Foster + Partners announced today that Hermitage Plaza, the ambitious high-rise project in Paris, France, has been approved and was granted the Permis de Construire. The twisted twin towers – at 320 meters aiming to be Western Europe's tallest mixed-use towers – promise to create a new community to the east of La Défense, bringing the life of central Paris to the business district with a riverside park lined with cafes and restaurants. — bustler.net

Jan Gehl, says the new suburb was old-fashioned from its inception. “It was built on principles — specifically those of the modernist movement — that were popular in the middle part of the last century,” he said. “Orestad was built from the top-down, rather than from the bottom-up. Plus, there was an idea that if you got enough ‘starchitects’ on board, then things would be fine.” — NYT

A quirky Montreal landmark has won an international competition among Lego enthusiasts – but the thrill of victory has been tempered by the sting of rejection.

The Habitat 67 housing complex won an internet vote, beating out iconic structures like Paris' Eiffel Tower, Rome's Coliseum and the U.S. Capitol Building in Washington D.C. — cbc.ca

NEWARK — Work has begun on an education-centered community featuring three charter schools and affordable housing for teachers in the city’s decayed downtown, with much of the design work done by the noted architect Richard Meier. The development, called Teachers Village, is expected to cost $149 million when it is completed two years from now. — The New York Times

The Basketball Arena, by architects Wilkinson Eyre, is one of two venues that can be taken apart into kit form and transported. This one, which seats 12,000, consists of a tent-like membrane stretched over a random arrangement of curved forms. The chief of the 2016 Rio Olympics has expressed an interest in taking it to Brazil — Guardian

The winners of the 2012 Housing Tomorrow competition were just announced. The annual competition promotes the exploration of contextual, cultural, and life cycle flows that offer new housing strategies for living in the future.

Sponsored by New York-based d3, the competition invites architects, designers, engineers, and students to collectively explore innovative approaches to residential urbanism, architecture, interiors, and designed objects. — bustler.net

The authorities think progress is demolishing our community just so they can host the Olympics for a few weeks — NYT

Dick Clark's Malibu hideaway makes crawling under a rock seem like an attractive proposition.

The home, which looks as if it were carved from one massive megalith, sits atop a mountain and almost 23 acres of land (zoned, of course, for horses and a pool). — huffingtonpost.com

Viennese architectural firm Wolfgang Tschapeller ZT GmbH has 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.

Tschapeller's winning entry, together with fourteen finalist submissions, will be on view in an exhibition at the Museum for Applied Arts from March 9 through 25. — bustler.net

We are rarely roused by the day-to-day, brick-by-brick additions that have the most power to change our environment. We know what we already like but not how to describe it, or how to change it, or how to change our minds. We need to learn how to read a building, an urban plan, a developer’s rendering, and to see where critique might make a difference.... We need more critics — citizen critics — equipped with the desire and the vocabulary to remake the city. — Places Journal

Global design firm Fentress Architects recently announced the winning designs for the 2011 Fentress Global Challenge, an international competition launched last fall for architecture and engineering students to present their visions for the Airport of the Future. Expert jury members narrowed the 200 submittals to 16 finalists, and then to the top three with two honorable mentions. — bustler.net

Swedish furniture company IKEA, has collaborated with Oregon architectural firm Ideabox, to launch its first line of prefabricated houses in the U.S., named the “Aktiv.” The IKEA-themed dwelling is a one-bedroom home centered around space-saving furniture and products. The hip and modern house was outfitted taking into consideration the demands from Pacific-Northwest homeowners, and is designed to be eco-friendly. — psfk.com

You can’t just focus on housing and transit in the core of a city, you need to focus on the physical needs of manufacturing, development and the needs that go along with them. That will clearly have a huge effect not only on the city but regional level. — Wired - Autopia

In theory the mechanism is really quite simple:

1. A sensor detects the rumblings of an earthquake.

2. Within .5 to 1 second an air tank pushes air in-between an artificial foundation and the actual structure of the home, lifting it as high as 3cm off the ground.

3. While the earth below violently shakes, the levitating home quietly and patiently waits, returning back to the ground once the tectonic plates have settled. — spoon-tamago.com

The innovation offered by a new tech campus on Roosevelt Island is not limited to New York’s technology sector but the design one, as well. Almost every bid had soaring renderings and flashy flythroughs, most notably the winning entry from Cornell. Now the upstate university has announced six of the world’s top firms, including a few local favorites, are in the running to design the new tech campus. — New York Observer