"Mr. Lewis had been a fan of Mr. Gehry’s work for years, and the men collaborated in the 1980s on a dream home for Mr. Lewis in suburban Cleveland, but their plans went comically awry. They could not agree on what the home should look like, and after 11 years of discussions, with the proposed budget reaching $82 million, Mr. Lewis called off the project." — NY Times

Zaha Hadid, the world’s best-known female architect, is none too pleased with critics like Jon Stewart, who have mocked her Al Wakrah Stadium—designed with AECOM for the 2022 World Cup in Qatar—and likened her to the “Georgia O’Keeffe of things you can walk inside.”

“It’s really embarrassing that they come up with nonsense like this,” Hadid tells TIME exclusively. “What are they saying? Everything with a hole in it is a vagina? That’s ridiculous.” — newsfeed.time.com

"Personally when I did the project of the Art Museum in São Paulo my basic concern was to make an ugly architecture...A poor architecture with free spaces that could be created by the collective...Most people find that the museum is poor, and it is. I wanted to make a poor project. That is, formally and architecturally ugly, but that would be a usable space, that would be something that could be taken over by men". - Lina Bo Bardi — Cosmopista

Later it was the stamping ground of the 19th century’s version of today’s “starchitects,” including Andrew Jackson Downing and his disciples, like Calvert Vaux and Frederick Clarke Withers. Their work — grand Second Empire Victorian, Gothic revival and Queen Anne houses — is everywhere — NYT

"The building, designed to be the New York City Pavilion of the 1939 World’s Fair, is a long, barrel-vaulted shed, with austere colonnades on both long sides and a few luxury touches, like the limestone and the scalloping on the columns. It was never a wonderful building, but it troubles me that the shorthand for a renovation is to slap a layer of glass on the side facing the road and call it new". - Justin Davidson — NY Magazine

"designed by famed architect Zaha Hadid whose signature style appears to be making some of the world's most f**kable buildings...like Georgia O'Keeffe of things you can walk inside...i guess maybe it is time things evened out a bit" - Jon Stewart — Daily Show

Last week Alex Calderwood, cofounder and creative force behind the Ace Hotel, was found dead. He was 47. The first Ace Hotel opened in Seattle in 1999, under Calderwood's direction... When Calderwood and his team took the company east, to New York, Calderwood brought his friends, design duo Roman & Williams, on board to design the space. Here, Robin Standefer of Roman & Williams remembers Calderwood's design legacy. — fastcodesign.com

Like one skyline perched on another, the latest mega-building by Rem Koolhaas towers over the starchitect playground of Rotterdam. But why was it even built? — theguardian.com

A new book, “The Houses of Louis Kahn” (Yale University Press, $65), provides an architectural bridge between the personal and the professional stories, focusing on the nine houses Kahn completed, and designs for two dozen more. The story told by the authors, George H. Marcus and William Whitaker, is one of warm client relations, attention to the smallest domestic detail and a philosophical search for the best arrangement of rooms to call home. — nytimes.com

New tumblr blog that looks at "outrageously gender-imbalanced lecture series, etc." send observed inequalities to feministwall at gmail dot com. — feministwall.tumblr.com