The American Institute of Architects (AIA) today announced that it had accepted an award from the U.S. Commerce Department’s International Trade Administration’s Market Development Cooperator Program (MDCP) to promote the export of American architectural services to India and Sri Lanka. — aia.org

The Principals' latest exploration of interactive architecture, Wave Dilfert, reads the changes in light and shadow occurring within it, catalogs and calculates them, then pulses, contracts or expands in reaction. — Mocoloco

Last week, Raj Patel, principal and acoustic consultant at Arup treated the crowd at Yale School of Architecture’s Sound of Architecture Symposium to a presentation on his company’s Sound Lab. The Sound Lab uses a battery of speakers arranged in a spherical configuration to mimic the acoustic properties of a digital architectural model. In real time, designers can change the shape of a hall, the material of the seats, the angle of the walls, and hear how it might affect the acoustics... — metropolismag.com

We tend to think of architecture as solid, stable, enduring, something that at its best will outlast us and possibly say something about us to future generations. Demolition makes powerfully evident the vulnerability, the mortality, of all things standing. — Places Journal

It’s true that micro-units are not family-friendly, but it’s less true that a small apartment is inherently inhabitable. While the debate rages on about how much space is too little, there is little talk of how much is too much.

Different constituencies may have their reasons for opposing these tiny units, but however varied they may be, all seem to reflect a distinctly American perception of what qualifies as “enough” space. — opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com

Richard Florida...thinks it needs a “robust community proc­ess,” in which an outside group could help build consensus with the surrounding community and create a plan that takes their wishes­ into account. “You can have serendipity,” he said. “But when you’re building a community, you also need a strategy.” — NYT

The narrowest building in Poland, and possibly the narrowest in Europe, is the brainchild of Israeli writer Edgar Keret. It was conceived as a memorial to his parents' family, who died in Warsaw during the World War II Holocaust.

The house was actually squeezed in-between two existing central Warsaw residential buildings on the edge of the former Warsaw Ghetto.

Polish architect Jakub Szczesny designed the weird construction, which is still a real house with all the necessary facilities. — rt.com

Like the meeting of the Red and Assiniboine rivers, there’s a compelling confluence of urban activists standing next to each other on the sidewalk of Portage Avenue in downtown Winnipeg. To my right is a group of First Nations flood evacuees protesting (politely) against cuts to their daily living allowance. To my left, below the gleaming, mirror-polished aluminum balconies of the Avenue on Portage mixed-use development... — theglobeandmail.com

The winning design, easily the most ambitious of three finalists announced last month, calls for a repeating series of concrete arches that both refer to and exaggerate the Butler design as the bridge stretches from downtown Los Angeles on the west to Boyle Heights on the east, spanning the L.A. River and the 101 Freeway on its way. — latimes.com

Decades ago, Erica Stoller accompanied her father, the architectural photographer Ezra Stoller, on a shoot of the Chase Manhattan Bank Plaza in New York. It was cavernous and dark, but Ezra insisted that a shaft of light would burst through in 15 minutes. “The plaza was full of sun,” she remembers. “It did just what he told it to do.” — nytimes.com

Within the station, the proposal creates wider concourses, with new and improved entrances. Externally, streets will be reconfigured as shared vehicle/pedestrian routes, and Vanderbilt Avenue fully pedestrianised. The proposal also creates new civic spaces that will provide Grand Central with an appropriate urban setting for the next 100 years. — fosterandpartners.com

Perhaps to palliate our worst Kafka-esque architectural nightmares, the city invited three renowned architecture firms, WXY Architecture + Urban Design, Skidmore Owings & Merrill (SOM), and Foster + Partners, to imagine “the next 100 years” of Grand Central Station (which is fast approaching its 100th birthday) and the surrounding Midtown cityscape. — blogs.artinfo.com

“China is evolving into a construction superpower,” says Fang Zhenning, a scholar who lectures at the architecture school of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing.

The country is expected to account for one-fifth of worldwide building by the year 2020, Fang says.

In the battle to build ever-faster, some architects have resorted to digitally cloning designs that can be replicated time after time. — aljazeera.com