"Beauty is not an additive act but rather a coherent aesthetic. Anything else would be irrelevant. We have been advocating a total and integral environment for both physical and mental wellbeing, in other words, a healthy environment must work on all levels."
- Ali Heshmati, '92 graduate from the School of Architecture at College of Design — LEAD Inc.

For its 75th birthday on Sunday, the bridge's management is planning a celebration that includes music, art shows, lectures, a new book and a new visitor center. But one thing won't happen: Nobody gets to cross the bridge on foot on the big day. — pbs.org

That's the ultimate question of the Bethlehem Steel Administration building and unfortunately it looks as if the question has already been answered by the City of Lackawanna officials and the owners. Thankfully, there are still people who don't want to see this Beaux-Arts beauty sent to the landfill like so many great buildings before it. — buffalorising.com

The Tokyo Skytree, twice as tall as the Eiffel Tower, and its surrounding retail and office complex opens today to an estimated 200,000 visitors. [...]

Tokyo Skytree, which took four years to build, surpasses the 600-meter Canton Tower in Guangzhou, China, as the world’s tallest, according to the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat. Dubai’s 828-meter Burj Khalifa is the tallest building, according to the council. — businessweek.com

The proposal "Papilio" by Swedish architect duo Selime Osman and Ilyas Awadh has taken the first prize of EUR 10,000 (USD 12,770) in the Bullhorn - Cembrit Design Competition. The winning entry transmorphs fiber cement in a very poetic way into a swarm of light flying butterflies. The brief was to improve life settings in urban transit areas with the Malmi station area in Helsinki, Finland as case. — bustler.net

The Music Box is a New Orleans art installation that makes regular artist’s colonies look like Camazotz. In this tiny shantytown, every building is also a musical instrument, and the entire town can be played in a beautiful, spooky symphony that looks and sounds like something out of Coraline. — grist.org

Space International's renovation of Rudolph Schindler's Mackey Apartments is both pragmatic and sublime. Choosing to honor the existing architecture through contrast, the studio designed a cantilevered, 75-square metre counterpoint to the original building. An architecture report from Los Angeles by Mimi Zeiger — domusweb.it

I remember Poly Styrene, the singer from X-Ray Spex, and all her prophetic songs from the late 70s: "I Am A Poser," "Germ-Free Adolescents," "Prefabricated Icon," "Genetic Engineering." Take a look at architecture and people today and you realize that it all came true. — Vice Magazine

Philip Kennicott interviewed Frank Gehry and analyzed the current proposal for the Eisenhower Memorial and what has gone wrong to date with the process. Donna Sink, felt it "was an excellent article. The slideshow is the first time I've really understood the urban context of this memorial, and OMG I love it completely now!..."

Campus 2, as it is currently called, will not replace the 1 Infinite Loop campus. Instead, it will provide “research facility” office space for an additional 13,000 employees, which is more than 3,000 than 1 Infinite Loop. There is also 300,000 feet of expansion space for future growth. — 9to5mac.com

SEEDocs launches with the story of the restoration and revitalization of the Owe’neh Bupingeh pueblo in Ohkay Owingeh, New Mexico. — SEEDocs

London/Paris-based practice Matteo Cainer Architects Ltd has sent us its competition entry for the new Swiss embassy building in Yaoundé, the capital city of Cameroon, West Africa. The design is a play on the precision of Swiss clockwork mechanism and traditional Cameroon Musgum housing. — bustler.net

The term ‘building science’ is used quite often now in sustainable building circles, but much of what we understand of it can be traced back to the work of Dr. Joe Lstiburek, founder of Building Science Corporation. Many of the building standards today have his finger prints all over them, and his tough love criticism of building design is undercut with his wry humor and encyclopedic knowledge of building construction. — Inhabitat