) Projects is a group of projects completed at Yale University's School of Architecture by 5 young architects during their graduate education. Each of the 5 projects are sited in New Haven on or adjacent to Yale's campus. Each project focused on an institutional building, loosely defined by program, type and context.

Read each one:

Monday: Mark Talbot (critic: Mark Foster Gage)
Tuesday: Adam Tomski (critic: Keith Krumwiede)
Wednesday: Matthew Persinger (critic: Keith Krumwiede)
Thursday: Brian Spring (critic: Peter de Bretteville)
Friday: Alexander Maymind (critic: Keith Krumwiede)

A Conversation with Michael Woo by by Orhan Ayyüce, who started the conversation by saying "Let's talk about built environment related issues; we have cities, open spaces, livability, affordability, social justice, healthcare"
 

A new Working out of the Box featuring Ann Armstrong, who although she received her M. Arch from the University of Texas in 2007 now works as a design-build/fabricator/sculptor and prefers to be called a "maker".

Also checkout Architecture in the Givenness - Toward the Difficult Whole Again an essay by Steven Song, a young architect which opens with three quotes by Adolf Loos, Hans-Georg Gadamer and David Leatherbarrow, and then goes on to write "Architects struggle with words. This is perhaps why Vitruvius prioritized the skill of writing for us. In such a struggle, we seem to be easily fascinated with borrowed words that appear to legitimize our operations. The problem is that such fascination often takes the words so out of their original context that in the end their meanings are reduced." Song then explores the concepts of communicative architecture and the difficoltà.
 

Also the blog Design + Build reviewed Archinect 3.0 writing "Overall - this is a triumph for Archinect"

The new issue of Art Lies is out on shelves. And its primary focus this issue is a proverbial bitch slap– "architecture is not art".

The architect David Chipperfield received the Mies van der Rohe award for his work on the restoration of the Neues Museum in Berlin.
 

School Blogs

Archinect School Blogger, Zhao, shared his first-hand experiences with the Japan quake while in classes at the University of Tokyo.
Lian posted a Letter from "Harvard Design School" re: Ai Weiwei current troubles with the Chinese government.

This semester at Wentworth Institute of Technology James and a friend are working on designing social housing in Allston village. They are crafting small houses then placing them next to one-another. "There are duplexes that jump over flats, duplexes that stack and town houses that shuffle together."

Discussion Threads

faintest ink is looking for some perspective on interning at MAD's Beijing office.
 

Inspired by an article in The Independent entitled The death of architecture rusty!, wants to talk about Death of Architecture (again).
 

pcoy is looking for examples of "unique / peculiar examples of architectural reuse projects in and around New York City."

Rufio thinks zaha is simply repulsive and that "It's actually Patrick Schumacher that engages interviewers and audiences alike in idea-based discussions."

While over on Green Thread Central, FRaC highlights the news that growing marijuana indoors may be worse for the environment than previously thought.

Finally, cmrhm, looks for advice on how to "create European style photo montage in PS", which leads to a conversation about contemporary (Photorealistic) vs more Retro (aesthetic) approaches to rendering...

Additionally

dETROITfUNK, attended last Saturday's ART X Detroit panel discussion at MOCAD, entitled “Chronicling a City in Change" aka the "Ruins Porn" panel. Describing the event he writes "It was a two hour roller coaster ride with side shows featuring people up on soapboxes opining on subjects that did not even remotely pertain to the panel topic. I was rather surprised at the choice of language used by the academics on the panel, who kept referring to urban landscape photography as “pornographic”, “fetishism” " Read more here