The building, designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, is a historical landmark but has been expensive and troublesome to maintain. The library’s management, led by D.C. Chief Librarian Ginnie Cooper, has been considering whether it can be renovated or expanded in some way, or if the library needs to find a new home for the central library. — washingtonpost.com

Famed filmmaker dedicates Haifa space to his father Munio Gitai Weinraub, a 'Bauhaus refugee' who single-handedly changed the city's landscape. — haaretz.com

Yet women architects in Latin America — as in North America — continue to confront gender-based inequities. Partly this seems due to entrenched cultural attitudes, and partly to the traditional connections between architecture, engineering and capital, which can make it difficult to progress to a less patriarchal culture of building and design. — Places Journal

Displaced residents will be able to move into the new apartments "as if they had just won first prize in a lottery."
The plans also include "Super-Galactic" residences, which will tempt celebrities including (but not limited to) royal families from Europe, CEOs, and "the wealthy." — curbed.com

When the plans were first unveiled, the architects said, the roof resembled a “a scarf floating within the space” — a somewhat loaded description, perhaps, considering that last year the French officially banned full veils in public places. The museum’s “luminous veil,” or “flying carpet” as it has also been called, covers some 30,000 square feet of gallery space on the ground and lower floors. — NYT

It’s an eye-opening experience. I have lived in New York for more than 30 years. I have crossed the harbor on the Staten Island Ferry more than once and crossed the big-name bridges hundreds of times. But great swaths of the city remain as unknown to me as Patagonia. The architecture cruise helped fix that. — NYT

The 11 floors tower of the HESAV (Health High School Vaud) has been animated as a rudimentary screen whose pixels are, in fact, all the windows and shutters that students, staff and friends shake for hours. This project announces the celebration "HESAV fait ses 400 coups!" from 1rst to 8th of November 2012 // — youtube.com

Yesterday we published the shortlist for the RIBA Manser Medal 2012 for the best new house, and today we're following up with the list of shortlisted houses for this year's Stephen Lawrence Prize which the RIBA announced just recently. [...] The prize, set up in memory of the teenager who was setting out on the road to becoming an architect when he was murdered in 1993, is intended to encourage fresh talent working with smaller budgets. — bustler.net

Architecture, the most public of endeavours, is practised by people who inhabit a smugly hermetic milieu which is cultish. If this sounds far-fetched just consider the way initiates of this cult describe outsiders as the lay public, lay writers and so on: it's the language of the priesthood. And like all cults its primary interest is its own interests, that is to say its survival, and the triumph of its values – which means building. — guardian.co.uk

TO THIS DAY I FIND THE PROCESS OF TEACHING WITH NUMBER CRUNCHING A HUGE MISTAKE. THE PRINCIPLES ARE WHAT COUNT. IF A STUDENT IS AWARE HOW THE STRUCTURE WORKS TO BE THE STRONGEST AND WEAKEST THEN THEY CAN DESIGN WITH KNOWLEDGE. — SMALL AT LARGE

Spanish architectural magazine future arquitecturas recently announced the winners of its SC2012 Links: Bridging Rivers competition which called for innovative ideas of how to build a habitable bridge in two different sites: Chongqing (China) and Seville (Spain). Eligible for the international competition were architecture students or young architects under 35 years old. — bustler.net

Today we chat with a man on a mission, Stan Munro, creator of the astounding and ever-growing Toothpick World. Stan is out to re-create the world’s most famous buildings — using nothing but toothpicks and glue. — blog.makezine.com

The entry by LA-based Neil M. Denari Architects has won the First Prize in the international competition for the New Harbor Service Building in Keelung, Taiwan. — bustler.net

Over the last three decades, the design of U.S. embassies has been a balancing act between the need to protect diplomats and staff and the desire to project a positive image of the United States: welcoming buildings that showcase transparency and openness versus imposing and intimidating fortresses. But attacks on U.S. facilities, especially in the post-9/11 era, have tended to tilt the conversation toward the latter... — npr.org

The larger irony is that in calling for a huge new mosque in the tradition of Sinan, Erdoğan may be missing the more fundamental lesson of the Ottoman architect’s work. As Bruno Taut, the German architect who emigrated to Turkey to flee the Nazis, argued, Sinan was himself a proto-modernist whose ability to create extraordinary beauty from novel engineering had more in common with twentieth-century German functionalism than earlier Islamic architecture. — The New York Review of Books