Hadid, who was born in Baghdad and is now a British citizen, claimed that Filler falsely implied she was indifferent to the alleged difficult working conditions of migrant workers on high-profile construction projects in the Middle East, including her own.

She also claimed Filler used large portions of his June 5 review of Rowan Moore's "Why We Build: Power and Desire in Architecture" to question her success and fault her personality, although she was not a prominent character in the book. — whtc.com

Global architecture and design firm Callison announced today that it will be acquired by ARCADIS (Euronext: ARCAD), the leading global natural and built asset design and consultancy firm. Callison plans to join ARCADIS, which also owns the built asset consultancy firm EC HARRIS, architectural design firm RTKL, and Asia's leading construction program planning and value management consultancy Langdon & Seah, in the third quarter of 2014. — WSJ

Seventeen years ago, when Kazakhstan moved its capital here, the city of Astana didn’t even exist. [...]

But after years of rapid economic growth fueled by Kazakhstan’s oil and gas riches, the skyline of Astana [...] is now punctuated by gleaming skyscrapers and Western-style shopping malls. The city has become a hotbed for architectural experimentation, attracting big names like Norman Foster and Manfredi Nicoletti who have transformed it into what locals now call “Manhattan on the Steppe.” — nytimes.com

As the state has withdrawn, Santiago Cirugeda has stepped in to turn abandoned sites in Seville and other Spanish cities into dramatic art spaces that are inspiring a new breed of architect — theguardian.com

Despite its echoes of Paris’s architectural past, Frank Gehry’s latest museum project—the Fondation Louis Vuitton, opening this fall in the Bois de Boulogne—is like nothing the city has seen before: muscular and delicate, utilitarian and fantastic, a marriage of cultural ambition and private enterprise. Paul Goldberger looks at the genesis of LVMH chairman Bernard Arnault’s partnership with Gehry, and the triumphant result. — vanityfair.com

It relates to scale, who's going to be there, what reflects the culture and interests of the community. People's first notion about a park is Central Park — big, grassy, lush. So adjusting expectations about that aesthetic, we have a hard row to hoe in L.A. This is the era for our city to think about parks and the river and the urban forest as all one thing. — latimes.com

Regardless, there are two paths forward. One is to scrap the project and start over with an open public competition, which would cost around $17 million, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The other is to push forward with the existing plan to finalize the memorial design and begin breaking ground.

We favor the latter. [...] And the current design is nowhere near a “monstrosity,” as some have called it; it is a novel take on memorialization [...]. — washingtonpost.com

Andraos, an associate professor of architecture, planning and preservation at GSAPP since 2011 and a principal at WORKac., will succeed Mark Wigley, who announced he would retire at the end of the 2013-2014 academic year [...]

“Columbia is already a leader in addressing the challenges of high-speed urbanization around the globe and I believe it can lead in recasting architecture in dialogue with our urban societies and the natural environment,” Andraos said in the release. — columbiaspectator.com

It has been the setting for music videos, TV commercials and scenes from the '80s movie "Less Than Zero." Now, the unusual Los Angeles home by influential architect John Lautner is slated to go on the market for $7.5 million.

Known as Silvertop, the house has a striking design: It is made up of a series of interlocking half-circles, with a massive, arched concrete roof over the living room. — online.wsj.com

Readers respond to a letter by Peggy Deamer, an architect, calling for less arrogance and more collaboration in architecture. [...]

It is not only the public that is fed up with this idea of The Architect, but also the profession itself. Having watched ourselves increasingly backed into the corner of aesthetic elitism, we are now more interested in models of practice that do away with the egos and the glamorous buildings they are associated with. — nytimes.com

Pretty much every architect in the alphabet has produced a chair, a miniature version of their particular aesthetic. [...]

Buildings are all very well, but it seems you haven’t truly made it as an architect until you’ve given us something to sit on. [...]

“Mentally, it’s a very good exercise, to go from [designing] a building to the smallest bit in a building,” [Alex Michaelis] says. “You go back to the detail of the human body." — moreintelligentlife.com