The four firms — Santiago Calatrava, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, SHoP Architects and SOM — will have until May 29 to propose new designs that will be unveiled to the public that day at the TimesCenter on West 41st Street. “We’re really trying to unlock people’s imaginations about the very real potential of a new arena and of a new Penn Station,” said Vin Cipolla, the society’s president, in an interview. — artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com

“When one office was doing well, another was not doing as well,” says the source. “But we always managed it so that there was the see-saw effect – one office would be profitable and another would be in the doldrums. But we managed to keep the group afloat.”

“What people are worried about now is that the people who ran the company down are still the ones in charge.” — scotsman.com

"Irrational exuberance" seems to me an apt introduction to an understanding of Rem Koolhaas in the '90s and beyond; it foregrounds his great success in navigating the intersection of the pragmatic corporate sector, on the one hand, and the “delirious” and volatile realm of desire and possibility, on the other. ... Koolhaas has encouraged his followers to shed the crippling shackles of critical theory and pick up a surfboard upon which to ride the shock waves of the new economy. — Places Journal

But for lovers of contemporary architecture, Paris can be a surprisingly rich place. The latest crop of French architects is producing some of the best new work the city has seen. They are an eclectic group comfortable taking large risks while still melding the work into an august context. — travel.nytimes.com

“A $100 million building cannot really be called cheap,” Ada Louise Huxtable, the celebrated architecture critic for The New York Times, wrote in 1963. “But Pan Am is a colossal collection of minimums.” — NYT

The latest evidence of Philadelphia’s architectural comeback? The Norwegian architecture firm Snøhetta is coming to town for a project at Temple University.

“We have a fantastic tradition of quality architeture and urbanism in Philadelphia, but we do go through low ebbs in that tradition,” says Harris Steinberg, the executive director of PennPraxis, the clinical arm of the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Design. — Next City

Soundscrapers could soon turn urban noise pollution into usable energy to power cities.

An honourable mention-winning entry in the 2013 eVolo Skyscraper Competition, dubbed Soundscraper, looked into ways to convert the ambient noise in urban centres into a renewable energy form.

Noise pollution is currently a negative element of urban life but it could soon be valued and put to good use. — DesignBuild Source

This means that the architect, a leader in sustainable development, has started filming all of his meetings and recording all of his phone conversations. He will send them in something close to real time to Stanford, which will be making much of the material immediately accessible on the Internet. Even presidents are not observed so closely and so continuously. — bits.blogs.nytimes.com

During the winter there has been a selection process to choose the architects who will be invited to participate in the planned architectural competition to design a Nobel Center at Blasieholmen in Stockholm. In total, over 140 architects have been considered by a specially appointed evaluation committee. Of these, 12 have been selected to be invited to the architectural competition. — nobelprize.org

In a speech prepared for the AJ Women in Architecture lunch, Scott Brown called on her role in Robert Venturi’s 1991 win to be acknowledged retrospectively. Describing it as a ‘very sad’ situation, she said: ‘They owe me not a Pritzker Prize but a Pritzker inclusion ceremony. Let’s salute the notion of joint creativity.’ — architectsjournal.co.uk

A previously historic government building has now become the centre of the Parliament of Navarra, Spain.

Designed by Otxotorena Arquitectos, the redevelopment project was part of plans to restore the 19th century Audiencia Building of Pamplona. Covering 11,062 square metres, the €9 million redevelopment project has drawn attention for its architectural aesthetics which incorporate a new glass skin into the parliament building. — DesignBuild Source

Today, the Freelancers Union is one of the nation’s fastest-growing labor organizations, with more than 200,000 members, over half of them in New York State. Ms. Horowitz, who has never lacked audacity, says she expects to expand the organization to one million members within three years. For some perspective, the United Automobile Workers union currently has 380,000 members. — New York Times

Olga Felip, co-founder of Catalonia-based practice Arquitecturia, has won the prestigious AJ Emerging Woman Architect of the Year award

The 32-year-old, who set up the studio with Josep Camps eight years ago, topped the award category open to architects and architectural designers under the age of 40. — architectsjournal.co.uk