good architecture can survive budgetary rigors — at Hunters Point South, for instance, where a pair of hulking towers designed by SHoP and Ismael Levya Architects expresses de Blasio’s urgency even though it’s a holdover from the era of the allegedly Nero-like Michael Bloomberg. [...]

SHoP’s new towers are not world-beating architecture, but they’re more than good enough to plug into an evolving network of ferries, parks, schools, shops, all of which foster more investment. — nymag.com

Vicino's company built Vivos Indiana, an "impervious underground complex" built in a Cold-War-era nuclear shelter and kitted out with luxury amenities. The idea is that you sign up in advance and plunk down $35,000 per person ($25,000 for kids) to secure one of the 80 spots available within the shelter...you can survive for a year amidst leather couches, 600-thread-count sheets and gourmet chow. — Core77

... transparent photovoltaic cells are fundamentally inconceivable, considering that solar panels can develop energy power through a transformation of absorbed protons into electrons [...] light would have to flow unrestrained to the eye, meaning that those protons would have to go wholly through the substance. Therefore what the Michigan State team developed [...] a device that utilize organic salts to take in wavelengths of light that are imperceptible to the human eye. — Next Nature

In the Bay Area, SFMOMA is now the largest art museum, surpassing the Oakland Museum of California at 110,000 feet. In the city, the de Young Museum is second at 84,000 square feet. Statewide, its exhibition space is 50 percent larger than the Getty Center in Los Angeles and is second only to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Smithsonian of the West, which boasts 230,000 feet. — San Francisco Chronicle

Zurich-based architects and roboticists have created the In-situ Fabricator, an autonomous construction robot capable of laying bricks into pre-programmed structures. Designers at the Swiss National Center of Competence in Research (NCCR) Digital Fabrication laboratory believe a future generation of the robot could be used widely on building sites. — Reuters

The tower, owned by Rudin Management, currently has 260,000 square feet of floorspace that counts towards zoning, and of that, 133,000 square feet will become residential, resulting in 205 new apartments. The remaining 127,000 square feet will stay commercial. [...]

110 Wall Street will be WeWork’s first foray into residential development [...]

The inclusion of Class B dwelling units, which denote transient housing, likely signals living options will range from communal to private. — newyorkyimby.com

this San Diego County jail, which houses everyone from petty criminals to accused murderers and was once known for its sickening decrepitude, is at the forefront of a new and, of course, controversial movement in prison design, one that manifests a counterintuitive idea: You could build a lockup so pleasant and thoughtfully devised that inmates would never come back. [...]

Welcome to Las Colinas Women’s Detention and Re-entry Facility. — ozy.com

'None of the buildings seemed built to impose and in all of them one had the sense that what mattered about a room was the spirit and determination with which it was filled, and the uses to which ingenuity could put it. When I want to remember what a first-class education felt like, that is the architecture I remember, and it mattered solely because of what people did with it.' — The Guardian

The $1.1 billion Essex Crossing project will be a 1.65 million-square-foot, mixed-use mega-development anchored by 1,000 residential units and a mix of cultural, community, and retail facilities. Though the city will lose the 75-year-old Essex Street Market, the new market will be transformed into one of the five biggest markets in the country. — 6sqft.com

In order to avoid participation in architecture and urban design becoming merely a politically required token of democratic involvement - a kind of fake participation that does not actually engage the participants in any meaningful way - architects, planners, and designers need to commit themselves and relinquish control, as Jeremy Till claims in an interview with us entitled "Distributing Power".

(Bernd Upmeyer, Editor-in-Chief, October 2015) — http://www.monu-magazine.com/news.htm

The question to be addressed by confronting these different types of ‘enclaves’, is of the role of architect and the scarce influence of the architectural practice to affect the social realm. The intangible architectures that emerge from these urban ecologies create a wider system; an archipelago of enclaves can be found from one place to another, from one epoch to the next one — dpr-barcelona