The Miami Center for Architecture and Design has two and a half years to find new digs. The landlord, Stambul, has declined to renew the lease on their current location, a grand two floor space in the Old U.S. Post Office which the Miami Chapter of the American Institute of Architects meticulously brought back to life. — miami.curbed.com

Eisenhower Memorial Commission chairman Rocco Siciliano will step down as leader of the board but will remain a member [...]

Siciliano, who is 93, is a World War II veteran who served as a special assistant to Eisenhower in the White House ... The commission’s founding chairman, he suggested the board elect Sen. Pat Roberts (R-KS) to succeed him. [...]

“We need a tough Marine like him to bring this project to conclusion.” — washingtonpost.com

Times Square has always been about reinvention — in order for the New York Times' headquarters to be built (and give the spot its name), the Pabst Brewing Company's Pabst Hotel had to be demolished. But in the late 1970s, after decades of grandeur followed by decades of decay, imagining the future of Times Square became a particularly pressing project. [...]

Here are some plans for the future of Times Square, some of which never caught on and some of which still have a chance. — nymag.com

[The Great Cannon] allows China to intercept foreign web traffic as it flows to Chinese websites, inject malicious code and repurpose the traffic as Beijing sees fit. The system was used, they said, to intercept web and advertising traffic intended for Baidu — China’s biggest search engine company — and fire it at GitHub, a popular site for programmers, and GreatFire.org, a nonprofit that runs mirror images of sites that are blocked inside China. — NY Times

The issue of water supply in the context of climate change was the topic for the recent 5KL: Water symposium, organized by The Architectural League and The Cooper Union Institute for Sustainable Design.

Twelve experts in water resource design and management — from architects to geographers to former government officials — addressed the carbon intensity of providing a clean and adequate water supply and how design and planning can contribute to that goal. — urbanomnibus.net

It's a big deal when Denver's top architect publishes an essay saying this city is failing at design downtown. That we are building one mundane apartment building after the next. That we are wasting the opportunity to become a national leader and ruining the urban landscape by putting profit above civic pride.

Jeff Sheppard said all that [...] in a guest editorial in last Sunday's Denver Post. And we'd be wise to hear him and do what he's suggesting: Knock it off immediately. — denverpost.com

Far from reducing his workload or resting on his considerable laurels, the 80-year-old Meier and his partners are also wrapping up construction on several other projects, including the HH Resort and Spa in Gangneung, South Korea; the Leblon office building in Rio de Janeiro; the 140-unit Rothschild Tower in Tel Aviv; the Cittadella Bridge in Alessandria, Italy; and Teachers Village, a mixed-use development in Newark, New Jersey. — The Real Deal

The costs of this misfiring property market are huge, mainly because of their effects on individuals. High housing prices force workers towards cheaper but less productive places. [...]

Tot up these costs in lost earnings and unrealised human potential, and the figures become dizzying. Lifting all the barriers to urban growth in America could raise the country’s GDP by between 6.5% and 13.5%, or by about $1 trillion-2 trillion. — economist.com

Justin McGuirk’s Radical Cities: Across Latin America in Search of a New Architecture should be required reading for anyone looking for ways out of the bleak social inequality we’re stuck in. There were 40 million more slum dwellers worldwide in 2012 than there were in 2010, according to the UN. Private markets clearly can’t provide universal housing in any way approaching efficiency, and governments are often hostile to the poor. — Metropolis Magazine

“What is it that you can do in a pavilion that you can’t do in a building? Buildings – you don’t want them to move. How can we get this structure to respond in a very subtle way to the weather and perhaps amplify the sound of the wind moving through it?” — theguardian.com

The phrases "public housing" or "low-income housing" do not generally conjure thoughts of architectural innovation. [...]

But it doesn't have to be that way, as several recent housing developments in Los Angeles prove. Instead, they pose the question: What if low-income housing was perceived as leading the vanguard of innovative, responsive architecture? — kcet.org