... he did design one house in the US, "where he was long banned because of his leftist political associations," according to an Architectural Digest story from 2005. The 1963 Strick House sits on Santa Monica's architecture-packed La Mesa Drive, and it was designed via post--Niemeyer never visited the site or met Joseph and Anne Strick, who commissioned the house (Joseph was a filmmaker best known for his adaptation of Ulysses and in fact divorced Anne before the house was even finished). — la.curbed.com

Gateway Towers 1 is designed to please even the most exacting and fussy Corinthians. That's why every home here is fully automated, giving you the most advanced technology of the century and making your life smooth and easy. Even the amenities have been handpicked with special attention, right from the designer fixtures to the Swarovski lobbies to the private theatre within the towers. — gatewaytowerspune.com

Taut concrete skin, structural glass, an escalator with nothing to hide, everything kinetic, a roof that rocks and rolls. Thom Mayne has given us the most exciting building in Dallas. Plastic cuckoo clocks, his wife Blythe, his dog Isis, his socks, his shoes, his Pritzker prize, the garden, the cereal, the coffee, showers you can see through, columns that could roll. This is where he lives. — fdluxe.dallasnews.com

schmidt hammer lassen architects just completed another building in Kolding, Denmark: The International Business College (IBC) Innovation Factory was officially inaugurated yesterday by the Prince Consort of Denmark. The 12,800 m2 (137,780 sq ft) educational building has gone through a total refurbishment and is designed to support new ways of learning. — bustler.net

The university believes this to be the first design-build competition for an art museum in this country.

Each team gets four months to design a museum and prepare a bid for the museum. — bizjournals.com

The €150m satellite of Paris's Louvre museum shimmers like an apparition on the raised plane of the former coalmine, looking down over streets of pitch-roofed miners' houses, dotted with the occasional chip shop. The building is formed from a series of long, low-slung walls that fade in and out of view as the changing light dances over its surface – or as clouds of drizzle engulf it entirely in the wintry gloom. — guardian.co.uk

The mayor's office in Yvrac said Wednesday that workers who were hired to renovate the grand 13,000-square-meter (140,000-square-foot) manor and raze a small building on the same estate in southwest France mixed them up.

"The Chateau de Bellevue was Yvrac's pride and joy," said former owner Juliette Marmie. "The whole village is in shock. How can this construction firm make such a mistake?" — npr.org

The design is based on the universal notion that you need to sacrifice something in order to make something new. Every product is a compound of different pieces of nature, whether it is a cell phone, a car, a stone floor or a wood board; they have all been harvested in one way or another. Our project is about trying to harvest something as gently as possible so that the source of what we harvest is displayed in a pure, pedagogic and respectful way... — Visiondivision website

Warming Huts: An Art + Architecture Competition on Ice has unveiled the five winning projects of its 2013 edition. Like in previous winters, the selected huts will be built in early January on site and placed on the Assiniboine Credit Union River Trail in Winnipeg, Canada - the longest naturally frozen skating trail in the world. — bustler.net

After several years of planning, design and construction, a team of students from The New School and Stevens Institute of Technology who participated in the 2011 U.S. Department of Energy Solar Decathlon celebrated the completion of Empowerhouse, an innovative model for affordable, energy efficient green housing located in the Deanwood neighborhood of Washington. — The New School

The building is alluring but unsettling. Is the museum’s 10-story concrete cube splitting apart or being pieced together? Is it being held intact by an enormous brace — a transparent protrusion on the cube’s side containing a 54-foot-long escalator — or is that a destabilizing gash that pierces the building’s body? — NYT

The Rotterdam-based Bureau of Architecture, Research, and Design (BOARD) won the Second Prize with its entry entitled “Het hergebruikte appartement” (“The Recycled Apartment”) in the open competition for “Sustainable Krajicek Playgrounds”. — http://b-o-a-r-d.nl

A 10-story building in India made headlines this week after it was reported to have been successfully constructed in only two days.

According to NDTV, the construction of the building, located in an industrial area in the city of Mohali, began on Thursday afternoon at 4.30 p.m. local time. It was reportedly completed on Saturday, also at 4.30 p.m. — huffingtonpost.com