Zack Giffin is [...] a host of a new series, “Tiny House Nation,” beginning Wednesday on FYI, an A & E Networks channel that used to be known as Bio. When we caught up with him by phone last week, he was on the road for the show, which chronicles those who live the tiny-house life. The chalet, he said, was sitting on a trailer “in a lovely field in Lummi Island, Washington State, on my parents’ property, which is where it lives when we are not around.” — nytimes.com

If women can’t always rely on legislation to support their cause, could they rely on architects? [...]

Brown says it’s time for the design community to take a stand on women’s reproductive rights. “Architects have to become more politically engaged in our built environment.” To that end, Brown is helping organize a design competition that will rethink a privacy fence for Mississippi’s only abortion clinic. — fastcodesign.com

The city of Jericho sits in the hot, flat Jordan Valley down the hill from Jerusalem. Jericho has bragging rights as one of the oldest towns on Earth. But one of its newest homes looks like it might have arrived from outer space.

Ahmad Daoud hired a firm of young Palestinian architects to build this house. Like Jericho's original homes, it is built of dirt. This one has a contemporary twist, though: It's constructed with earth compacted in bags that are then stacked and plastered over. — npr.org

The Russian architect Yuri Grigoryan, and his firm Project Meganom, have been chosen for the long-delayed 22bn ruble ($640m) expansion of the State Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow. The new design replaces a controversial proposal by the British architect Norman Foster that required the destruction of historic buildings, upsetting preservationists. Foster pulled out of the project last year. — theartnewspaper.com

Urban blight is the single biggest challenge to large-scale revitalization efforts underway in the city of Detroit, where roughly 84,000 properties and vacant lots are considered blighted or at risk of blight [...].

In an interview with DLA Piper attorney and ULI member Jay Hailey, Gilbert kicked off the Institute’s public/private partnership conference in Detroit. — Urban Land Institute

Architecture students at the University of Texas at San Antonio will have to go back to the drawing board in order to reconstruct their fallen class project in Travis Park.

Weather conditions and probably someone climbing on the sculpture, called “F2,” factored into the collapse of part of the structure Saturday night.

The 15-foot-tall, 40-foot-wide dome made of interlaced wood topped with white spikes has only been in the park since late May [...]. — mysanantonio.com

Architects and builders all over the world seem to be participating in a fictional rat race to build the very first 3D-printed house. In the past five years we’ve seen quite some drawings and models of 3D-printed architecture, but only few architects have the printers running until now. In this article we’ll compare five of the most prominent 3D-printing initiatives in the world to find out what 3D-printed architecture has in store for the coming years. — popupcity.net

Skyscrapers and shanties, gleaming malls and rundown markets, palatial houses and the piss-poor guys who build them: Those are the divides in cities like Mumbai, Nairobi and Manila. Rich and poor do not much mingle.

But a movement is afoot to change that. It aims to integrate the poor into the urban bloodstream, instead of shunting them from sight. For this "inclusive cities" movement, urban renewal doesn't require razing slums and markets. — npr.org

Delegates to the American Institute of Architects (AIA) national convention in Chicago elected Russell A. Davidson, FAIA, (AIA Westchester Hudson Valley) to serve as the 2015 AIA first vice president/president-elect and 2016 AIA president. William J. Bates, AIA, and Francis M. Pitts, FAIA, will each serve as vice president from 2015 through 2016; John A. Padilla, AIA, as the Institute’s Secretary from 2015 through 2016. — aia.org

Zaha Hadid is the first woman to win the Design Museum's Designs of the Year Award 2014 with her Heydar Aliyev Center in Baku, Azerbaijan. Another first in this year's competition is that the Heydar Aliyev Center is the first architectural project to win the widely recognized award. — bustler.net

The Municipal Art Society of New York has developed a new tool that shows where development could bring the most change across the city's five boroughs. This resource is a continuation of the group's "Accidental Skyline" initiative, an effort to curb the "as-of-right" development (which allows developers to bypass some regulatory hurdles) that has resulted in some of New York's tallest and skinniest new skyscrapers. — citylab.com