When it comes to museums, Hiroshi Sugimoto doesn’t mince words.

“This is the worst space I ever encountered,” he told the Journal before opening a retrospective of his work at Seoul’s Leeum Samsung Museum of Art late last year. The Japanese artist was especially unhappy about a steep escalator leading down into the main gallery space of the OMA-designed building. “Why do that? It’s terrible,” he lamented. “I feel a kind of bad will from this architect.” — blogs.wsj.com

Under his tutelage, designers learn to privilege approach over style. Rather than work with drawings, like most traditional architecture firms, OMA employees first "Diagram" a building—identify the structure's basic components and how they fit together—and then proceed to build it. It's an analytical method that results in buildings that are sometimes ungainly but never unexciting and reject the signature styles associated with many other renowned architects. — online.wsj.com

In my own office, for instance, two firms, Synthesis Design + Architecture and Freeland Buck, are carrying out their only major projects in places like China and Thailand. A former office mate, Platform for Architecture and Research (P-A-R), is pursuing most of its work in Europe and Asia. If you move up to LA’s most established design firms, they’re doing the exact same thing. Where are Frank Gehry, Thom Mayne, and Neil Denari doing most of their projects? The Middle East, China, and Europe. — archpaper.com

Vandals have smashed an ‘irreplaceable’ stained-glass window after breaking into Le Corbusier’s Ronchamp Chapel in eastern France.

The hand-painted, coloured glass window designed by the Swiss architect in the early 1950s was destroyed, it is understood, as the intruders forced entry into the famous Chapel of Notre Dame du Haut.

Once inside the vandals lifted a concrete collection box and threw it outside. — Architect's Journal

Despite a city planning report advocating its preservation, Oklahoma City’s Downtown Design Review Committee voted 3-2 last week to green light the destruction of the Stage Center, a futuristic landmark of modern architecture designed by the late John M. Johansen. — artsblog.dallasnews.com

the show offers innumerable other examples of the housing industry’s braiding of mythic imagination and commercial calculation...It’s an epic, richly rewarding intellectual journey — NYT

"I think that the press has been too fast to reduce the conversation to heroes and villains and martyrs, and to suggest that what MoMA is doing is necessarily bad. We want to get more information out. We want to share the problem with others and invite them to really take a hard look" - Elizabeth Diller — LA Times

In a SPIEGEL interview, Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, 56, discusses how the authorities monitor his movements in sometimes bizarre detail and the feud with the government in Beijing that has kept him from being allowed to leave the country for three years now. — spiegel.de

British architect Kathryn Findlay, Co-Founder and Principal Director of London-based Ushida Findlay Architects, has died. Findlay had been suffering from a brain tumor.

Unaware of her recent passing, the jury of the 2014 Jane Drew Prize just announced her as this year's award recipient. The Prize, awarded annually by The Architects' Journal, recognized Kathryn Findlay ‘for her outstanding contribution to the status of women in architecture.' — bustler.net

I wish that it still existed.
— Frank Gehry

It would be the world's biggest nightmare if the Institute were still alive.
— Mark Wigley

It was the moment for something to happen.
— Diana Agrest

// — Places Journal

Sexism is alive and well in architecture, according to research showing that two-thirds of female architects believe the construction industry hasn’t fully accepted the authority of women.

The annual Women in Architecture survey, conducted by Architects’ Journal, found evidence of widespread discrimination and unequal pay in the profession. — independent.co.uk