We need to talk! We at MONU think that the time has come to talk with you about "participation" in architecture and urbanism and re-evaluate and re-examine developments around this topic in recent years and what the future might hold.

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

Architect Juan Gabriel Moreno is teaming up with Chicago's International Latino Cultural Center to build a new downtown headquarters in the form of a wild-looking $50 million complex. Announced during the most recent edition of Chicago Latino Film Festival that took place this month, the organization announced its ambitious new "Ibero-American Tower" which would house a number of components [...]. — chicago.curbed.com

The forest of elevator cores sprouting up around town tells us that we’re living in a once-a-century moment—a sugar rush of development unseen here since our parents’ parents’ time. But the dirty little secret behind Boston’s building boom is that it’s profoundly banal—designed without any imagination, straight out of the box, built to please banks rather than people. — bostonmagazine.com

A Chinese construction company is claiming to be the world’s fastest builder after erecting a 57-storey skyscraper in 19 working days in central China.

Broad Sustainable Building, a prefab construction firm, put up the rectangular, glass and steel Mini Sky City in the Hunan provincial capital of Changsha, assembling three floors a day using a modular method [...].

The company now has ambitions to assemble the world’s tallest skyscraper, at 220 floors, in only three months. — The Guardian

After years of delays, Amsterdam RAI is getting its own hotel and with its 650 rooms, Nhow RAI will win the title of largest hotel in the Netherlands. The design of the building was chosen from eleven candidates and is designed by Rem Koolhaas from well-known Rotterdam architecture firm OMA. [...]

Among the features will be a virtual 3D holographic meeting space for having “in person” meetings with the holographs of people in another location. — nltimes.nl

But supplementing that aesthetic of “the future” sketched in imaginary edifice, the full SF vision of the future city is a mosaic, constructed from fragments of the cities that we recognize, including symbols that are decidedly from the past. [...]

If SF functions by taking the world we know and altering it with a constructed future fantasy, the Statue of Liberty serves as the junction point, the axis where the speculative fantasy begins and ends. — motherboard.vice.com

In over 140 years of making glass, [...] Corning Inc. has also established a reputation for commissioning first-rate works of architecture at its home base in this small city in the Finger Lakes region of New York. [...]

And now there’s a Contemporary Art + Design Wing by Thomas Phifer and Partners. Mr. Phifer is a New York architect whose intensely crafted minimalist sensibility comes as close as any American architect has to a Japanese aesthetic. — wsj.com

James Biber can see Russia from his roof. Mr. Biber, the architect of the USA Pavilion at Expo Milano 2015, the world’s fair that is racing to meet its opening date on Friday, also has a good view of Kuwait next door and Iran across the street.

“It’s really a kind of identity parade,” Mr. Biber, 62, said about the jumble. [...] “It’s every nation attempting to express itself in a building. It is the very best and very worst of design you’re going to see in its concentrated form.” — nytimes.com

After public comments were provided, the committee discussed the concepts, the input they had received, and deliberated on the ranking. The final ranking of the Design Concepts by the Selection Committee is as follows:

The Pier Park by Rogers Partners Architects+Urban Designers, ASD, Ken Smith
Destination St. Pete Pier by St. Pete Design Group
ALMA by Alfonso Architects, inc.

City staff will now present these rankings to City Council for approval at a meeting in the near future. — newstpetepier.com

Norman Foster may lose out on yet another major project in Manhattan. The Journal writes that if News Corporation and 21st Century Fox decide to move into 2 World Trade Center, as previously reported, developer Larry Silverstein may drop Foster’s design in favor of a new one by none other than starchitect of the moment, Bjarke Ingels of BIG. — 6sqft.com

Some of the spaces are as Mr. Koolhaas found them; others have been reconfigured but look as though they haven’t been touched. The three new buildings are made of glass, white concrete and an aluminum — NYT

The powerful temblor measuring 7.9 on the Richter scale on Saturday practically levelled the nation's tangible cultural history, robbing it of its architectural jewels, including the landmark Dharhara Tower, in an eerie reminder of the 1934 quake that claimed over 10,000 lives.
The 19th century nine-storey minaret, a UNESCO World Heritage site, which once offered a panoramic view of the Kathmandu Valley, turned into graveyards for over 200 people. — ibnlive.in.com