The Modernism worth pursuing — worth protecting — is the one where Gregor Samsa wakes up transformed into a large insect, and ends up with an apple embedded in his carapace, which is exactly what the Folk Art Museum is to the Museum of Modern Art, right now, right where it is. — Places Journal

Over at the LA Times, Christopher Hawthorne reported on LACMA Director Michael Govan’s plan’s for $650-million new building by Swiss architect Peter Zumthor...Eric Chavkin commented "New construction has always been fundraising tail that wags the museum dog. Big names to draw bigger money...Now that AMPAS is leveraging it's Oscar prestige to be a part of LACMA, a new name to entice donor dollars is Zumthor, a name that means absolutely nothing to most.

Paris has a new monthly event highlight: Architecture Whispers, a series of intimate multidisciplinary and cross-cultural conversations between emerging, established and visionary international architects and their colleagues in other disciplines. They take place in the Silencio Club located at 142 Rue Montmartre, an exclusive venue for writers, directors and musicians, established by American filmmaker/visual artist/musician David Lynch. — bustler.net

Winners have been announced recently at the fifth annual Mock Firms International Skyscraper Competition, organized by Chicago Architecture Today. [...]

The top title of International Skyscraper and Mock Firm Champion (a combination of architectural and marketing efforts) was awarded to the team AZAHAR Architecture composed of five architecture students and one professor from the Polytechnic University of Valencia, Spain. — bustler.net

The shape of the new headquarters of the People's Daily, the Communist Party's main propaganda machine, has sparked heated discussion online for looking a bit too phallic.

Most photos posted on Sina Weibo, the mainland's most popular microblogging site, were removed by censors, and attempts to search for " People's Daily building" in Chinese were met with a message that read: "According to relevant laws, regulations and policies, search results cannot be displayed." — scmp.com

MoMA’s plan can hardly be a surprise, because its entire history since 1937 is based on demolishing potential landmarks. — nytimes.com

Frank Gehry has pulled out of a major architecture exhibition set to open June 2 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, a move that could force the show to find a new venue or face the prospect of being canceled altogether.

The exhibition... is an exploration of the last 25 years of Los Angeles architecture, with work by Gehry, Thom Mayne, Michael Maltzan, Barbara Bestor, Lorcan O'Herlihy and many younger architects. — latimes.com

Adrian Smith and Gordon Gill Architecture has unveiled plans for Imperial Tower, which would become Mumbai's tallest building and surely one of the world's most slender skyscrapers, should it come to be built.

The 116-story, 400-m (1,300-ft) tall residential skyscraper has a distinctive curved shape, which AS+GG says has been designed to "confuse the wind." — gizmag.com

The highly anticipated expansion to the Kimbell Art Museum, designed by the Renzo Piano Building Workshop (RPBW) and Kendall/Heaton Associates, opens to the public on Wednesday, November 27, 2013.

Renzo Piano’s colonnaded pavilion stands as an expression of simplicity—glass, concrete and wood—surrounded by elms and red oaks, some 65 yards to the west of Louis I. Kahn’s vaulted, luminous museum of 1972.

Henry Hope Reed, an architecture critic and historian whose ardent opposition to modernism was purveyed in books, walking tours of New York City and a host of curmudgeonly barbs directed at advocates of the austere, the functional and unornamented in public buildings and spaces, died Wednesday at his home in Manhattan. He was 97. — nytimes.com

Winning design schemes have just been announced in the international competition Borderless: Designing Future ASEAN Borders. The competition brings attention to the spaces along the borders of the 10 members of ASEAN, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, with the aim of improving their existing conditions. — bustler.net

Women make up almost half the graduating architecture classes, but only 17 percent of architecture-firm leadership. Even as women have made great strides in the field over the last several decades, that disconnect hasn’t gone away. — csmonitor.com

From the very first, the Vietnam Memorial, it was about being extremely site-specific and site-sensitive, creating something that merged with the land around it. But much more so in the last decade or two decades, my artwork has focused on making you aware of things in the natural world that we might not be aware of. What’s invisible we tend not to think about, so I’ve made sculptures that reveal the terrain below sea level. — style.time.com

One expert in the UAE has estimated that 70% of the high-rise buildings there have panel facade cladding made of a combustible thermoplastic core held between two sheets of aluminium. — BBC News