Making a mess of the built environment and the politics of space, one issue at a time. — SOILED

If you're in Atlanta in the next few weeks, make sure to see Joseph Choma's solo-exhibition, Object to Atmosphere, as part of the Young Architects Forum Atlanta Emerging Voices 13 exhibition. Choma is this year's recipient of the AIA Atlanta 2013 Emerging Voices Citation for his research and experimentation in architecture. — bustler.net

Earlier this week, Zaha Hadid was presented the Aenne Burda Award for Creative Leadership at the Digital Life Design (DLD) Conference in Munich, Germany. The Award for Creative Leadership honors women for outstanding entrepreneurial and creative achievement. — bustler.net

In 2009, Dennis Maher... bought an abandoned property from D’Youville College for $10,000...After he sorted through the junk he found inside, he began to build, reconfiguring the pieces of things like a home entertainment center...and dollhouse furniture... He attached the structures he created to the floors, walls and ceilings, like Joseph Cornell sculptures run amok...You can sense dust bunnies everywhere swelling with importance. — New York Times

It all leads one to ponder the what-if Los Angeles, to imagine the city that would exist today if the best proposals for remedying its ailments had been realized. Los Angeles would now include a ring of thousands of acres of urban and regional parks, a bold, space-age airport, a winged nature center for Griffith Park and hillside housing developments sculpted to the contours of the landscape rather than sitting on graded and terraced scars. We would be living in a very different city. — latimes.com

Mr. Ito, the Japanese architect whose team won a Golden Lion Award at the 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale for its concepts for new housing after the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, recently designed flatware called Mu. Introduced in Paris by the Italian company Alessi, the pattern complements Ku, the delicate porcelain service Mr. Ito created for Alessi in 2006. — nytimes.com

How can we let geriatrics design the future? There is a creeping conservatism in old age, Rogers and Piano’s Pompidou was genuinely revolutionary, but that was in 1977, ever since then they've been riffing off the same ideas, with decreasing vitality...They are past retirement age and yet they march on, pulling out the same ideas over and over again, while the planet fawns obsequiously at their feet. — Vice

The New York Museum of Modern Art and MoMA PS1 announced CODA (Caroline O’Donnell of Ithaca, New York) as the winner of the annual Young Architects Program (YAP) in New York...Donna Sink shared "That PS1 installation just looks dull to me" to which Steven Ward responded "i must like dull. actually, i know i do. i'm thinking i'll like its texture and shadow. form".

The modernists were attempting to make architecture for a class of people who were not necessarily privileged to the architectural product... that’s very relevant for our times, because once again architecture has drifted to the fringe of being a product for the elite... when the early modernists imagined that we could build light, airy, and dignified environments for working-class, they recognized that there was a limitation on the resources and capital society had available to make the work. — artinfo.com

"I'm going to be intolerant of bad architecture," he says, describing how the former head of planning was a highways engineer who "let anything and everything through – including office blocks stacked on top of multistorey car parks.

"My idea of good architecture is about creating place. It's not about providing glitzy iconic buildings, competing one against the other, but how we use the best of what we've got." — guardian.co.uk

"Anything we can do to expedite the speed with which people can get licensed is a good thing," says David Cronrath, AIA, Dean of the University of Maryland's School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. "What Renee [Cheng, Professor and Head of the University of Minnesota's School of Architecture,] has done is establish a roadmap which a lot of people can follow. And, I think, of course they will." — University of Minnesota

From simple and functional to splendidly provocative, four proposals vying to become reality as Kent State University's new College of Architecture and Environmental Design were presented to the public Thursday.

The university hosted the four partnerships competing to design the $40 million building by providing a forum so the architects could pitch their ideas for "solving the problem," as one presenter put it. — kent.patch.com