Forget Facebook, I've got a whole new IPO for you. The owners of the Empire State Building filed papers to go public this week. — marketplace.org

The proposal is for a mixed-use development. On the Howe Street side, there will be a 49-storey residential tower with a 9-storey podium which includes market rental housing, commercial uses, and a childcare facility. The building height is at 150 metres and will be the tallest building on the southern end of downtown and the 4th tallest building in the city, unless the Ritz Carlton site gets developed before this, in which case it would be the 5th tallest. — vancitybuzz.com

Several years ago a Swedish-American company called Plantagon unveiled plans for a series of massive skyscraper greenhouses that stood to transform urban farming in large cities. While the spiraling vertical farms seemed too good to be true at the time, Plantagon just broke ground on its very first vertical farm this week in Linkoping, Sweden. — Inhabitat

Preservationist John Linnert, a Costa Mesa architect, noticed crews working on the upstairs interior in January and reported them to the city planning staff. He has kept a close watch on the building in recent years. — latimes.com

Jeanne Gang and Greg Lindsay suggested some ways of Designing a Fix for Housing, beginning with rethinking our historic commitment to detached, single-family homes and segregated Euclidean zoning. Louis Arleo agreed that we need to redesign suburbia but argued "however suburbia will never be improved until architects embrace the idea of a developers business model."

He plans to build an 80-foot-tall tower by stacking former railway planks at a slight spiral so that the entire structure will appear to change directions midway up, like a game of Jenga gone askew. Inside, a restaurant will sit on the building's lobby floor while a cantilevered, wooden staircase will lead visitors to the various white-cube gallery floors above. — wsj.com

Whatever else you might think about it, Boston City Hall is an improbable building. Call it a giant concrete harmonica or a bold architectural achievement, but to walk by this strange, asymmetrical structure in Government Center is to wonder how on earth it landed there. — bostonglobe.com

Too often during the bubble, banks and builders shunned thoughtful architecture and urban design in favor of cookie-cutter houses that could be easily repackaged as derivatives to be flipped, while architects snubbed housing to pursue more prestigious projects.

But better design is precisely what suburban America needs, particularly when it comes to rethinking the basic residential categories that define it, but can no longer accommodate the realities of domestic life. — nytimes.com

One of France's most important landmarks of modernist architecture, La Cité Radieuse housing estate in Marseille, built by the architect Le Corbusier, has been damaged by fire.

Fire services fought for over 12 hours to put out a blaze that began on Thursday afternoon in a first floor flat in the nine-storey concrete complex which is protected by special heritage status in France. — guardian.co.uk

On Thursday, Architect of the Capitol Stephen Ayers testified before the House Appropriations Legislative Branch subcommittee to explain why the boost is needed for fiscal year 2013.

According to Ayers, aging buildings around the Capitol campus and unexpected events, including last year’s 5.8-magnitude earthquake, will require more money. — thehill.com

A team of two graduate students from Clemson University School of Architecture, Eric Laine and Suzanne Steelman, has won the international Dow Solar Design to Zero competition. The team's proposal LiveWork was awarded the first place award, along with a $20,000 prize sponsored by Dow Solar. — bustler.net

In this uniformity, I see a tendency among architects to respect and maintain the status quo, and a consensus about what architecture is and can do for our society. That’s the expression of a decorative understanding of architecture, even if it expresses itself in a subtle, modernist language. (Jacques Herzog) — Places Journal

Global warming will make New York spectacularly vulnerable to flooding. Some researchers even suggest that in 200 years, Manhattan could look like Venice. Does that mean 8 million people oughta start packing their bags? Of course not. But experts agree the city should do something. Enter Tingwei Xu and Xie Zhang. The U Penn students think New York can protect itself the way a guy cracking lobster protects his tie: by strapping on a bib. — fastcodesign.com

Venturi and Schwartz’s efforts would have been for naught had it not been for Deborah Sarnoff and Robert Gotkin, a dermatologist and a plastic surgeon, respectively, who bought Lieb House for a dollar and spent another $100,000 moving it to Glen Cove, N.Y., where they turned it into a guesthouse that sits across the driveway from their home on the Long Island Sound — a spacious house that Venturi and Scott Brown’s firm completed in 1985. — tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com

Invoking the “Wonders of the World,” Travel + Leisure has just released a comprehensive list of the top 60 must-see landmarks in the modern world. The winners include skyscrapers, bridges, museums, arenas and parks -- all constructed within the last 15 years – and readers took the opportunity to voice their favorites in an online poll. — constructiondigital.com