to Rule the Sea is to Ruin the World — The Forgotten Space

Several years ago a Swedish-American company called Plantagon unveiled plans for a series of massive skyscraper greenhouses that stood to transform urban farming in large cities. While the spiraling vertical farms seemed too good to be true at the time, Plantagon just broke ground on its very first vertical farm this week in Linkoping, Sweden. — Inhabitat

What’s the best place to build a wetland? How about at the site of an old MTA bus lot in South Los Angeles? It took more than $26 million and nearly three years to complete the transformation from parking lot to urban wetland. Open to the public as of February 9, the new South Los Angeles Wetland Park that doesn’t only efficiently process storm water runoff–it also provides crucial community green space. — blog.archpaper.com

I assumed someone would be working to preserve it. I called around and thought the American Institute of Architects or the Municipal Arts Society would be working on this. So many things in New York have preservation groups attached to them. But pretty quickly I found no one was doing anything for the High Line and that it was actually going to be demolished. — dirt.asla.org

Scott Timberg wrote a piece for Salon examining how "One of the coolest creative-class careers has cratered with the economy". spaceman was surprised by some of the architects quoted and wrote "One successful architect feels ‘Very much like an immigrant worker,’ and another says, ‘We are making less than a cleaning lady.’ This seems a little over the top.”

Construction was completed on a new straw bale building for the University of Nottingham which brings together the School of Biosciences and the School of Veterinary and Medical Sciences. The project is the first stage of a 20-year visionary masterplan for the university's Sutton Bonington Campus. — youtube.com

...will re-examine the built environment of the arid and semi-arid west as a vast field of opportunities for design innovation at a range of scales, from building systems to infrastructure and landscape spaces. The conference will present and debate a portfolio of design strategies generated in response to the challenges set forth in ALI's Drylands Design Initiative... — Arid Lands Institute

Lindal Cedar Homes has just launched their Lindal Architects Collaborative, an innovative new prefab home collection featuring designs from the world's leading architects. The line, which will feature prefab systems designed by 12 architects, will not only make modern design more accessible, but will make architecture previously reserved for the more affluent financially accessible to the masses. — www.Inhabitat.com

“GOOD Ideas for Cities is a project that emerged from events where we have paired designers with urban leaders to see what new kinds of thinking and solutions may emerge,” says Caplowe. “Even if ideas are far-fetched, they always lead to provocative conversations about the places we live and how we might improve them, rather than just accepting the status quo.” — nowness.com

This week the U.S. Department of Energy announced the 20 collegiate teams selected to compete in the U.S. Department of Energy Solar Decathlon 2013 and unveiled the competition’s location, the Orange County Great Park. caffeine junkie is disheartened by the decision "This is a real miss-step in my opinion.

At an event today in Albuquerque, New Mexico, U.S. Department of Energy Secretary Steven Chu announced the 20 collegiate teams selected to compete in the U.S. Department of Energy Solar Decathlon 2013 and unveiled the competition’s location, the Orange County Great Park in Irvine, California. — energy.gov

In August 2009 the editorial of MONU #11 on the topic of "Clean Urbanism" started with the lines "Do we simply have to stop having sex to produce Clean Urbanism..." — MONU

Evidently an impressive transformation is taking place – creating a truly modern metropolis. However Mr Hopkinson alludes to an almost cancerous growth on the outskirts of the nation’s capital city, and states that new builds fail to represent Chinese culture and imagination. Building projects on the outskirts of the city are viewed on an individual basis, without context and appear to result in “grids of square buildings of equal height, in a square plot, with uniform facades”. — blogs.independent.co.uk

Designed by John Kaliski Architects, in conjunction with Lawrence Moss & Associates, Landscape Architects, and Kimley-Horn & Associates, Civil Engineers, the Ocean Park Boulevard Complete Green Street recently broke ground on December 12, 2011. When completed in early 2013, it will be the longest complete green street in the City of Santa Monica, and one of the longest in Southern California. — bustler.net

Guy wrote “why, when the evidence is out there, were a number of architects so defensive about the “Don’t Major in Architecture” article? Why are they whining? My conclusion, so far, is that this touched a nerve precisely because this isn’t new information to architects.” In response emergency exit wound asked, “And the assumption that 'an informed public makes the space for architecture more possible' is based on what exactly?