Rumor has it that Pritzker Prize–winning French architect Jean Nouvel has been selected to design a mammoth new building for the National Art Museum of China (NAMOC), renowned for its exhibitions of 20th-century and contemporary Chinese art, in Beijing. If reports prove to be true, Nouvel will not only have the distinguished honor of executing this highly coveted commission, but also to win bragging rights for outgunning his blockbuster contemporaries, Frank Gehry and Zaha Hadid... — jingdaily.com

When asked, the German-born “Father of Fonts” insists that there is nothing similar about designing a typeface and designing a house. “They’re totally different,” he says, in excellent English peppered with correctly implemented expletives. “With a typeface, you design a space. A letter is defined by the inside space, more than it is by the outside. You design for shape, but also for function.”... “In either case,” he concedes, “the design is as much about function as it is about aesthetics.” — dwell.com

d3 today announced the winners of its Natural Systems competition for 2012. The annual competition promotes investigation of natural systems from microscopic to universal toward determining new architectonic strategies. The competition invited architects, designers, engineers, and students to collectively explore the potential for analyzing, documenting, and deploying nature-based, sustainable influences in urbanism, architecture, interiors, and designed objects. — bustler.net

Ratner & Co. believe Brooklyn as a whole is already well on its way to super-premium status and will never go back. They believe Ratner has built exactly the sort of architectural showpiece and modern sports-and-entertainment megaplex that the newly gentrified Brooklynites want. — New York Magazine

We have received stunning photos of the new Porsche Pavilion at the Autostadt in Wolfsburg, Germany. The building which opened just recently is the first addition to Volkswagen's theme park since its opening in 2000. Designed by German HENN Architekten, the pavilion expresses the importance of Porsche within the Volkswagen Group family. — bustler.net

Inspiring, educational, innovative and informative: these museum designs are world class. — Frame Magazine

For a Middle East-based client he's not allowed to identify, Johnson worked on a project back in the late 2000s designing a building that would have been a mile-and-a-half tall, with 500 stories. Somewhat of a theoretical practice, the design team identified between 8 and 10 inventions that would have had to take place to build a building that tall. Not innovations, Johnson says, but inventions, as in completely new technologies and materials. — theatlanticcities.com

When Mr. Archer, 62, finds something intriguing (and it’s usually a very large something), he often builds a new wing around it.

His house, which he bought 30 years ago for $135,000, was once a 3,000-square-foot, two-story box. Now it is somewhere between 11,000 and 13,000 square feet, with wings flying every which way, a pterodactyl of architectural detritus. — nytimes.com

If you happen to be in Antwerp, Belgium this summer, make sure to check out "Badboot" [...], the world's largest floating open-air swimming pool, which opened this week. At an overall length of 120 meters (394 feet), the lido is capable of receiving up to 600 people at two event halls, a swimming pool and a restaurant with a lounge terrace, which are all open to the public. — bustler.net

Why bother, then? It’s a key building in the history of structural engineering, and its unusual form, a poured-concrete cantilevered shell, has few if any equals in modern engineering. Almost nothing else looks like this building, and in a world of carbon-copy architecture, its loopy, futuristic curves are unique: a concrete rocket ship amid Chicago’s glass boxes. A little weird, yes, but the more you look at it, the more you like it. — vanityfair.com

In 1954, a young Hungarian went to work with Eero Saarinen in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. As his then colleague, Cesar Pelli, describes him: “[He] was a small sensation: he had a fur-trimmed coat, a homburg, and a Van Dyke beard.”... He had been a distinguished architectural student at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, in Paris, and a draftsman under Le Corbusier... he was quickly tapped as the in-house photographer, creating pictures that became indelible symbols of the Mad Men age of Modernism. — fastcodesign.com

Sydney spent three times its original $2 billion Games budget—its Olympics facilities still operate at a loss. Most of Athens’ stadia remain empty, some in graffiti-covered disrepair. — thedailybeast.com