Practitioners create visually dazzling and unexpected forms that’re seemingly unrelated to anything as prosaic as function or context. They exploit advances in design and construction technology to build ever more visually arresting and extraordinary buildings.

The future of this movement is likely to be limited because the law of diminishing returns inevitably applies to the search for ever-newer and ever-more unexpected architectural forms. — INDAILY

This project was designed to offer a kinetic and mechanical solution to a problem that would otherwise be nearly impossible to solve with static architectural components: providing shading across a building facade for both low evening sun and high afternoon sun conditions.

If designing cabins is your thing, maybe you can find ideas from the Community Forest International's International Sustainable Architecture Competition in New Brunswick, Canada...The submissions presented new approaches to cabin design, but the jury decided "The Whaelghinbran Nomadic Cabin", by recent master's graduate Nathan Fisher from Toronto, was most suitable to be built at CFI's developing Rural Innovation Campus. — bustler.net

Researcher Anastasia Swearingen claims that "LEED certification is little more than a fancy plaque displayed by these ‘green’ buildings", and compares energy use intensity (EUI) of LEED certified buildings to non-certified buildings. Quoting data from the Green Building Report for the District of Columbia, she concludes that "For LEED-certified buildings, their EUI was 205, compared to 199 for non-certified buildings..." — treehugger.com

Gensler recently began a research project focused on Los Angeles and D.C., “Hackable Buildings – Hackable Cities,” exploring how building owners can adapt their properties to meet changing demand.

“It really started with some research that we were doing on the evolution of office buildings,” said Raffael Scasserra, a Gensler principal. “What we were looking at is what is that evolution like? What is it transforming to and what are buildings going to be?” — washingtonpost.com

China’s premier, Li Keqiang, announced a “war on pollution“—evidence that the highest levels of government have acknowledged that China’s smog and dirty air have reached a crisis point. And what better way to launch a war on pollution than with a fleet of smog-clearing drones? — qz.com

New homes in America are a lot bigger than they used to be. In fact since 1950 they've doubled in size, to an average about 2,500-square feet per home. And a bigger home generally uses more energy. So one college professor is attempting to trash some of our ideas about home ownership, by sleeping in a six-by-six-foot dumpster.

[...] this month, Wilson moved into a sanitized recycling dumpster on the Austin, Texas, campus of Huston-Tillotson University. — marketplace.org

In keeping with the designer's forest-themed interior motif, a pair of homesteader cabins from the late 1800s are being installed in Twitter's new digs in the historic Western Furniture Exchange and Merchandise Mart building, a 1937 art deco landmark on Market Street. [...]

In this spirit of reuse and reclamation, Lundberg saw the cabins as a novel way of breaking up the wide open spaces of a gutted floor in the old furniture mart that will become a casual dining area. — Marin Independent Journal

The commercialisation of the urban landscape has resulted in the privatisation of public space. As city centres have become tributes to consumption, private interests have permeated these spaces. They have become awash with pseudo-public consumer spaces which belong to corporations rather than the citizenry. Although these places hold the semblance of being “public”, they are owned by corporate interests and are therefore under private control and not accountable to the public. — New Left Project

Your assignment is to come up with an idea so revolutionary that it could be considered an important advance in industrial design.

Students at Rice University in Houston accomplished that with plans for a floating city that is being considered by one of the world's largest oil companies. Last year, the students won the inaugural Odebrecht Award for a radical design of man-made floating islands where as many as 25,000 oil workers and their families could live. — npr.org

The long and varied history of waste and its removal in New York from the 18th century onwards is the subject of Elizabeth Royte’s 2005 book Garbage Land and of the Urban Omnibus City of Systems video she narrates. In the video, Royte describes how her research into where exactly her trash was going after she threw it out has led her to become a more ecological citizen, with “a systems view” of our interconnected processes of manufacturing, transportation, disposal and re-use. — Urban Omnibus