As a result of the violence, the local real estate market has bottomed out. Those who flee the city usually can’t sell their homes and businesses, so more and more buildings, including some of Tampico’s largest and most impressive ones, lie abandoned. Buildings that could easily survive for another century are mere empty shells, with huge trees growing through the roofs and out of the windows. Such levels of abandonment are rarely seen in the centre of a major city. — theguardian.com

The New York Public Library’s revised renovation plan — to upgrade the Mid-Manhattan Library and create more public space in its flagship Fifth Avenue building — is expected to cost about $300 million, according to library officials who outlined new details of the project in interviews. [...]

But officials, for the first time, revealed that the original plan, mostly scrapped last month in large part because of questions about the price tag, would actually have cost more than $500 million [...]. — nytimes.com

Over in The Hague in The Netherlands, the U.S. Department of State's Bureau of Overseas Buildings Operations (OBO) celebrated the groundbreaking of the new U.S. Embassy earlier this week. Located on a 10-acre site in the Wassenaar municipality, some features of the $206 million project will include a chancery office building, a U.S. Marine Corps residence, a utility building, and multiple access pavilions. — bustler.net

Despite its distance from the center of New York City, Co-op City’s site and scale make it prominent on the landscape [...]. Critics, historians, and even the Supreme Court have noticed as well, weighing in since construction began in 1966 on what the complex signifies for housing finance, site planning, cooperative ownership, ethnic and racial diversity, and tenants’ rights. [...] But it is far from prototypical. — urbanomnibus.net

[The American shopping mall] has its own traceable lineage, from the earliest planned shopping centers to the first regional hubs for shoppers traveling by car, to the novel post-war enclosed malls of Victor Gruen [...]

Malls, in short, have spread across the American landscape -- and defined it -- with remarkable success, adapting to our changing tastes along the way. — washingtonpost.com

The GSA said that retrieving the archives and collections from inside the building was its “first priority”. [...]

Firefighters were able to save around 70 per cent of the Charles Rennie Mackintosh-designed building’s contents during the blaze.

But the famed Mackintosh library, which contained hundreds of rare periodicals and collections, was destroyed, along with countless works of art and the roof of the west wing. — express.co.uk

In what could have been a nightmare come true, part of the glass floor in a viewing box high above Chicago cracked right below a group of California tourists. [...]

Alejandro Garibay and his family were taking in the sights at Chicago's Willis Tower on Wednesday night. The tower's Skydeck, which opened in 2009, is on the 103rd floor, about 1,353 feet above Chicago's downtown. [...]

While on the glass, Garibay heard cracking. — mashable.com

The owners of the tallest tower at the World Trade Center are cutting office rents just months before it opens because of slow leasing activity.

Only one private tenant has signed a lease at One World Trade Center in nearly three years: a one-floor deal with advertising firm Kids Creative that was signed last week. The 3.1-million-square-foot skyscraper, formerly named the Freedom Tower, is 55% leased. — online.wsj.com

Many New Yorkers, still trying to make sense of the 2001 destruction of the World Trade Center, have had a single question as a museum was being built at ground zero: Too soon?

Now that the 9/11 Memorial Museum, as it's officially called, has opened to the public, they and others may find themselves asking something else: Too much?

The museum is an overstuffed answer to the appealing minimalism of the 9/11 memorial and its cascading pools, which opened in 2011. — latimes.com