Long accustomed to basing its reputation on the grandeur of its old buildings, the city now finds it almost impossible to agree on how to build new ones.

In recent months, traditionalists have blocked efforts to introduce contemporary architecture in the historic core [...]. Modernists are rolling their eyes at new buildings that copy traditional styles, arguing that they pervert a record of architectural progress long documented in mortar and stone. — nytimes.com

Why not ask Howard Hughes to abandon its current plan and do something really wonderful and revive the Guggenheim plan for Gehry’s gargantuan palace of titanium ribbons? The residential conversion of so many major office buildings is going, eventually, to create a need for new office buildings. Gehry’s plan could be enlarged gracefully to accommodate both offices and condominiums and rebalance the famous Lower Manhattan skyline... — 6sqft

Egypt is in the throes of a severe housing shortage [...]. But one thing the country has an abundance of is lonesome desert, and developers are turning there to construct immense projects that stick out in the emptiness like skyscrapers on Mars.

London-based photographer Manuel Alvarez Diestro has a yen for the monumental [...] naturally he was interested in the colossal structures rising on the outskirts of Egyptian cities. — citylab.com

Two decades after civil war blew the Lebanese capital to rubble, the city centre boasts immaculately rebuilt streets lined with Gucci and Prada stores – but the whole place is strangely deserted

[...] the resulting place feels less souk than Duty Free airport lounge. It is a monotonous world of more swanky high street brands, from Burberry to Tag Heuer, staffed by idle shop assistants awaiting the promised customer footfall that has yet to arrive. — theguardian.com

Big, brash, and full of energy, Moscow is a city that knows how to make an impression. But for all its attractions — world-class museums, clubs and rapidly transforming food scene, to name a few — its downsides are impossible to ignore. [...]

This week, The Calvert Journal considers Moscow’s prospects, consulting experts at the Moscow Urban Forum, looking in detail at two projects in the pipeline — VDNKh and Zaryadye Park — and checking out some neighbourhoods that are already going places. — calvertjournal.com

Does it make sense for Qatar to host the 2022 World Cup? German architect Albert Speer, whose office is in charge of the project, says yes -- and is doing all he can to ensure sustainability. In a SPIEGEL interview, he says how. — spiegel.de

There were ten out of twelve months of increasing demand for design services in 2014, and the Architecture Billings Index (ABI) points to a healthy outlook for the nonresidential construction industry. [...] The American Institute of Architects (AIA) reported the December ABI score was 52.2, up from a mark of 50.9 in November. [...] The new projects inquiry index was 58.2, following a mark of 58.8 the previous month. Design contracts posted a mark of 49.9, after a 54.9 score in November. — aia.org

It’s time to retire the term gentrification altogether. Fourteen years ago, Maureen Kennedy and Paul Leonard of the Brookings Institution wrote that gentrification “is a politically loaded concept that generally has not been useful in resolving growth and community change debates because its meaning is unclear.” That’s even truer today. Some U.S. cities do have serious affordability problems, but they’re not the problems critics of gentrification think they are. — slate.com

George Lucas said Friday that complications in his plan to build his Lucas Museum of Narrative Art on the Chicago lakefront may put Los Angeles back in the running.

Last summer, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti made a vigorous push to get the "Star Wars" creator to choose L.A., but the city lost out to Chicago.

"We still have to get through some lawsuits and things in Chicago [...] But it's still a possibility that Chicago will be unable to do it," Lucas said. — latimes.com

This map shows the difference in living costs around the world using figures from the world's largest database of user contributed data about cities and countries worldwide. The Consumer Price Index, used to determine the difference in the living costs between countries takes into account the prices of groceries, transportation, restaurants and utilities.

The CPI in the infographic is a relative indicator of a country's living costs compared to New York. — MoveHub

North Africa used to be a civilizational crossroads in which Muslims, Christians, and Jews not only lived alongside one another but also shared one another's language and culture. This mingled society, formed from many intense particularities, is what we call cosmopolitanism. It was born in the Middle East, and it now seems to be disappearing there, including from the one place where the cosmopolitan ideal reached its supreme realization: Alexandria. — Foreign Policy