The Case Study Houses have finally made the National Register of Historic Places (well, 11 of them have). [...]

The LA Conservancy's Modern Committee spent nearly a decade trying to get some of the CSHes recognized and last month the National Park Service officially listed 10 of the houses [...]; an eleventh "was determined eligible for listing but not formally listed due to owner objection," according to the Conservancy. — la.curbed.com

A hunger strike in California state prisons calls for an end to indefinite solitary confinement in Security Housing Units, known as SHUs. Raphael Sperry has challenged fellow architects to ban the design of SHUs. Beverly Prior responds, reflecting on a career designing for incarceration. Joe Day sees societal values mirrored in the growth of both American prisons and museums. — kcrw.com

Everyone makes mistakes. But when seemingly minor blunders are made in designing and building structures, the results can be catastrophic. Read about some of the more infamous architectural failures in history, and what we have learned from those mistakes. — NewSchool of Architecture + Design

Modern homes, both real and fake, as featured in the movies. — vimeo.com

[My Ideal City] is an instrument where all people in Bogota help to create their city by interacting in proposals made for their Downtown in crowd sourcing, thus impacting design through real time interaction and direct feedback. Once the different initiatives are defined, the process is completed by the population crowd funding its own initiatives. — Aedes

School buses are so much fun. The springy seats, the awkward-to-open windows [..]—it all hearkens back to a time in your life when you were younger, happier and worry-free. But did you ever imagine living in one? Hank Butitta did.

By his last semester at architecture school, Butitta had grown weary of doing projects that only existed on paper, ones that were destined to be filed away and forgotten. He got sick of making things that nobody cared about. So what did he do? He bought a school bus. — gizmodo.com

How do you fancy living in a city with which you can interact? A city that acts more like a living organism, a city that can respond to your needs. [...]

But how do we get to this smarter future. Who will be monitoring and controlling the sensors that will increasingly be on every building, lamp-post and pipe in the city?

And is it a future we even want? — bbc.co.uk

“We have beaten the odds and the obstructionists over and over again,” the mayor triumphantly declared in his State of the City address in March. He chose an appropriate venue: the Barclays Center, the new home of the Brooklyn Nets, which was a lightning rod for his all-out development policy. A vigorous opposition was beaten in the courts and the City Council in much the same way he often steamrolled opposition to his comprehensive rethinking of development. — nytimes.com

They look like shelters for hikers in a national park, but these wooden sheds in Switzerland have a rather less innocent purpose – they provide a discreet location for men to have sex with prostitutes. — telegraph.co.uk

Coast Modern is an independent documentary by directors Mike Bernard and Gavin Froome. Travelling along the Pacific North West coastline from LA to Vancouver, the film showcases the pioneers of West Coast Modernist Architecture, and the homes that have become their legacies. Stepping inside the most inspired dwellings on the west coast, we feel how the light and space of a classic Modernist home can work in collaboration with the natural environment. — coastmodernfilm.com

Renowned British architect Norman Foster has resigned from a proposed expansion to the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow.

In a statement released on Thursday, Foster + Partners claimed it had formally resigned from the project more than two months ago.

In 2009, the Russian government approved Foster's plans and agreed a sum of $650m (£415m) to modernise and expand the museum.

But the project subsequently stalled. — bbc.co.uk

“An economic downturn is always a good thing for preservation,” says Regina O’Brien, chairperson of the Modern Committee of the Los Angeles Conservancy. “A lot fewer developers are making a lot less money, and therefore they have a lot less motivation to pursue these profit-oriented flips. But the problem is that the opposite is true when the market picks back up.” — thedailybeast.com