“While it’s not an across the board recovery, we are hearing a much more positive outlook in terms of demand for design services,” said AIA Chief Economist, Kermit Baker, PhD, Hon. AIA. “Moving into 2013 we are expecting this trend to continue and conditions improve at a slow and steady rate. That said, we remain concerned that continued uncertainty over the outcomes of budget sequestration and the debt ceiling could impact further economic growth.” — aia.org

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, together with city officials, announced today the winner of the adAPT NYC Competition, a pilot program to develop a new housing model for the city’s growing small-household population [...]. The winning entry, ‘My Micro NY,’ was designed by a development team comprising Monadnock Development LLC, Actors Fund Housing Development Corporation, and nARCHITECTS. — bustler.net

The New York Museum of Modern Art and MoMA PS1 announced CODA (Caroline O’Donnell of Ithaca, New York) as the winner of the annual Young Architects Program (YAP) in New York...Donna Sink shared "That PS1 installation just looks dull to me" to which Steven Ward responded "i must like dull. actually, i know i do. i'm thinking i'll like its texture and shadow. form".

We seem to have lost the political capacity to grapple with the big picture, the long range, the global scale. To a degree we've even lost the vocabulary. In design circles it's as if the perceived failures of mid 20th-century planning — exemplified by top-down urban renewal and personified by the power-brokering Robert Moses — have induced a kind of conceptual paralysis, an inability to formulate the public sector, or public works, in terms not beholden to a discredited history. — Places Journal

"I'm going to be intolerant of bad architecture," he says, describing how the former head of planning was a highways engineer who "let anything and everything through – including office blocks stacked on top of multistorey car parks.

"My idea of good architecture is about creating place. It's not about providing glitzy iconic buildings, competing one against the other, but how we use the best of what we've got." — guardian.co.uk

"Anything we can do to expedite the speed with which people can get licensed is a good thing," says David Cronrath, AIA, Dean of the University of Maryland's School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. "What Renee [Cheng, Professor and Head of the University of Minnesota's School of Architecture,] has done is establish a roadmap which a lot of people can follow. And, I think, of course they will." — University of Minnesota

The staging was called the Ideal House, and it was a fully furnished modern home, but one with an audience, a runway wrapped around it, and “windows” projected on the walls with scenes of the outside world. It was the latest in many intricate and avant-garde pairings between Prada and OMA...

The 12-piece furniture collection, designed by OMA for Knoll, will debut at the Salon Internazionale del Mobile in Milan in April. — blogs.artinfo.com

In an innovative response to the current property squeeze in China, a Beijing architectural and a design firm have combined creative forces to develop a portable house and garden on the back of a tricycle.

The Tricycle House and Garden is a sustainable mobile home with its design and construction inspired by the shape and movement of an accordion. The playful designed is also being described as the “adult cardboard box fort box.” — DesignBuild Source

But the insights of the maturing sciences of nature and human nature—of evolution and ecology and how human biology interacts with an environment—are only beginning to be applied systematically in design education and day-to-day practice...In the design professions we are, in a sense, like doctors trained more deeply in anatomy than in a patient’s total experience — Metropolis Magazine

A London architect firm has been declared the winner of an international competition to design a new $1bn Iraqi parliament building in Baghdad.

Assemblage architects was one of 130 firms to put forward a design for the £620million scheme.

But while Assemblage received its $250,000 prize in August, the designs have only just been released as the Iraqi Government had remained in talks with a rival, which came third place in the competition, Zaha Hadid Architects, The Guardian has reported. — dailymail.co.uk

When I first heard of Paju Bookcity, I imagined a bibliophilic paradise of human-scaled buildings with legible facades nestled side-by-side like volumes on a shelf. When I traveled to the real Paju Bookcity, I found an industrial estate created by companies related to all aspects of book manufacturing, sited north of Seoul in the marshes near the Demilitarized Zone. But if Bookcity is not the fairy tale I envisioned, it is a kind of Cinderella story: this is the industrial park remade. — Places Journal

The 14-year battle over the fate of the modern structure at the heart of Gettysburg National Military Park is over, as the National Park Service will begin demolishing the Richard Neutra designed Cyclorama building as soon as February. A disappointed Donna Sink argued "How can destroying what is truly a unique piece of art while allowing KFC to be visible from the battleground furthering our appreciation of the tragedy of this battle?"

Richard Meier & Partners’ mixed-use building was selected in an international competition topping submissions by Foster + Partners and Zaha Hadid Architects. The challenge, Bernhard Karpf, associate partner-in-charge, said was to create a hybrid building that was “like a city in itself,” which creates “property lines” that carves out distinct areas for rentals, offices, and shops, but still comes together in a unified and coherent design. — The Architect's Newspaper