A growing number of small urban spaces are creating landscaped gardens that stretch beyond floor pots, with greenery growing upwards along walls and fences.

This new trend toward ‘vertical gardens’ is renewing apartments, offices and restaurants inviting greenery to flourish in small spaces. — DesignBuild Source

Those outside the design industry may often wonder what makes for good architectural design. Most laypeople would say good design is aesthetically pleasing and unique, but their assessment would likely end there. — DesignBuild Source

Manchester Airports Group (MAG) has outlined redevelopment plans worth £650 million to create Airport City Manchester, a future ‘aerotropolis’, close to Manchester Airport, the UK’s third busiest airport. — DesignBuild Source

The skyline of Chile’s capital city, Santiago, has a new addition with the Gran Torre skyscraper casting a two-kilometre shadow across the historic city.

The 70-storey residential building stands more than 300 metres tall, making it the tallest building in South America. The five-ton steel structure cost an estimated one billion dollars to build and tenants are expected to move into the building next March. — DesignBuild Source

Salameh is heading the “Adh Dhariyeh” project, in the south of Hebron, where he began with single-building restoration and has progressed to a community centre and two schools...“Dhariyeh is one of 50 historical sites whose renovation Riwaq has undertaken and which constitute 50 per cent of the architectural heritage of Palestine.” Salameh says. “There are almost 900 old buildings and the project is funded by the Arab Fund in Kuwait. — Gulf News-Weekend Review

Portuguese architect and 2011 Pritzker Prize winner Eduardo Souto de Moura was announced today as one of this year's laureates of Israel’s prestigious Wolf Prize. Souto de Moura is being honored for his achievements in architecture while other prizes are given to scientists in the fields of physics, mathematics, chemistry, and agriculture. — bustler.net

Architects think people aren’t interested in buildings anymore, and don’t look at them, and consequently don’t — can't — appreciate what architects really want to do, which is make fetishized constructions to sit on the landscape like mechanical praying mantids, which will make people look at them some more. — Places Journal

Piano apparently sketched his idea on a restaurant napkin while meeting property developer Irvine Sellar in March 2000. According to Piano's architectural firm, RPBW, Sellar keeps the famous napkin in his offices. "He saw the beauty of the river and the railways and the way their energy blended and began to sketch in green felt pen on a napkin what he saw as a giant sail or an iceberg," Sellar recalled in a recent interview. — guardian.co.uk

Star architect Zaha Hadid is currently building several projects across China. One of them, however, is being constructed twice. Pirates are the process of copying one of her provocative designs, and the race is on to see who can finish first. — spiegel online