"You can have a grand dome and grand minaret, but if it doesn't really serve the purpose, if it only has a large prayer space and nothing else, then you're not really fulfilling the needs of the community," he says. — BBC News

Passage across a border wrenches us from a space of citizenship — where our individual being is cloaked in layers of legal protection — to a space where we experience at once freedom and nothingness. As architects and planners, we lack the language for describing this shift in the perception and socio-political dimension of place; for distinguishing between the place of the citizen and the place of the stranger within the space of the state. — Places Journal

The act of memorializing the AIDS epidemic with a physical gesture goes beyond remembering and honoring the dead. AIDS is not a war, nor a disease conquered. There are no definite dates or victims. In our design process, we emphasize the changing and varied ways through which AIDS affects us personally and as a society. It is important to create a space that conveys our sense of solemn respect, remembrance and loss, without resorting to symbolism around a date, image, or names. — aidsmemorialpark.org

The Architectural League’s annual Emerging Voices lecture series and award spotlights individuals and firms with a distinct design ‘voice’ that has the potential to influence the discipline of architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design. Since 1982, the juried series has featured architects and designers from throughout North America who have a significant body of realized work that not only represents the best of its kind, but also creatively addresses larger issues... — archleague.org

Private nonresidential construction may pick up this year, as demand grows for new U.S. projects.

The Architecture Billings Index held at 52 last month, a sign of expansion, according to the American Institute of Architects. The commercial and industrial component -- a proxy for private building activity -- climbed to 54.1 in December, the highest in 10 months, the Washington-based association said Jan. 18. — bloomberg.com

Containing almost a 1000 questions, the Modern Architecture Game provides the base for an evening full of insights in the world’s most famous architects, buildings and trends of the Western architecture, all through the roll of a dice. The goal is simple: To reach the heart of the board before anyone else. This is done by moving your way through questions of six different categories: Visuals, Architect, Project, Style, Influence and Quote. — NEXT Architects Archinect profile

“GOOD Ideas for Cities is a project that emerged from events where we have paired designers with urban leaders to see what new kinds of thinking and solutions may emerge,” says Caplowe. “Even if ideas are far-fetched, they always lead to provocative conversations about the places we live and how we might improve them, rather than just accepting the status quo.” — nowness.com

This week the U.S. Department of Energy announced the 20 collegiate teams selected to compete in the U.S. Department of Energy Solar Decathlon 2013 and unveiled the competition’s location, the Orange County Great Park. caffeine junkie is disheartened by the decision "This is a real miss-step in my opinion.

... much of the capital's ancient architecture will soon be no more than a memory, according to one of the world's leading authorities, Niels Gotschow, as haphazard urbanisation and a desire for modernity change Kathmandu.

"To put things into a book is an act of preservation because one day this will be the only way to remember," says Gutschow, who has dedicated the last four decades to chronicling and preserving Nepal's architectural treasures. — mysinchew.com

David Galbraith has embarked on a fascinating journey, exploring the notion that the flow of people and their interactions inside buildings, is similar in design to the flow of data and user interaction of Web apps.

Could best practices in Web app design be applied to architectural design? — zdnet.com

At an event today in Albuquerque, New Mexico, U.S. Department of Energy Secretary Steven Chu announced the 20 collegiate teams selected to compete in the U.S. Department of Energy Solar Decathlon 2013 and unveiled the competition’s location, the Orange County Great Park in Irvine, California. — energy.gov

In August 2009 the editorial of MONU #11 on the topic of "Clean Urbanism" started with the lines "Do we simply have to stop having sex to produce Clean Urbanism..." — MONU

Breaking Out and Breaking In is an exploration of the use and misuse of space in escapes and heists, where architecture is the obstacle between you and what you're looking for. — bldgblog.blogspot.com

Evidently an impressive transformation is taking place – creating a truly modern metropolis. However Mr Hopkinson alludes to an almost cancerous growth on the outskirts of the nation’s capital city, and states that new builds fail to represent Chinese culture and imagination. Building projects on the outskirts of the city are viewed on an individual basis, without context and appear to result in “grids of square buildings of equal height, in a square plot, with uniform facades”. — blogs.independent.co.uk

The structures in Architecture Without Architects reveal a kind of purposeful, iterative, social design process that, while dating back centuries and originating in primitive cultures, offers a powerful parallel to contemporary shifts towards collaborative creation. — theatlantic.com