It's goodbye to mao and hello to Europe's top architects, all Australia's iron ore... and half the World's concrete. With its sights set on Olympic gold, Beijing is being rebuilt round the clock. By Deyan Sudjic View full entry
The housing cartel known as Toll Brothers continues its monopolistic reshaping of the American domestic landscape, with vast new tracts of identikit housing, creeping into farmlands, displacing forests, colonizing the plains: New York Times. See also artist Jason Salavon's brilliant housing... View full entry
Brooklyn Atlantic Yards developer (among many other blue chip projects) first builds bridges. "The project's supporters - as well as Mr. Ratner's associates - see these tactics as smart business. But opponents see the outreach as something more sinister: a campaign to divide opponents, co-opt... View full entry
Italy has chosen a winner for the 4.4bn euro ($5.3bn; £3bn) contract to build the world's longest suspension bridge that will link Sicily to the mainland. Big Berlu Biz or Big Berlu White Elephant? BBC | via View full entry
The Sky's No Limit from LATimes and Castles in the Sand abridged from this week's New Yorker View full entry
In order to track urban wind patterns - patterns that could disperse wind-borne germs or poisonous gases - scientists are relying on "micro-meteorology," or the study of complex inner-city wind dynamics. Those dynamics' very complexity may be "bad news for scientists trying to build a model, but... View full entry
While history has shown border fences to be largely ineffective at keeping out immigrants, Spain, apparently, now plans to join the ranks of Israel and the U.S. by upgrading it's massive border fence system around the enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla. Intent on keeping African asylum-seekers out at... View full entry
A new list of $1.7 billion in overseas embassy contracts "is topped by a whopping $463.8-million award to First Kuwait Trading & Contracting Co. for construction of the unclassified portion of the new U.S. embassy complex in Baghdad, Iraq." (Rwanda is the third biggest). ENR View full entry
1 million-square-foot complex envisioned as heart of Valley: The Internet giant, which has been looking for expansion space during the company's extraordinary growth spurt, plans to build offices, housing for workers, roads and infrastructure on a vacant section of the sprawling NASA facility in... View full entry
Silvio Berlusconi has given the go ahead to controversial plans to build an underwater dam to protect Venice from flooding. BBC View full entry
"stop farming the crops and start manufacturing them" seems to be the mantra of Organitech, and once you do that, why not go vert? Wired View full entry
"Add to that (Ground Zero) a project in Brooklyn (Gehry) that seeks to create a superblock where there isn't one, and scattered calls to bring back Robert Moses, and this isn't looking like a great season for the legacy of Jane Jacobs." NYO View full entry
Remember this classic discussion? Well, they're back ... and this time the city will remain dim. | nytimes View full entry
The juxaposition of suburban and urban elements in american cities continues to make me laugh and worry simultaneously. l check it out l previous lPulled from a community bulletin (via email) of residents living near Cabrini-Green Video taping and documenting illegal activity and presenting a... View full entry
Years of talk and concern have still not managed to deliver the "28.5 hectares maze of towering blocks, low-rise flats and concrete walkways that became the Aylesbury estate " from inner city blight. Now the bulldozers have been called in to demolish 2,700 homes, and hundreds of families will be... View full entry