...In the 1970s, the streets east of Little Tokyo and west of the L.A. River made up a dingy district of hollowed-out warehouses that landlords rented to artists who needed a lot of space for little money [...] Then a decade ago, what started with a new restaurant on this block and then another up that street, turned into an avalanche of development [...] — LA Times

With change in Queens arriving rapidly, the Mets can preserve a piece of team history—and public good will—by helping to restore a part of the World's Fair from 50 years ago. — CityLab

Migrant workers building the first stadium for Qatar's 2022 World Cup have been earning as little as 45p [≈75¢] an hour, the Guardian can reveal [...] More than 100 workers from some of the world's poorest countries are labouring in ferocious desert heat on the 40,000-seat al-Wakrah stadium, which has been designed by the British architect Zaha Hadid [..] — The Guardian

Witold Rybczynski, the architect and emeritus professor of urbanism at the University of Pennsylvania, complained recently about “starchitects” who often work in cities they are unfamiliar with, creating buildings that are out of sync with their surroundings. In an interview, he argued in favor of local architectural talent, or “locatecture.”

Are superstar architects ruining city skylines? — NY Times

Design competitions play a fascinating role in the history of architecture, with losing entries often as important in defining the progress of architectural thought and theory as the actual winning and built projects: the projects that might have been built becoming as influential as those that perhaps should never have been built. — theepochtimes.com

Cities that are growing and cities that are shrinking, climate change, environmental health and equity, resource scarcity, technological change — all demand that we rethink how we plan, design, construct, and maintain the built environment. These challenges also demand that serious design journalism and scholarship move from the margins to the center of the larger cultural discussion. — Places Journal

A Motor City Mapping app will make it possible for users to snap photos of properties and text them to the public database. (They are trying to brand a new word to describe this process — the awful-sounding “blexting.”) These will be quality-checked before going onto the database, and the hope is that users will participate in training sessions before pointing, clicking and sending. Several “blexting bootcamps,” will be held in coming weeks. — nextcity.org

Until present, we knew of similar patterns created from saline solutions and isolated proteins, but this is the first report that demonstrates how whole bacterial cells can manage the crystallisation of sodium chloride (NaCl) and generate self-organised biosaline structures of a fractal or dendritic appearance. — AlphaGalileo

Throughout his neighborhood of Lanier Heights, developers are buying up two-story townhouses and building an extra floor or two, additions that are known as pop-ups. They’re also extending the structures as far back as allowed, to within 15 feet of the property line, obliterating backyards in the process. [...]

A few doors down the other way is a deafening construction site, where a single-family home is being turned into eight units, taking full advantage of what was once the backyard. — washingtoncitypaper.com

What does a city look like? If you’re walking down the street, perhaps it looks like people and storefronts. Viewed from higher up, patterns begin to emerge: A three-dimensional grid of buildings divided by alleys, streets, and sidewalks, nearly flat in some places and scraping the sky in others. Pull back far enough, and the city starts to look like something else entirely: a cluster of molecules.

At least, that’s what it looks like to Franz-Josef Ulm, an engineering professor [...]. — bostonglobe.com

Leading British archaeologist and member of the House of Lords, Colin Renfrew, says the destruction of historic mosques in Mosul, northern Iraq, by Islamic state militants (Isis) “is a disaster for the cultural heritage of Iraq, and indeed of Islam”. The Prophet Jirjis mosque and shrine in Mosul was destroyed on 27 July, according to unconfirmed press reports. The 14th-century mosque was the latest in a series of holy sites targeted by the jihadist group. — theartnewspaper.com

"Star Wars" creator George Lucas on Monday will announce an architectural team for his controversial planned museum on Chicago's lakefront: an avant-garde Chinese designer whose credits include Toronto-area skyscrapers dubbed the "Marilyn Monroe Towers" and Chicago's Jeanne Gang, shaper of the undulating Aqua Tower here. — chicagotribune.com

The SONAR installation was conceived and built during the 1st Parametric Design Workshop at Universidade Católica de Pernambuco (UNICAP), Brazil. Applying Grasshopper and Rhinoceros as key design tools, the idea was to capture the lively relationships that take place on the main integration axis in the Campus to where social gatherings, daily conversations and meals converge, bringing these into the Architecture School building, a typical modernist structure punctuated by long boring corridors. — Coletivo-rt