Through case studies, surveys, and construction-cost analyses, the Cultural Policy Center report found that the museum building boom didn't bring the net benefit to communities predicted by the so-called Bilbao Effect. [...] Beyond the standard gentrification effect [...] supply may have outstripped demand over the course of the U.S. arts center building boom—leaving some cities with the responsibility to maintain or even pay for cultural centers that they don't entirely need. — citylab.com

Architect Peter Zumthor has dramatically revised his design for a new Los Angeles County Museum of Art, creating a new bridge-like section of the building that would span Wilshire Boulevard.

The new design is meant to address concerns that the original plan would encroach on, and potentially damage, the La Brea Tar Pits at the neighboring Page Museum, casting a shadow over the largest pit. — latimes.com

About $570 million, or 94 percent, has been raised by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art for its 235,000-square-foot (21,800-square-meter) expansion and to add $245 million to the museum’s endowment. The $305 million wing designed by the Snohetta architecture firm is rising behind SFMOMA’s current home, opened two decades ago in the technology-heavy South of Market area, or SOMA. — bloomberg.com

Take one voguish designer, one national treasure and one icon-hungry mayor and what do you get? A floating forest across the Thames. But can anyone actually say what the £175m garden bridge is for? — theguardian.com

The Royal Institute of British Architects has announced the winners of the 2014 RIBA National Awards. With 44 buildings in the UK and 12 buildings elsewhere in the European Union, the selected projects will now have the chance to make the shortlist for the coveted RIBA Stirling Prize, awarded annually to the architects of the building that has made the greatest contribution to British architecture in the past year. — bustler.net

Switzerland’s two largest art museums are building extensions, although Basel is moving faster than its neighbour and sometimes rival, Zürich. In Basel, construction is proceeding apace on the Kunstmuseum’s project, across the street from the original museum. [...]

Meanwhile Zürich’s Kunsthaus has become embroiled in a dispute which has halted work this month. The Swiss environmental group Archicultura is objecting, and permission to build is being withheld by a canton court. — theartnewspaper.com

Imagined with bright pink and green lights, standing more than 150m taller than the Burj Khalifa and emerging from an island in a lake in central China, these plans for Wuhan’s Phoenix Towers seem a world away from grey old London.

Yet the ambitious design revealed this week has been put forward by the British architectural firm Chetwoods, and owes much of its inspiration to an award-winning project for a new, greener London Bridge. — independent.co.uk

"What's interesting is that when you go back a long time, they share a lot of architectural typologies. They are not so different...This is about going back to the origins when these three faiths were close and shared a lot architecturally". Kuehn says. — BBC News

Using images provided by cultural organizations worldwide, some of which were captured with Google’s Street View camera technology, [the Google Cultural Institute's Street Art Project] includes street art from around the globe, including work that no longer exists [...]

Google is the latest organization to wade into debates about how or whether to institutionalize, let alone commercialize, art that is ephemeral and often willfully created subversively. — nytimes.com

A team of researchers from Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia are working on another solution: A swarm of tiny robots that could cover the construction site of the future, quickly and cheaply building greener buildings of any size. [...]

"The robots can work simultaneously while performing different tasks, and having a fixed size they can create objects of virtually any scale, as far as material properties permit” — fastcoexist.com

"I got to say Chicago I think this is on you. Did you not think Donald Trump was going to put his name on the building you let him build? It's what he does. Have you been to New York? Or, as you'd think it would be called from the buildings, 'New Trump City'" — Daily Show