For three straight months now, the Architecture Billings Index — a measure from the American Institute of Architects — has shown slight increases in work levels at architectural firms, with the latest figures showing a score in January of 50.9, compared with 51.0 in December.

... the index tends to provide a decent lens into the mood of the real estate world, and an increase may lay the groundwork for new construction projects months down the road. — blogs.wsj.com

Directed by Ai Weiwei (China, 2012). Official Selection International Film Festival Rotterdam 2012.

Ordos 100 is a construction project curated by Herzog & de Meuron and Ai Weiwei. One hundred architects from 27 countries were chosen to participate and each design a 1000-square-meter villa to be built in a new community in Inner Mongolia. The 100 villas would be designed to fit a master plan designed by Ai Weiwei. — youtube.com

The city was initially prepared to contribute €77 million to the project – but this figure has since gone up by nearly five times to more than €323 million – more than half the expected €600 million total cost. And the original completion date of 2010 has been pushed back to 2014.

The building’s designers had underestimated certain costs – such as an acoustic panelling for the main concert hall which cost five times as much as expected, adding more than €10 million to the bill. — thelocal.de

A bond forged in storm-ravaged New Orleans between actor Brad Pitt and a local architecture firm is bearing fruit in Kansas City — and may show the path forward to reusing dozens of empty schools.

The long-closed Bancroft School at 4300 Tracy Ave. will be renovated into affordable apartments and a community center with the aid of the Make It Right Foundation founded by Pitt... — kansascity.com

Foreclosed, a new exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art, shows ways of radically rethinking suburbia, homeownership and housing. But are such drastic measures what the suburbs really need? — Next American City

The school announced Friday that it has selected Allied Works Architecture of Portland and e.e. fava architects, etc. of Charleston to design a new three-story building at George and Meeting streets.

Richard Goodstein, dean of Clemson's College of Architecture, Arts and Humanities, said the firms were chosen "because of their deep experience in urban design, their commitment to sustainability and their demonstrated sensitivity to place and context." — postandcourier.com

Reacting to the Beach & Howe Tower proposal in Vancouver by Bjarke Ingels Group holz.box argued "still beats 90% of what's out there. i'd love to see this built."

"There is a backlash," says Gehry, now aged 82, "against me and everyone who has done buildings that have movement and feeling", that is "self-righteous" and "annoying… The notion is that it is counterproductive to social responsibility and sustainability. Therefore, curving the wall or doing something so-called wilful is wrong and so there is a tendency back to bland." — guardian.co.uk

... one the most gifted architects of my time has been reduced to wrapping such conventional programs of use in merely expressionistic forms, without letting a single ray of her genius illuminate the human condition. Am I being pretentious and overly demanding? Of course. But that’s the way disappointed lovers behave. Exaggerated emotions. Absurd demands. Anger that transgresses all reason. She has let me down, and what makes it worse is that she apparently couldn’t care less. — Lebbeus Woods

Marina Abramovic signed a deal with architect Rem Koolhaus earlier this week to design and construct her Center for the Preservation of Performance Art in Hudson, New York. The Serbian art superstar will seek to raise $8 million to pay for the project, she revealed Tuesday night to a group of art collectors at a panel at Manhattan's tony Core Club, and the museum will be devoted to performance art pieces of "six hours minimum." Some of them will go on for days. — vulture.com

An aesthetic traditionalist who sponsors an annual architecture award that bears his name, Driehaus is no fan of Frank Gehry's proposed modernist design for the Eisenhower Memorial in Washington, D.C. And he's doing what he can to fight it.

Earlier this week, a public relations operative who works for Driehaus called me and offered the following essay, by the influential neo-traditionalist architect Leon Krier, who offers a tough critique of Gehry's plan and ideology. — BLAIR KAMIN, chicagotribune.com

[Gerhard Albert] Becker... built an 18-foot "fire trough" through the home despite being warned of the dangers it may cause. It was described as an oversize indoor fire pit.

They said the attic was equipped with plastic pipes for fire sprinklers. The fire melted the pipes, flooding the attic and filling the insulation with water. The weight of the insulation appears to have caused a large section of the ceiling to collapse, injuring Allen and five other firefighters, — LA Times

The proposal is for a mixed-use development. On the Howe Street side, there will be a 49-storey residential tower with a 9-storey podium which includes market rental housing, commercial uses, and a childcare facility. The building height is at 150 metres and will be the tallest building on the southern end of downtown and the 4th tallest building in the city, unless the Ritz Carlton site gets developed before this, in which case it would be the 5th tallest. — vancitybuzz.com

Modernist architect Eugene Weston III was in his early 30s when he declared that "the house is the last of the handcrafted objects" in an industrial age...

The architect built a number of homes in and around Pasadena but only one in Eagle Rock, in 1953, for Norman Bilderback, then a director of design at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. — latimes.com

Jeanne Gang and Greg Lindsay suggested some ways of Designing a Fix for Housing, beginning with rethinking our historic commitment to detached, single-family homes and segregated Euclidean zoning. Louis Arleo agreed that we need to redesign suburbia but argued "however suburbia will never be improved until architects embrace the idea of a developers business model."