We reported over the summer about the unveiling of the East River Waterfront Esplanade and mentioned plans to further extend it in coming years. Only six months later, Pier 15 just south of South Street Seaport, is now open. Designed by SHoP Architects, with help from Ken Smith Landscape Architect, the new two-story section features sharp angles, a colorful red roof, native flora, and a design that expands upon the existing esplanade. — InhabitatNYC

Finnish architects Kouvo & Partanen have just recently been chosen to design a hotel residence for the astronomers, engineers, and other observatory staff working at ALMA, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array. At 2,900 meters above sea level, the hotel residence will be built at the ALMA Operations Support Facility in the Atacama Desert, in the foothills of the Chilean Andes. — bustler.net

Following last year’s nuclear disaster in Fukushima, there has been a great deal of public concern over the contamination of local food sources and water and now, newly constructed buildings can be added to the list of radiation fears in Japan. A three-month long survey of students in Nihonmatsu City turned city officials onto the presence of high levels of radiation in one recently built three-story apartment complex. — Inhabitat

BOARD's Europan 11 entry for the Dutch city of Deventer suggests abandoning the idea of agriculture in cities. — http://www.b-o-a-r-d.nl/projects.htm

A Michigan native who as a boy played with Legos and wrote a fifth-grade essay titled "Why I Want to Be an Architect," Ronan wears the black-on-black palette that is a modernist uniform and goes well with his fluffy gray hair. The recognition for the Poetry Foundation headquarters is his second national Honor Award from the AIA. The first, given in 2009, was for the brightly colored Gary Comer Youth Center in the South Side's Greater Grand Crossing neighborhood. — Blair Kamin, Chicago Tribune

Our friends at Wallpaper* yesterday announced the winners of their 2012 Design Awards. The international panel of judges, this year comprising Grayson Perry, Rafael Vinoly, Simon de Pury, Gerd Bulthaup, and Jean-Paul Goude, selected the top entries in eleven major design categories. Many more awards in highly specialized design categories were chosen by Wallpaper* editors and contributors. — bustler.net

Along the Cartagena waterfront, architects José Selgas and Lucía Cano light up an architectural antidote to the gloom of the Spanish real estate crisis — domusweb.it

The truth I’m trying to present is one about site-specific forgetting. If our history is a history of forgetting how to remember the past, as I am arguing, then the city of Detroit is the engine of our conflicted deliverance. It’s the machinery we’ve used for particular acts of forgetting, each connected to the place and time where the forgetting got done. — Places Journal

Istanbul’s evocative skyline is set to be capped by a new peak, as architects on Wednesday unveiled plans to build a tower almost 300 meters high, which will rival the highest buildings in Europe.

Scotland-based architectural firm RMJM’s office in Dubai said that it received planning approval for “Metropol Istanbul,” a vast 500,000 square meter project, which includes three towers, a 30,000 square meter public shopping mall, offices and luxury apartments. — blogs.wsj.com

In response to the demolition of several famous buildings, the City Council approves rules for tearing down or altering structures older than 45 years and designed by important architects. It also establishes a Cultural Heritage Commission. — latimes.com

The American Institute of Architects (AIA) has selected the Gehry Residence in Santa Monica, California for the 2012 AIA Twenty-five Year Award. [...]

A seemingly ad hoc collection of raw, workmanlike materials wrapped around an unassuming two-story clapboard bungalow, Frank Gehry’s, FAIA, home for his wife, Berta, and two sons found a literal, but unexpected, answer to the question of neighborhood context, and used it to forever re-shape the formal and material boundaries of architecture. — bustler.net

Czech firm CHYBIK+KRISTOF Associated Architects have shared with us their schematic design for the Faculty of Fine Arts at Brno University of Technology in Brno, Czech Republic. The project team also included Ivan Ruller and Ondrej Stehlik. — bustler.net

Reviving the Maida Vale model is often talked about but rarely done, and although the athletes' village version hasn't quite captured the lushness and generosity of the originals, it is at least there. It is also welcome that there is a degree of calm to the buildings, compared to the frenzied gesticulations, the visual shouts of "buy me, buy me" that typify most works of regeneration. — Guardian