London's Architectural Association School of Architecture and Foster + Partners have announced the winner of the 2013 Foster + Partners Prize, presented annually to the AA diploma student whose portfolio best addresses the themes of sustainability and infrastructure. The recipient is selected jointly by the AA and Foster + Partners at the end of each academic year.

This year’s prize has been awarded to John Naylor, of Diploma Unit 16, for his project ‘Bamboo Lakou’. — bustler.net

Delegates to the American Institute of Architects (AIA) national convention in Denver elected Elizabeth Richter Chu (AIA Corpus Christi) to serve as the 2014 AIA first vice president/president-elect and 2015 AIA president. James Easton Rains, Jr., FAIA, and Thomas V. Vonier, FAIA, will each serve as vice president from 2014 through 2015; and James P. Grounds, AIA, as the Institute’s Treasurer from 2014 through 2015. — aia.org

It might not seem like an architect’s area of expertise to reform inhumane prison conditions. But like attorneys, journalists and doctors, architects have a code of professional ethics. They’re required to “uphold human rights in all of their professional endeavors.”

Architect Raphael Sperry says that prisons designed for prolonged solitary confinement violate the human rights of the inmates, and that he and other architects are ethically bound to do something about it. — thestory.org

The prototype of the shelter is now being tested in a refugee camp in Ethiopia. The refugee families who would be making the shelter their homes will have a direct say in how the product is developed, putting their experience at the heart of this collaborative process. — ikeafoundation.org

As a revealing new exhibit at the Canadian Centre for Architecture shows, ambivalence about digital architecture was characteristic of most of the architects who pioneered it, including Peter Eisenman, Chuck Hoberman and Shoei Yoh. “The computer has become an opportunistic gadget for most of the profession,” Gehry tells the architect-cum-curator Greg Lynn in an interview for the exhibition catalogue. — forbes.com

Chee Pearlman, a design consultant and curator, ventured that nests are “probably the purest antidote to the heavy steel-and-concrete building footprints that, city by mega-city, are overtaking the globe.” — NYT

Smart city infrastructure can augment the ability of managers, planners, designers and engineers to define and implement a fundamentally better next generation of buildings, cities, regions — right? Maybe. For that to be a serious proposition, it’s going to have to be normal for planners and designers not only to collaborate productively with engineers, but to do so with the full and competent participation of the only people they mistrust more than each other ... customers. — Places Journal

"These products suggest the terrific span of Le Corbusier’s career in time, space, and scale, attacking the problems of how we should build and how we should live at home and abroad . . . If current architects take anything from the exhibition—a must-see, despite some critical flaws—it should be the power of those big, gestural drawings, where visual and verbal argument vividly come together." — The New Yorker

Clip/Stamp/Fold: The Radical Architecture of Little Magazines 196X – 197X takes stock of seventy little magazines from this period, which were published in over a dozen cities. Coined in the early twentieth century to designate progressive literary journals, the term “little magazine” was remobilized during the 1960s to grapple with the contemporary proliferation of independent architectural periodicals. —

"The protests in Istanbul indicated one simple thing for architects. We need new definitions for architecture in situations when architecture is removed from architects." -Yelta Köm, the organization founder — #occupygeziarchitecture

By century's end, rising sea levels will turn the nation's urban fantasyland into an American Atlantis. But long before the city is completely underwater, chaos will begin — rollingstone.com

"Are festivals and biennales dynamic catalysts to discuss and celebrate the city and architectural culture?" asks the Architecture Foundation, which is putting on the event as part of London's own month-long festival of architecture. "Or are they calculated devices of tourism and industrial promotion?" — guardian.co.uk

Wright’s bijou, as he described it, was the architect’s first permanent work in the city, his first constructed automotive design, and one of his few interior-only projects. Realized during New York’s post-World War II commercial construction boom, it was the architect’s single gesture along the corporate corridor of International Style buildings designed by his rivals, the “glass box boys.” The showroom’s signature ramp was also one of Wright’s several design experiments with the spiral... — metropolismag.com

The vote came after Gehry presented the latest changes in the design, which included the restoration of bas-relief sculptures that had been eliminated in an earlier design and alterations in the statues of a young Dwight D. Eisenhower and of Eisenhower as president and World War II general. Excerpts from Eisenhower’s Guildhall Address, delivered after the allied victory in Europe and considered his most important speech, were also approved for the memorial. — articles.washingtonpost.com