Apple is actually taking a site that is now parking lots and low-rise boxes and making it worse for the community. Yes, it will be iconic, assuming you think a building shaped like a whitewall motorcycle tire is iconic, but it will reduce current street connectivity, seal off potential walking routes and, as I wrote some time back, essentially turn its back on its community. With a parking garage designed to hold over ten thousand cars, by the way. — Switchboard

Initial designs for the third and final section of the High Line were released Monday by Friends of the High Line. Section 3 will wrap around the striking stretch of rail yards at the center of the Hudson Yards project.

The new stretch will pick up where the completed section ends at 30th Street between 10th and 11th Avenues, continue west to 12th Avenue, turn north, and then head back east at 34th Street for about half a block. — NY Times

More visibly, this shift means that the familiar security architecture of airports and international borders – checkpoints, scanners, ID cars, cordons, security zones – start to materialise in the hearts of cities. What this amounts to, in practice, is an effort to roll out the well-established architecture and surveillance of the airport to parts of the wider, open city. — The Guardian

one driving idea of the show holds firm, Bergdoll’s binder notwithstanding: Suburbs are generally an architect-free zone. Insofar as such creatures are spied at all, they’re employed to rubber-stamp a builder’s plans. Beyond that, they’re not wanted. Suburbanites are conservative, wherever they might lie on the political spectrum: There’s a good reason why builders have kept on churning out houses which have remained essentially the same for decades, even as they have grown steadily in size. — architectmagazine.com

College towns have weathered the recession and housing collapse more than the rest of America, but the neighborhood around USC is an exception. Now USC is planning what local officials call the biggest project in South Los Angeles in a generation — 35 acres, complete with restaurants, shops, a six-screen theater, faculty office space and student housing. Will gentrification push local residents out, or is the university — often accused of ignoring its neighbors — be doing them a favor? — Which Way, L.A.?

Swiss star architect Peter Zumthor has lost a battle for ownership of the spa and hotel complex in Vals, eastern Switzerland, which he designed.

The commune, which owns the complex, decided on Friday night to sell it to 35-year-old property developer Remo Stoffel. — swissinfo.ch

It is possible to say without too much exaggeration that we now inhabit a version of the future William Gibson first described 25 years ago.... an accumulation of smaller changes, the consequences of which are subtle and all-pervasive as technology has increasingly lodged in unanticipated aspects of our lives. As Gibson has observed, the actual future is often more nuanced and unexpected than the imagined future. — Places Journal

The way to find the sort of transcendence Coulter is looking for is to achieve "flow" [...]. Simplistically, flow is when someone becomes one with an experience, whether that be contained in a game or a building.

This type of flow is present in "Snake the Planet!", which merges interaction design and architecture. — huffingtonpost.com

Viennese architectural firm Wolfgang Tschapeller ZT GmbH won the First Prize in an international competition that seeks to overhaul the campus of the Angewandte, a group of buildings that house the University of Applied Arts, as well as the Museum for Applied Arts in Vienna, Austria. johnszot commented "fucking hot, that".

Although Japan boasts some of the most highly regarded architects in the world, many of the buildings that define the Tokyo skyline are the work of foreign architects. — ft.com

Hop aboard the Portland Streetcar to discover the city's hidden architectural gems. Disembark along the route and reflect on the stonework of the Armory. Hop on the next car and travel a few blocks to Tanner Springs park. This photo essay is a sample of what one might see between the South Waterfront and Northwest portland. — photos.oregonlive.com

“The city is better for the starchitect phenomenon,” said Jonathan J. Miller, the president of the appraisal firm Miller Samuel, “because it enhanced the mystique of New York’s residential housing market. But during the frenzy, those buildings were marketed as if they had inherent greater value, and the jury is still out on that.” — NYT

Michael Kimmelman is not a very good architecture critic, at least that is what some of his critics would have you believe. As invigorating as his first few columns championing urbanism and public design were, the whole thrust has devolved into a sort of schtick, whereby every article is about the greatness of cities, and barely about architecture.

Michael Kimmelman knows this. — observer.com