Here is a constant refrain: Why is so much new building junk? [...]

The truth is that architects don’t have that much power. Architects don’t design most buildings; they are designed by developers or contractors working from cookie-cutter plans. Perhaps an architect signs off. [...] In any number of ways—our building codes, our housing policies, our preservation statutes—we systemically encourage bad building. — artsblog.dallasnews.com

Seventy years after the end of the war, Berlin is finally filling the last gaps left by Allied bombs, which destroyed more than two-thirds of the buildings in the city center. Architects say the construction boom offers Berlin a chance to make up for decades of bad planning and mediocre architecture. “This is a new time in Berlin,” says Libeskind [...]. “It’s one of the great cities of the world, and we expect it to compete. We don’t expect it to be some backwater.” — bloomberg.com

Cornell alleges that the firm Pei Cobb Freed & Partners committed 'architectural malpractice' in its plans for the new wing of the museum, leading to structural deficiencies, cavities in the roof, cracks in the ceiling and other problems. The university says it has suffered 'at least' $1.1 million in damages as a result of the flawed designs. Pei, who also designed the original museum in 1968, was hired by the university to build the addition in 2006. — The Ithaca Voice

municipal infrastructure is being expanded to include living creatures. In many ways, of course, this is simply the contemporary urbanization of a practice that goes back millennia. However, the ensuing juxtapositions – of 21st-century landscapes and cities being maintained not by high-tech machines or by specialty equipment but by neo-medieval groups of trained animals – can be quite jarring. Animal labour is once more becoming an explicit component of the modern metropolis — newscientist.com

In a blow to Google’s expansion plans, on Tuesday the Mountain View City Council voted to give the search giant roughly a quarter of the office space it had requested for the project, and instead awarded the lion’s share of the city’s future office development –- 1.5 million square feet –- to LinkedIn.

Google received about 500,000 square feet, or about enough to build one of the four buildings it had proposed. — bits.blogs.nytimes.com

Mock-ups of the so-called ‘crabots’ are featured in lengthy planning documents submitted to the City of Mountain View Council in Silicon Valley [...]

‘Our objective is to create a solution that can be assembled efficiently and economically within pre-erected canopy structures by means of small, easily manoeuvrable cranes.’

‘Through the life of the buildings this [will] allow reconfiguration and maintenance…of the canopy envelope from within.’ — architectsjournal.co.uk

[Mark Herrema] and Kenton Kimmel, a high school classmate, founded the Irvine, California-based company Newlight Technologies in 2003. After years of research, the team unveiled a way to produce plastic from carbon emissions that is actually more affordably priced than oil-based plastics.

The "secret sauce" is a biocatalyst that combines air and methane, and reassembles all of the carbon, hydrogen and oxygen molecules into a thermoplastic the makers call AirCarbon. — Smithsonian

When the Presidio Trust announced last year that it was rejecting George Lucas’ bid to build a museum at Crissy Field, its leaders didn’t reveal that three days earlier they had been prepared to grant the “Star Wars” creator the land he sought. [...]

if he agreed to change the look of his desired museum, a mock-classical temple that at one point had four ceremonial domes. [...]

Five months later, Lucas was bound for Chicago. — sfgate.com

While neighborhood councils don't have governing power, they are crucial for the public to come together and discuss issues and concerns, organize projects and lobby for change from City Council. [...]

Page and other activists say that Skid Row is underrepresented in the [Downtown LA Neighborhood Council] [...]

He likened downtown to a glazed donut, where the shiny donut part is the rapidly gentrifying downtown, and where Skid Row is the empty hole in the center. — laist.com

What will Zumthor's plan do for the museum's art and its audience? An art museum presents our histories in visual form; is LACMA making room for enough stories? [...]

Los Angeles is one of the world's four major centers of art production. Yet the museum has no permanent-collection galleries that tell a California-authored story of contemporary art. [...]

The proposed Zumthor building is also awfully expensive given its modest gain in exhibition space. — latimes.com

President Obama will choose the University of Chicago as the site for his presidential library, according to several reports and sources close to the Obama family.

The proposal from the University of Chicago in Chicago’s South Side Hyde Park neighborhood, which is near where the Obamas have a home, their daughters attended grammar school and Michelle Obama worked as a vice president of the university’s medical center, is the apparent winner, reports and these sources say. — forbes.com

It's been over 50 years, but for many, the destruction of Charles Follen McKim's original Pennsylvania Station still stings (hey, even Mad Men mourned its passing). But now, there is a hopeful (if improbable) plan from Richard W. Cameron—principal designer at Atelier & Co—to bring back the civic jewel of a long-gone New York.

According to Traditional Building's's Clem Labine, Cameron's plan has three main goals [...]." — ny.curbed.com

With the historic lifting of the Cuban embargo creating an instant rush to visit the long-cloistered island nation, a rush for rediscovery will bring all manner of Cuban art, culture and design to the fore.

While it's not always acknowledged as such, Cuban architecture, especially modernist buildings, showcase an eclectic and exciting blend of styles, from the Spanish and Art Deco buildings that preceded them to the modern and Brutalist influences that came during the postwar period. — curbed.com