“There’s a whole bunch of wonderful aspects of it,” Mr. Cheramy said, noting Vertical Harvest’s tall and narrow greenhouse design and its hiring of people with disabilities. “But it also makes good fiscal sense.” — NYT

Stephen Ashton, Howard Raggatt, and Ian McDougall have left a lasting impression in the Australian contemporary architecture scene since they founded Ashton Raggatt McDougall in 1988. Since then, ARM has built projects that the Australian Institute of Architects describes as “some of the most extraordinary [if not sometimes controversial] buildings in the short post-colonial history of [the] country.” — Bustler

Pritzker Prize-winning architect Shigeru Ban is once more jumping into disaster-relief efforts. The cardboard-wielding starchitect traveled to Ecuador earlier this week [...] to provide architectural training and brainpower in the wake of the deadly earthquake April 16 earthquake, which has killed more than 650 people and displaced another 26,000 from their homes. — curbed.com

It once seemed like a herculean, if not insurmountable, challenge – raising $600 million or more for an ambitious modernist building to serve as the new home for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Skeptics abounded when plans were first announced three years ago. But momentum now seems to be shifting in LACMA's favor with the announcement this week of two major donations that will push the fundraising campaign near the halfway point. — Los Angeles Times

If you want evidence that London’s renters are being taken advantage of, look no further than a new social media campaign. Launched Monday, the #rantyourrent hashtag encourages London’s overcharged and poorly housed tenants to visually detail the bad conditions they’re expected to put up with in return for large sums of monthly rent.  

The results, detailed in a new Tumblr called Vent Your Rent, make for sobering viewing. — citylab.com

[Project leader Zena] Howard focuses on all of the aspects of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, but hones in on the porch, which happens to span 200 feet and it serves as an transitional space between the outside and inside of the museum.

“I think that the porch is…quintessential America,” [...]

“This project—not only given the scale, the complexity, the political and contextual sensitivities—is an amalgam of all the problems that we, as architects, love to solve” — blackyouthproject.com

As the Nepalese government continues to face criticism for the slow pace of the country’s reconstruction, Nepal’s prime minister Khadga Prasad Oli announced today that the reconstruction of key heritage sites in Kathmandu, Patan and Bhaktapur is to finally begin, the Associated Press reports. — The Art Newspaper

On the long approach from the sea, the flowing, horizontal silhouette of this all-concrete structure, bracketed fore and aft by leaning walls, stands out from the heavyset classicized buildings along the waterfront promenade [...]

Prime Minister Matteo Renzi visited the site on Sunday, calling it a masterpiece. The absence of Ms. Hadid, 65, who died on March 31 without ever seeing the finished terminal, was keenly felt both days. — NYT

[Yale students:] Why do you think architecture is important, and who do you think it serves, other than the golf players? (laughter)

[Stern:] Architecture is everything about the man made environment. Some of it achieves the level of high art, some of it is good solid meat and potatoes, which is very important after all. You don’t want to sit down to a dinner of foie gras every day in the week. Sometimes you want to have bangers and mash. [...]

Architecture is an art—high and low. — yalepaprika.com

Harnessing the collective intelligence of plant behaviour, the reEarth project explores new forms of bio-cooperative interaction between people and nature, within the built environment.

Echoing the architecture of Buckminster Fuller, the geodesic sphere, is both exoskeleton and ecological iconography. Its core of twelve garden modules, each carrying native British species on outwardly-extending linear actuators allow the structure to become mobile by shifting its centre-of-gravity. — interactivearchitecture.org

Contrary to many, maybe including himself, I do not consider Bjarke Ingels the reincarnation of this or that architect from the past. On the contrary, he is the embodiment of a fully fledged new typology, which responds perfectly to the current zeitgeist. Bjarke is the first major architect who disconnected the profession completely from angst. He threw out the ballast and soared. — TIME