The White House may be the centre of great power, but it is not in itself that big or that shouty. It’s just a nice, white house, rather elegant, with a fine sweeping drive, but utterly dwarfed by the US Treasury next door – a fact that is, in itself, a bit of a clue to the relative significance of wealth in American society. [...]

If the White House gleams simply because of the influence of the man inside it, the rest of the Washington complex is designed to make its case for significance. — telegraph.co.uk

Rice University has picked the New York architectural firm Diller Scofidio & Renfro to design an opera theater scheduled to open in 2018.

The 600-seat theater will stand in what now is a parking lot between Alice Pratt Brown Hall, the home of Rice's Shepherd School of Music, and Rice Stadium. Besides serving the school's Opera Department, the theater will be used for chamber music concerts and other events, Rice said.

Charles Renfro, a 1989 Rice graduate, will be the lead architect. — chron.com

Yesterday, March 19, Horace Havemeyer III, Metropolis’s founding publisher passed away peacefully at his home in New York City. Death released him from the suffering brought on by complications from CIDP, a chronic neurological disorder that rendered him quadriplegic in mid-2011. He was 72. — metropolismag.com

The Royal Institute of British Architects (Riba) has demanded the suspension of the Israeli Association of United Architects (IAUA) from the international body, saying it is complicit in the construction of illegal settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and other violations of international law. — theguardian.com

On April 19 there will be a groundbreaking near Southern Illinois University to celebrate the restoration and preservation of the world’s first geodesic dome home, originally built by Buckminster Fuller and his wife, Lady Anne, in 1960.

The ceremony at the Fuller Dome Home in Carbondale will be open to the public, free of charge, and will include a tour and the opportunity to view rare artifacts. — upi.com

Greece's cultural gems have become the focus of renewed protest on the streets of Athens following the cash-strapped government's announcement of plans to include prime properties around the Acropolis, and other landmark buildings, in its privatisation programme.

Furious opponents marched through the city centre at the weekend to denounce the "illegal sale" of the country's heritage. — theguardian.com

Hudson Yards, the $20 billion Related Cos. development on Manhattan’s far west side, is taking a key step forward as work begins on a platform over the area’s rail depot designed to support three skyscrapers. [...]

Building the 37,000-ton platform enables the start of almost 6 million square feet (560,000 square meters) of construction on the eastern half of the 26-acre (11-hectare) yards, said Stephen Ross, the New York-based developer’s chairman and founder. — bloomberg.com

The American Institute of Architects (AIA) reported the February ABI score was 50.7, up slightly from a mark of 50.4 in January. This score reflects an increase in design services (any score above 50 indicates an increase in billings). The new projects inquiry index was 56.8, down from the reading of 58.5 the previous month. — calculatedriskblog.com

They submitted an entry for the "Architecture is" competition... The call for entries asked young architects to fill in the following sentence, "Architecture is ___." For Rudolph and Johnson, the answer to the question was a no-brainer. "Architecture is design, bitches."

They earned an honorable mention, and although it was never intended as a name, Design, Bitches stuck. It has turned out to be a mission statement in two words. — laweekly.com

"Places like M&A provide architects with the opportunity to fail. I mean that in the best possible way," said Benjamin Ball of Ball-Nogues, whose practice got its start at M&A. Ball-Nogues works are now in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. "Not many clients will support a trial-and-error process on an untested structure. M&A is a place where you can do that." — latimes.com

... it is, in a special way, an architectural history. “A small interior world of color and form now came within grasp of small fingers,” wrote Frank Lloyd Wright about his 9-year-old self in a 1943 autobiographical sketch. “These ‘Gifts’ came into the gray house” and “made something live here.” These were the famous Froebel Blocks, educational wooden building blocks in systematic shapes and sizes developed in the 1840s by Friedrich Froebel, the inventor of kindergarten. — nytimes.com

One of the great feats of 20th-century engineering, a landmark of modernist architecture is facing demolition. Late last month, the Russian State Committee for Television and Radio Broadcasting agreed to the dismantling of the Shabolovka radio tower in Moscow.

This is the Eiffel Tower of Russia, a 50-story conical structure of steel latticework, shaped roughly like a collapsing telescope, designed by the engineer Vladimir Shukhov. — nytimes.com

In 1980, when Marsha Maytum was a fledgling designer at the San Francisco architecture firm EHDD, the majority of women on construction sites were centerfolds. [...]

Nearly 35 years later, progress has been measurable but mixed. Women make up 25 percent of architecture staff in the U.S., though they now earn 42 percent of the architecture degrees. — curbed.com