The collection of the Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA) is inching closer to safety. The Michigan State Legislature agreed yesterday to contribute $350m over the next 20 years to protect the museum’s works of art and shore up Detroit’s ailing pension funds. The state’s governor Rick Snyder is expected to sign the bill, which is part of a package to help settle the city’s bankruptcy, by the end of the week. — theartnewspaper.com

Suzhou is like many Chinese cities. It has a historic core, including nine Unesco world heritage sites, as well as many beautiful gardens, waterways and temples. [...]

But Suzhou has also embarked on another fascinating project: urban mimicry. From Venetian-style “water town” districts to Dutch-style suburban living, Suzhou hosts what journalist Bianca Bosker calls “original copies”: simulations of western landmarks. The city is fast becoming China’s city of clones. — theguardian.com

With a feature called HomeKit that's coming in iOS 8, iPhones will be able to start controlling smart devices, such as garage door openers, lights, and security cameras. It'll all be controllable through Siri too [...]

It's only a matter of time before major tech companies begin vying to be the thread that connects appliances and devices throughout your home, and this seems to be Apple's first step in the door. — theverge.com

What if you only had to buy one piece of furniture to make your tiny apartment abundantly livable?

CityHome, a new project from MIT Media Lab’s Changing Places group, promises to make that fantasy a reality. The highly transformable device, loaded with built-in sensors, motors, and LED lights, promises to make a 200 sq.ft. apartment feel three times larger. — citylab.com

In an effort to remediate a large patch of heavily contaminated soil in the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou, engineers managed to unleash a smell so pungent that, last week, owners of the site took a new tactic: a giant tent to contain it all. [...]

Though the 20,000-square-meter polyester tent contains an area roughly the size of three football fields and rises 36 meters near downtown, it only covers less than half of the contaminated area. — motherboard.vice.com

As a result of the violence, the local real estate market has bottomed out. Those who flee the city usually can’t sell their homes and businesses, so more and more buildings, including some of Tampico’s largest and most impressive ones, lie abandoned. Buildings that could easily survive for another century are mere empty shells, with huge trees growing through the roofs and out of the windows. Such levels of abandonment are rarely seen in the centre of a major city. — theguardian.com

The New York Public Library’s revised renovation plan — to upgrade the Mid-Manhattan Library and create more public space in its flagship Fifth Avenue building — is expected to cost about $300 million, according to library officials who outlined new details of the project in interviews. [...]

But officials, for the first time, revealed that the original plan, mostly scrapped last month in large part because of questions about the price tag, would actually have cost more than $500 million [...]. — nytimes.com

As the 14th edition of the Venice Biennale of Architecture prepares to open, the pavilions of the Giardini might be the perfect venue for an analysis of the architectural manifestations of national identity. [...]

Architecture is a curious world in which the things we hate might look very similar, to a less-inured eye, to the things we love. It is a question of degrees, of finesse. Koolhaas exemplifies the paradox. — ft.com

Despite its distance from the center of New York City, Co-op City’s site and scale make it prominent on the landscape [...]. Critics, historians, and even the Supreme Court have noticed as well, weighing in since construction began in 1966 on what the complex signifies for housing finance, site planning, cooperative ownership, ethnic and racial diversity, and tenants’ rights. [...] But it is far from prototypical. — urbanomnibus.net

[The American shopping mall] has its own traceable lineage, from the earliest planned shopping centers to the first regional hubs for shoppers traveling by car, to the novel post-war enclosed malls of Victor Gruen [...]

Malls, in short, have spread across the American landscape -- and defined it -- with remarkable success, adapting to our changing tastes along the way. — washingtonpost.com