As we look at the border in an age of network culture ascendant, we need to do so with the special goggles of a Deleuzian Israeli commando, and see the presence of the networks that are the real nervous system of the cities on both sides, networks that pay little attention to the border...As we look at the robot eyes of the surveillance cameras, we need to pay more attention to how networks let the people conduct surveillance on power. — The New York Review of Science Fiction

Even tougher, Ms. Yamamoto said, would be the labor involved in grafting the system onto the city’s existing archaic reservation network or building a new one from scratch.

Jake Levitas, research director at the Gray Area Foundation for the Arts, the San Francisco digital arts nonprofit that conceived Creative Currency, believes that such obstacles are best surmounted by applying the hacker mind-set to community issues. — The Associated Press

The concept of building or imagining a new City is actually more than just a concept, and has been delivered in recent times for political, economic, social or other reasons. Abuja, Nigeria is one of the more recent, purpose built in the 1980s and now Nigeria’s Capital City since 1991. — thisbigcity.net

It is easy to see how Kimmelman’s resistance to conventional criticism can open the discussion of architecture to those outside of the field. But perhaps more importantly, it prompts critics, readers and architects who look to the Times to consider architecture as both a large-scale work of art, deserving of lofty theoretical contemplation, and an equally large-scale social intervention, deserving of anyone’s comments. — blogs.artinfo.com

Elected officials in Goshen, N.Y., voted Thursday against a resolution to demolish and replace the Orange County Government Center by Paul Rudolph. Steven Ward, hoped “mr diana will now get behind this decision and determine how best to renovate to meet the needs of the community...score one for preservation of the modern!"

Just off the narrow, crowded streets of Greenwich Village is a lush, spacious garden of drooping mature willows and sycamores.
New York University, its owner, fights for its destruction.
If the university prevails, two curvy towers shaped like chocolate drops will arise from the garden. The million square feet of new construction are the space equivalent of a hefty skyscraper. — bloomberg.com

in professional practice, there’s a tendency to lose track of the initial spark that drew us to the profession and fall into a routine of designing similar projects for a familiar client type without thinking too deeply about it. It’s hard to make any money in the profession without a certain amount of repetition and standardization. So when a project comes along that challenges your values, that would be a good time to reconnect with the reasons you got into your profession in the first place. — thepolisblog.org

MASS Design Group is one of a handful of nonprofits showing that design isn’t just for the wealthy, nor is it just image-making. The challenge, for MASS and others trying to do public service design work, is to make their operations financially sustainable. As students, MASS provided much of their work on the Butaro Hospital pro bono, but they are not students anymore. The staff of MASS eclipsed 20 in the past year... — blog.sfgate.com

Beginning on May 19th, people will see the Barnes collection not where Barnes intended it to be seen, but in a new building designed by the New York architects Tod Williams and Billie Tsien.

This building won’t please the absolutists, the people we should probably call Barnes fundamentalists, because nothing would please them short of a return to the way things were. But it really ought to please everybody else, because—to cut to the chase—the new Barnes is absolutely wonderful. — vanityfair.com

Danish architects are building a digitally fabricated house printed from a computer file - a new concept they say minimizes waste and simplifies the building process. — reuters.com

Though it pervades the landscape of many of our cities, we rarely appreciate how window units continue to shape our homes and street walls. The basic design of a window unit has remained mostly the same since it appeared on the market in 1935 – that is to say, functional and bland. But instead of designing a more elegant object, we have allowed AC units to become visual background noise. — urbanomnibus.net

Elected officials in Goshen, N.Y., voted Thursday against a resolution to demolish and replace the Orange County Government Center, a late-1960s building in the small Hudson Valley town that sparked debate on the value of modern architecture.

"I am deeply disappointed by the outcome of today's vote," Mr. Diana said in a written statement. — online.wsj.com

When Anne Griswold Tyng entered Radcliffe College in 1938, she had already found her calling: her faith was in architecture. “I was intensely drawn to the combination of science and art, of the pragmatic and aesthetic, of rigorous facts and intuitive leaps,” she wrote, looking back nearly 60 years later... In 1942, she enrolled in the first class to admit women at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where she studied with Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer... — nytimes.com