We were invited to Qatar by the prime minister's office to see new flagship accommodation for low-paid migrant workers in early May - but while gathering additional material for our report, we ended up being thrown into prison for doing our jobs.

Our arrest was dramatic. — bbc.com

"There's actually such a lack of transparency that it is difficult to understand what developers and property owners are actually planning ... There's no mechanism for us or the city for us to understand ahead of time what's in the planning" [...]

The board ultimately wants Mayor Bill de Blasio to take steps to create more comprehensive zoning laws that would assess the impact of large towers on open space and mitigate any potential impacts, like shadows on Central Park. — wnyc.org

Airbnb is sailing a full-size floating house along the Thames this week to celebrate new rules to support home sharing in London.

The publicity stunt follows the passing of the Deregulation Act last month, which means Londoners are now free to rent their homes for up to 90 days a year without risk of fines or having to secure planning permission before doing so. — theguardian.com

The slum, of course, is the hottest button in urbanism. Beneath the cliché that half the world’s population lives in cities — and that urban populations will double by 2050 — is the fact that only bottom-up informal settlements, or slums, can absorb several billion new residents in the timeframe. [...]

URBZ is notable in that it offers a third way at looking at Dharavi — as both a failure and a better path to success than stillborn smart cities or other attempts at top-down instant urbanism. — nextcity.org

Chilean architects have begun to exert an influence well beyond the size and scale of their string-bean nation. [...]

“There are enough people working here in a way that shifts the art,” explains Aravena, sitting in the middle of his firm’s buzzing Santiago offices. “There is healthy competition and there is critical mass. When you have a critical mass, you are not alone in trying to push boundaries.”

The result: remarkable buildings all over Chile. — latimes.com

Nouvel’s aspirations for 53W53, scheduled for completion in fall 2018, sound almost modest: “It’s going to try to hold its place, [...]

It’s going to try to be good enough for New York … it’s going to try to make its own small contribution, and it’s done in a way that ensures this contribution is readable, understandable, and it’s maybe a bit more precious than others. And it’s a little linked to this notion – a fairly disputed notion these days – that architecture is still an art, sometimes.” — theguardian.com

Thousands of Bauhaus buildings are concentrated in a central district of Tel Aviv, called the "White City." It became a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2003.

These houses were built by Jewish architects who fled Nazi Germany and emigrated to what was the British Mandate of Palestine at the time. They designed their houses according to the principles developed by Walter Gropius [...]

Germany plans to invest 2.8 million euros ($3.2 million) to help preserve the cultural heritage. — dw.de

[...] shadows even turn light into another medium of inequality. Light becomes a resource that can be bought by the wealthy, eclipsed for the poor.

[...] multimillion-dollar apartments in the sky will darken parts of the park a mile away. Enjoyment of the park in the park – a notably free activity in a high-cost city – will be dimmed a little to give billionaires views of it from above. — theguardian.com

The Pritzker Architecture Prize, undoubtedly the most prestigious architecture award in the world, is having its ceremony in Miami this week. [...]

Otto often questioned how his work could benefit mankind. When speaking with Icon magazine in 2005, he was critical of grandiose structures such as Buckminster Fuller’s vision of an enormous dome over Manhattan, asking to himself: “What does society really need?” — miamiherald.com

The Members' Council of the BNA has elected Nathalie de Vries of MVRDV as the new chair of its board. Nathalie de Vries will take over the position on July 1st from Willem Hein Schenk, architect and partner of architecture firm De Zwarte Hond, which he has held since 2011. — mvrdv.nl