Visionary architect Paolo Soleri,the Italian-born designer of the experimental Arizona city near Cordes Junction called Arcosanti, died Tuesday. He was 93.

Arcosanti officials confirmed the death in a statement.

Soleri, one of the last living direct disciples of Frank Lloyd Wright, designed a $3.5 million pedestrian bridge in Scottsdale - Soleri Bridge & Plaza, the only completed bridge of the hundreds he designed. It is located southwest of Camelback and Scottsdale roads. — azcentral.com

Unlike Rietveld’s complex interplay of layered planes, the Eameses, looking towards more commercial approaches to middle-class housing, created something more like the box that Rietveld was trying to escape. — ft.com

Reading this was for me an epiphany. I could see, almost in a flash, the unity of building and landscape developing throughout Mies’s building art, ultimately morphing into the podium that binds the Seagram tower to the urban landscape — plaza, platform, an oasis amid the chaos of New York. This led me to reevaluate the importance of surrounding context, in Mies’s architecture throughout his career and to understand in a new light some of his statements, drawings, and photomontages. — Places Journal

Do you know what I love more? My children. And that is why I will never live in my MCM dream home. Because mid-century modern architecture is designed to KILL YOUR CHILDREN. (Also, moderately clumsy or drunk adults). — projectophile.wordpress.com

Naturally, there were some projects that Bob worked on more and others that I worked on more. Sometimes our collaboration was more close than others. But I think our best projects were when we worked together. I remember so many real tousles—and those were the projects that worked out best. — Architect Magazine

The four firms — Santiago Calatrava, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, SHoP Architects and SOM — will have until May 29 to propose new designs that will be unveiled to the public that day at the TimesCenter on West 41st Street. “We’re really trying to unlock people’s imaginations about the very real potential of a new arena and of a new Penn Station,” said Vin Cipolla, the society’s president, in an interview. — artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com

Whole Foods is teaming up with rooftop garden company Gotham Greens for its next New York location. When the lettuce only has to come down a staircase from the roof, that’s about as local as you can get. — fastcoexist.com

In 1967, his architectural firm, Warner Burns Toan Lunde of 724 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, won a contract to advise the Grumman Corporation of Bethpage, N.Y., for what would eventually be Grumman’s bid to construct an orbiting space station. Mr. Toan worked on the project for the next 20 years, until Grumman was bypassed as a prime contractor by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. — cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com

D’Hooghe, a Belgian-born architect and director of the Center for Advanced Urbanism at MIT, cares deeply about urban form and the large-scale issues cities face in achieving more efficient energy use, better transportation and less congestion. One of his main concerns is better integrating suburbs with the larger metropolitan areas in which they exist. — web.mit.edu

"Irrational exuberance" seems to me an apt introduction to an understanding of Rem Koolhaas in the '90s and beyond; it foregrounds his great success in navigating the intersection of the pragmatic corporate sector, on the one hand, and the “delirious” and volatile realm of desire and possibility, on the other. ... Koolhaas has encouraged his followers to shed the crippling shackles of critical theory and pick up a surfboard upon which to ride the shock waves of the new economy. — Places Journal

"They felt some of those things were too flashy and not in keeping with the kind of the culture of Facebook, so they asked us to make it more anonymous. Frank (Gehry) was quite willing to tone down some of the expression of architecture in the building." — gawker.com

Foster + Partners recently added another international airport to its portfolio, the just-opened Queen Alia International Airport in Amman, Jordan. According to a press release, the flight hub boasts a “highly effective passive design, which has been inspired by local traditions,” namely a canopy of shallow concrete domes that mitigate Amman’s hot climate and mimic forms in Islamic art. — blogs.artinfo.com