What might happen at Seattle Center when Memorial Stadium goes away? Are there imaginative and unique uses for a large urban park? What is the Jelly Bean and why is it floating next to the Space Needle?
Join us Friday, May 11, for presentations by the finalists of a design competition, Urban Intervention, that explores the future of Seattle Center and public space. The lecture is free and open to the public, but tickets should be reserved in advance. — AIA Seattle

Designed primarily by Roland Genick, chief architect for rail and transit systems at Parsons, the huge Pasadena-based construction conglomerate, the new stations are topped by undulating light-blue canopies of perforated metal panels that are not only dated — bringing a public-art project from the early 1990s to mind — but provide almost no shade or rain protection. Or solar power, for that matter, though from certain angles the stations look a bit like they're covered with photovoltaic panels. — latimes.com

As contemporary governments and citizens increasingly demand that reclaimed landfills be many things to many people — energy producers, social nodes, memorials — and also that they interface with local infrastructure, we would do well to study the historical precedent of Monte Testaccio... [whose] longevity and vitality make it an ideal model of what a landfill can become: an agent of civic engagement and an urban catalyst. This is the promise of landfill reclamation. — Places Journal

International architectural practice 10 Design has shared with us their concept of a headquarter park for pharmaceutical company Yabao in Shenzhen, China. Construction of this massive project already commenced last October and is well underway. — bustler.net

Archinect had the opportunity to speak with Tadao Ando. Check out the Interview: 20 Minutes with a Master. b3tadine[sutures] was so inspired that he posted three times and archaalto wrote "I sometimes imagine that millions of years from now when another intelligent species excavates the earth they find the ruins of Louis Kahn's and Tadao Ando's buildings, and maybe they'll think we had some grace and weren't just accidents waiting to happen.."

The Jury of the European Prize for Urban Public Space 2012, chaired by Spanish architect Josep Llinàs, has announced two joint First Prize winners [...].

The European Prize for Urban Public Space is an award created by the CCCB in 2000 to acknowledge and encourage the creation and recovery of public spaces in European cities, and to highlight urbanistic interventions that promote the public dimension of urban space and its role in social integration. — bustler.net

Ayyüce also says that with governments such as Los Angeles now less financially able to maintain parks and other such amenities, big business set about increasingly co-opting -- or, picking up the slack for -- the creation and safeguarding of a bastardized brand of community commons.

"You go to The Americana, you go to The Grove, you got to the Santa Monica [Third Street Promenade], these are places that thousands of people visit," Ayyüce says. "But this is not really public space." — kcet.org

When the hotel workers released a short film a few months later that vividly made the connection between poverty and the uprising, there was a memorable freak-out in the Convention Bureau and City Hall. Instead of a comprehensive investigation that documented events, took public testimony and probed underlying causes, the Christopher Commission was coaxed to finish its superficial report on reforming the LAPD. No one wanted to hear the voices from our own intifada. — Los Angeles Review of Books

Over the past ten years a lot has been researched, analyzed, written and said about cities in the largest developing countries and emerging economies such as Brazil, Russia, India, and China. (Bernd Upmeyer, Editor-in-Chief of MONU Magazine, April 2012) — http://www.monu-magazine.com/

Ben van Berkel of UNStudio, along with Jonathan Cohn of EE&K a Perkins Eastman company, presented their 'Vision Board' - a conceptual rendering in the year 2050, showing Los Angeles Union Station as a multi-modal transit hub with a mix of uses, new development and outdoor spaces. The intent of the Vision Board was to explore visionary possibilities for Union Station and surrounding areas. — bustler.net

A public forum today at Union Station provided the public with their first look at conceptual visions for Union Station and the surrounding area by six architectural firms bidding to prepare a master plan for the facility.

Metro Executive Planning Director Martha Welborne told the several hundred people in attendance that the point of the vision boards was to energize the teams submitting bids to prepare the master plan, and energize the public that uses — or will someday use Union Station. — thesource.metro.net

The proposal would replace a parking lot and a low building near the northwest corner of Market and Van Ness with a 34-story, 400-foot residential tower designed by New York's Richard Meier & Partners. — San Francisco Chronicle

Things are changing enormously in almost every sense. The effects of globalization have been positive and negative. My generation of architects is the first that could work almost anywhere in the world. We had the option to repeat the same building everywhere or to push ourselves forward, to create an encounter between ourselves and the local culture. — americancity.org

Your message is really a philosophical message to architects. You’re trying to show us how we can build cities and break out of the old modes of urban planning and urban design.

And even thinking about or imagining cities that we have had for the past few hundred years, you’re offering a new way. I don’t know anyone else that’s done that today. Maybe someone will say Colin Rowe. OK—Collage City, but this goes far, far beyond Collage City and any urban theory of Corbusier or anyone else. — lebbeuswoods.wordpress.com

“One of the things that may come out of the study is that the design of those cones [the north-facing oculi] may have inadvertently or in some other way, you know, turned out to actually have reflections coming in when Renzo sold you a bill of goods that said it wouldn’t.”

That’s how Criswell remembers the exchange weeks later.... He is clearly proud that he stood up to Strick, a man who, he says, isn’t accustomed to having people talk back. And he’s proud that he insulted Renzo Piano." — D magazine