It is no design flaw: encapsulated within the walls and ceiling panels is a gel that solidifies at night and melts with the warmth of the day. Known as a phase change material (PCM), the gel will help reduce the amount of energy needed to cool office space in the building - scheduled to house the molecular engineering department when completed this month - by a whopping 98 per cent. — newscientist.com

What can you accomplish in 360 hours?
The Chinese sustainable building company, Broad Group, has yet attempted another impossible feat, building a 30-story tall hotel prototype in 360 hours, after building a 15-story building in a week earlier in 2011. — youtube.com

“There needs to be intensification,” argues architect Bruce Kuwabara. “What we have to think about are ways to create a vertical urban life that’s livable. It isn’t just about the view. It has to be about how buildings work at the base and how they contribute to the public realm.” — thestar.com

A REVOLUTION in cognitive neuroscience is changing the kinds of experiments that scientists conduct, the kinds of questions economists ask and, increasingly, the ways that architects, landscape architects and urban designers shape our built environment.

This revolution reveals that thought is less transparent to the thinker than it appears and that the mind is less rational than we believe and more associative than we know. — nytimes.com

Y Design Office has proposed Unit Fusion, a modular, plug-in high-rise residential typology for Hong Kong. However, as of yet, the 75-story tower project is still in its conceptual design phase. Liebchen quipped "Who wants to bet it won't leave the conceptual design phase?"

In Weaponized Architecture, architect Léopold Lambert looks at how architecture is conceived or instrumentalized as a political weapon.

Lambert's study explores the power of architecture as a political weapon through history, from the wide 'boulevards' designed by Haussmann to allow for an easy movement of the artillery and cavalry in Paris to the mobile fences deployed by police forces during the G8 in Genoa to control mass demonstrations. — we-make-money-not-art.com

Some have described the Cyclorama building on the Gettysburg battlefield as an eye sore and called for it to be demolished. But a group of architectural historians is organizing to preserve the building — The Evening Sun

Pallets are omnipresent. (We) have found pallets not only in the small architectures of informal settlements in Buenos Aires, Istanbul, and Panama City, but in the blogs of self-builders throughout North America and Europe...Urban pioneers in Detroit, Camden and other failing Rust Belt cities reclaim pallets...But none of these builders have negotiated the gap between informal and formal economies with a permanent pallet building authorized by a building permit. - Wes Janz, Cabin(s) in the Woods — The Speakeasy: A Curatorial Research Blog

Construction cranes have only recently returned to the skyline and stasis remains the quo. Instead, here are five changes that I'd like to see in San Francisco. Some involve structures, but most involve sensibilities: the need to pay attention to the final product, rather than the process along the way. — sfgate.com

Recent college graduates with bachelor’s degrees in the arts, humanities and architecture experienced significantly higher rates of joblessness, according to a study being released Wednesday by Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce.

Among recent college graduates, those with the highest rates of unemployment had undergraduate degrees in architecture (13.9 percent), the arts (11.1 percent) and the humanities (9.4 percent), according to the study. — washingtonpost.com