BIG is returning to the National Building Museum in Washington D.C. with a new exhibition titled "HOT TO COLD: an odyssey of architectural adaptation", just a few months after their successful giant indoor maze this past summer that brought in more than 50,000 visitors -- and a marriage proposal. Opening on January 24, the exhibition will showcase BIG's latest projects and more than 60 3-D models will be suspended at the second-floor balconies of the Museum's Great Hall. — bustler.net

“They don’t want a foreigner to build in Tokyo for a national stadium. On the other hand, they all have work abroad. Whether it’s Sejima, Toyo Ito, or Maki or Isozaki or Kengo Kuma.”

Last month Isozaki, 83, wrote an open letter to the Japan Sports Council, the government body in charge of plans for the 2020 Games, in which he attacked the “distorted” process that has led to “a dull, slow form”. — theguardian.com

After a $91m, three-year renovation, the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum is due to reopen on Friday, 12 December.

[...] the firms Gluckman Mayner, Beyer Blinder Belle and Diller Scofidio + Renfro—moved the museum’s offices and research library, previously on the third floor, into the adjacent Miller-Fox townhouses, which had been used for storage. In the offices’ place, they built the Cooper Hewitt’s first open-plan galleries. — theartnewspaper.com

Ahead of a special Guardian Cities event, the renowned urban ‘rethinker’ says cities should be six or seven storeys high, Helsinki is on the verge of revolution, and that he’s sceptical of London’s cycle superhighway plans [...]

Practice partner Søholt puts forward one way of improving a city’s liveability: “Mix the city and assemble the people rather than dispersing them.” — theguardian.com

Norway-based architecture firm Snøhetta will move its New York City offices to the Rudin family’s 80 Pine Street in the Financial District, the landlord announced this morning.

The architecture company, whose first New York City project was the National September 11 Memorial Museum Pavillion at the World Trade Center site, will relocate from 25 Broadway to a segment of the 10th floor of the 38-story structure in 2015 [...]. — commercialobserver.com

[Jeanne Gang] had just come back from a trip on which she’d been using binoculars with Swarovski lenses and had become intrigued by the optical aspect of the crystal company’s output. She had also become interested in James Balog’s Extreme Ice Survey, a long-term project that documents glacier shrinkage using time-lapse photography [...]

One challenge the studio faced was communicating the size of the glaciers photographed by Balog, and the extent of the devastation caused by global warming. — designmiami.com

William Byrd Callaway, one of the Bay Area’s most influential landscape architects, died Nov. 25 of cancer in San Francisco. He was 71. [...]

In 2007, by then the CEO of one of the profession’s largest firms, Mr. Callaway received the ASLA Medal from the American Society of Landscape Architects for accomplishments that included inspiring other designers “to retain an idealistic view of the profession and the world.” — sfchronicle.com

And do you live with as much of the collection as you can?

Absolutely. I never keep fewer than five bronzes in my bedroom. It’s incredible that I have these things. I have them all round my bed—my little friends. I have very little money in the bank. I’m a hyper-materialist; enjoy it while you can. So many of my friends collect money in the way I collect art, but I don’t see the point. — theartnewspaper.com

The architect, who implicitly exempted himself from that 98%, might have been arrogant, but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t right.

[...] many if not most buildings are the work of contractors, not architects, and that this has been and will likely always be the case. Unfortunately, architectural education and criticism tends to focus on important buildings at the expense of the common and ordinary. — forbes.com

SelgasCano of Madrid will be designing the fifteenth Serpentine Galleries Pavilion in London's Kensington Gardens. For the past 15 years, the Serpentine Galleries has invited architects like Sou Fujimoto, Jean Nouvel, Herzog & de Meuron with Ai Wei Wei, Peter Zumthor, SANAA, Zaha Hadid, and most recently Smiljan Radic to design the temporary outdoor structure, which continues to be an anticipated summer event every year. — bustler.net

Architect Yoshio Taniguchi and industrial designer Jasper Morrison are the recipients of the second annual Isamu Noguchi Award. The Isamu Noguchi Award recognizes individuals whose work represents the collaborative and multi-disciplinary qualities of landscape architect and artist Isamu Noguchi. Morrison and Taniguchi will be presented with the award by Motohide Yoshikawa (Ambassador of Japan to the U.N.) during a ceremony at The Noguchi Museum's Spring Benefit on May 19, 2015. — bustler.net