Swapping cement and steel for timber is the vision of a number of environmentally-minded architects who are planning high-rise buildings across the world.

Architect Michael Green has plans for a 30-story wooden skyscraper in Vancouver, while plans are afoot in Norway and Austria for 17- and 20-story buildings that use wood as the main building material, eschewing steel and concrete. — CNN.com

In Inner Mongolia a new city stands largely empty. This city, Ordos, suggests that the great Chinese building boom, which did so much to fuel the country's astonishing economic growth, is over. Is a bubble about to burst? — BBC

China, of course, is not new terrain for international architects. Many top American firms have run offices inside China for a decade or more. The new arrivals, though, come not by invitation or out of curiosity but because they need work. They are, as Michael Tunkey, head of the China office for the North American firm Cannon Design, says, “refugees from the economic crisis.” — New York Times

Mr. Kundig first visited Frey House II about 25 years ago. "The design is a bit strange, but it completely resonated with me," he said. "I'm influenced by architecture that toes the line between rugged and beautiful, that demonstrates how they can be the same thing." He notes that Mr. Frey's simple design nodded to the local vernacular of humble miners' shacks. — WSJ.com

Van Alen Books is a new architecture and design bookstore and public reading room located in NY. How will @DelaineIsaac fare with this newly industrialized space? Does LOT-EK address the dearth of public meeting and forum spaces in the city? — YouTube

Apple is actually taking a site that is now parking lots and low-rise boxes and making it worse for the community. Yes, it will be iconic, assuming you think a building shaped like a whitewall motorcycle tire is iconic, but it will reduce current street connectivity, seal off potential walking routes and, as I wrote some time back, essentially turn its back on its community. With a parking garage designed to hold over ten thousand cars, by the way. — Switchboard

The pavilion concept SEAT by New York and Portland-based collaboration E/B Office has won the commission for this year's Freedom Park Project at Atlanta. SEAT is a garden pavilion composed of approximately 400 simple wooden chairs arrayed and stacked in a 3-dimensional sine wave surface rising above the ground. — bustler.net

Swiss star architect Peter Zumthor has lost a battle for ownership of the spa and hotel complex in Vals, eastern Switzerland, which he designed.

The commune, which owns the complex, decided on Friday night to sell it to 35-year-old property developer Remo Stoffel. — swissinfo.ch

In our previous post, we just published the winners of eVolo's 2012 Skyscraper Competition. This entry here, Coal Power Plant Mutation by Romanian architect Bogdan Chipara, was one of the Honorable Mentions and suggests a radically new design approach towards fossil fuel power plants. — bustler.net

eVolo Magazine has announced the winners of the 2012 Skyscraper Competition. The annual contest—now in its sixth year—honors visionary ideas that redefine skyscraper design through the use of new technologies, materials, programs, aesthetics, and spatial organizations, along with studies on globalization, flexibility, adaptability, and the digital revolution. — bustler.net

Viennese architectural firm Wolfgang Tschapeller ZT GmbH won the First Prize in an international competition that seeks to overhaul the campus of the Angewandte, a group of buildings that house the University of Applied Arts, as well as the Museum for Applied Arts in Vienna, Austria. johnszot commented "fucking hot, that".

Austrian firm soma is updating us on the latest construction status of their “One Ocean“ Thematic Pavilion for the EXPO 2012 in Yeosu, South Korea. The pavilion is a major and permanent building for the Expo and is scheduled for official opening on May 12, 2012. [...]
The building will house two kinds of exhibitions that will give the visitors an introduction to the EXPO’s theme, The living Ocean and Coast. — bustler.net

“The city is better for the starchitect phenomenon,” said Jonathan J. Miller, the president of the appraisal firm Miller Samuel, “because it enhanced the mystique of New York’s residential housing market. But during the frenzy, those buildings were marketed as if they had inherent greater value, and the jury is still out on that.” — NYT

The results of the Pfff Inflatable Architecture competition, organized by CityVision and FARM, have recently been announced at MACRO - Museum of Contemporary Art in Rome. Competition winner is the concept 'Grenade' by Emmanuel Sitbon and Selma Feriani of Paris-based SITBON ARCHITECTES. — bustler.net