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

The London office of SOM and Copenhagen-based firm Entasis -- who collaborated with COWI in Denmark and Sweden -- was just announced as having the winning design for the Polestar Tower in Gothenburg, Sweden. Once built, the 230 m. structure will reportedly be Scandinavia's tallest tower. — bustler.net

Though many scholars focusing on penitentiaries suspect that staff-prisoner relations are molded by institutional architecture, little empirical work has been completed on the topic. Now, a new study led by Beijersbergen and published in Crime & Delinquency has concluded that building styles, floor plans, and other design features do indeed have a significant impact on the way Dutch prisoners perceive their relationships with prison staff. — psmag.com

Due to plummeting enrollment and a troubled district, vacant school buildings—heck, just vacant buildings—are none too rare in Detroit. After 19 years of abandonment, the Nellie Leland School, however, is no longer vacant—it, as abandoned urban buildings are want to do, is back in session as condos. [...]

Today, the school is known as Leland Lofts, a set of expansive condos in the Lafayette Park neighborhood near downtown Detroit, where a 1,465-square-foot, one-bedroom loft goes for $175K. — curbed.com

Work is already underway in Bel Air on a megacompound that will include the largest single-family house in the US. The enormous project, at the dead-end of Airole Way above the Bel-Air Hotel, comes from megamansion developer Nile Niami, and is slated to total 85,000 square feet with a 70,000-square-foot main house. [...]

The [Los Angeles Business Journal] guesses America's newest mega-megamansion will be listed "in the $150 million-plus range." — la.curbed.com

The Wall Street Journal calls this "Fighting Urban Blight With Art". Liz Thomas, the curator of the project, calls it "an experience that asks people to think about this space that they hurtle through every day".

The project is not actually fighting blight, of course - only the ability of Amtrak customers to see it. — Al Jazeera

Downtown Los Angeles’s historic core is about to get its first major museum, if that’s what you want to call it. Local developer Tom Gilmore and architect Tom Wiscombe are teaming up on the complex project, which they are calling the Old Bank District Museum. It will be dedicated to contemporary Los Angeles art and located in the sub-basements, basements, ground floors, mezzanines, and roofs of three interconnected buildings along Main and Fourth streets. — archpaper.com

Brutalism, a muscular and monumental architectural style known for its unsparing use of cast concrete, has grown old enough since its heyday in the fifties, sixties, and seventies to have aged badly, but not old enough to inspire much sympathy. The austere, domineering artifacts of its philosophies now face widespread enmity; a number of institutions, with varying degrees of exertion, have sought in recent years to replace their Brutalist inheritances with practically anything else. — theawl.com

THANKS TO preservation efforts and the museum-building boom of the past decade, America's hot zone for modern and contemporary architecture is still the Midwest. And driving is the best way to see it all, including the star attraction, Chicago. "It's the birthplace of tall buildings," said Zoë Ryan, an architecture and design curator at the Art Institute of Chicago — online.wsj.com

A $700,000 home was teetering over the edge of Texas' Lake Whitney — until officials set it on fire.

The home, which had been gradually crumbling into the lake for weeks, was set on fire shortly after 10 a.m. local time after authorities deemed it the safest and cheapest option. Officials had considered pulling the home closer to land using a giant net — deemed unsafe — or letting it fall into the lake on its own — too expensive to clean up. — mashable.com

Some people might mentally retch that the United Nations, believing the world's population could hit 9 billion by 2050, thinks we should prepare to eat bugs.

Not the folks at Sweden's Belatchew Arkitekter, though: They want to fast-track the insect-munching. Thus they've whipped up plans to build "vermin farms" upon Stockholm's major intersections, so that by 2018 everybody in the city will be guaranteed plentiful rations of six-legged foodstuffs. — citylab.com

On Thursday, Mayor Rahm Emanuel belatedly jumped into the fray after a public campaign against the sign on Chicago's second-tallest building spearheaded by the Chicago Tribune’s Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic Blair Kamin.

“Mayor Emanuel believes this is an architecturally tasteful building scarred by an architecturally tasteless sign,” Kelley Quinn, the mayor’s newly-appointed communications director, said in an emailed statement. — politics.suntimes.com