world-renowned Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, who recently chaired a 12-hour debate on "what is Europe?", argues the EU has been a good thing for his country and for the UK, where he began his architecture studies in the 1960s.

Sitting in his Rotterdam office, he told me the Brexit camp was full of people who "fundamentally want to change England back to the way it was before" and lamented the way, as he sees it, the EU has been used as a scapegoat. — bbc.com

There are simply too many ways for an attacker to get into your computer now. If you log on to the office network with a smartphone, or if you carry a laptop between work and home..you make it very easy for intruders to enter the office network [..]

With Wi-Fi hot spots, which can be easy to tap into, popping up everywhere, and with ever more network-enabled devices entering both the office and the home—smart TVs, smart front-door locks—intruders have a panoply of ways to break into your life. — the New Yorker

The architectural design profession continues to grow, with more women pursuing licensure than ever before, according to data released today by the NCARB...The number of practitioners working toward licensure reached an all-time high in 2015 with more than 41,500 individuals either taking the Architect Registration Exam, reporting Architecture Experience Program (AXP, formerly IDP) hours, or both. That’s up from 37,178 in 2014—a record high at that time. — Architect Magazine

Too often children from low-income neighborhoods are called broken...That needs to stop.

“You keep telling kids that, and they actually begin to believe they are broken, that there is something wrong with them,” she said. “When in reality, it’s not the children that are broken, it’s the environment and area around them that is not working properly.” — The Washington Post

The moment a space like [a gay bar] disappears, a sense of identity goes with it. “When you don’t have those spaces, you lose the ability to see yourself," [...]

"...we also need to continue to modify it in a way so everybody has access, so we’re not doing the same thing that the mainstream population is doing to us and isolating ourselves in certain spaces due to access.” — attn.com

"Climate change is happening so fast and on such a huge scale that it's forcing us to change the borders of a country," said head of the mapping expedition, Marco Ferrari... The borders of a country are "something we always consider as stable, as a political device, the foundation of the modern state, the most sacred thing, but this huge natural transformation makes clear how disruptive and alarming these changes are," he said. — Vice

China is speeding up efforts to design and build a manned deep-sea platform to help it hunt for minerals in the South China Sea, one that may also serve a military purpose in the disputed waters.

Such an oceanic “space station” would be located as much as 3,000 meters (9,800 feet) below the surface, according to a recent Science Ministry presentation viewed by Bloomberg. — Bloomberg

Although the game was simulating an environment from 1989, urban planners these days still run into problems trying to get officials to think about their city in the long run. Climate change and sea level rise is a very crystalline example of the way city officials get in their own way and set themselves up for larger obstacles later on [...]

Playing SimCity 2000 nowadays is a strange but wonderful way to realize what defines a city is not what it currently is, but what it could be. — inverse.com

For decades, state neglect forced a pace of progress that was slow and painful in Rio’s favelas, which – unlike many other informal settlements around the world – have a largely stable population. While some residents express satisfaction that state involvement has brought new income streams and improved security, there is anger that changes are imposed from outside, without consultation with residents. — the Guardian

On a recent afternoon, the historian Robert Jan van Pelt was standing in a quiet room at the 15th Venice Architecture Biennale, explaining the significance of an unassuming steel-mesh column that visitors to this sprawling survey of global design might walk right past.

“This is one of the most deadly things so far created,” Mr. van Pelt said. And it was the handiwork, he noted, of an architect. — the New York Times

As rents spiral in London, one company is proposing a solution. The Collective is a new block of apartments that acts like a giant shared house: small private bedrooms with communal laundry, kitchens, spa, cinema and workspaces … and some covert matchmaking by the managers. Our series on the global revolution in urban living goes inside the modern-day boarding house — theguardian.com

In a new paper, economists and public health researchers have found that not even working indoors in an office can protect people from the deleterious impacts of polluted air and particularly fine particulate pollution — defined as tiny particles that can travel deep into our lungs and even get into the bloodstream and eventually reach the central nervous system. — the Washington Post

The National Security Agency is researching opportunities to collect foreign intelligence — including the possibility of exploiting internet-connected biomedical devices like pacemakers, according to a senior official.

[...]

When asked if the entire scope of the Internet of Things — billions of interconnected devices — would be “a security nightmare or a signals intelligence bonanza,” [Richard Ledgett, the NSA’s deputy director] replied, “Both.” — the Intercept