“The recurring themes were people wanted a decent place to shop; second, the residents wanted a safe, affordable place for their kids to play; and the third concern was the lack of affordable housing, particularly for seniors and young families.” — NYT

Threats by left-wing activists in Berlin prompted New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation to cancel a planned stop in the city’s Kreuzberg district for its mobile laboratory, the BMW Guggenheim Lab. — bloomberg

Los Angeles was one of the first large cities in the U.S. to adopt a kind of modern zoning to keep the industrial away from the residential.

If the city would have more mixed use, with people living closer to retail and workplaces, Los Angeles would feel like another city, with less of its land area dedicated to low density, single family residential neighborhoods, and more streets with shops and businesses on the ground floor and homes above. — kcet.org

In Inner Mongolia a new city stands largely empty. This city, Ordos, suggests that the great Chinese building boom, which did so much to fuel the country's astonishing economic growth, is over. Is a bubble about to burst? — BBC

China, of course, is not new terrain for international architects. Many top American firms have run offices inside China for a decade or more. The new arrivals, though, come not by invitation or out of curiosity but because they need work. They are, as Michael Tunkey, head of the China office for the North American firm Cannon Design, says, “refugees from the economic crisis.” — New York Times

Apple is actually taking a site that is now parking lots and low-rise boxes and making it worse for the community. Yes, it will be iconic, assuming you think a building shaped like a whitewall motorcycle tire is iconic, but it will reduce current street connectivity, seal off potential walking routes and, as I wrote some time back, essentially turn its back on its community. With a parking garage designed to hold over ten thousand cars, by the way. — Switchboard

UPSTATE was created [as a] framework for sustained collaboration with the community and the city—in our case a post-industrial city in upstate New York that's been grappling with a shrinking population, eroding tax base, crumbling infrastructure, underfunded schools, cash-strapped services. The challenges aren't new—they're the challenges of cities all across the rust belt—but they're real, and they're intensifying. — Places Journal

With their entry Seattle Jelly Bean, Boston architects PRAUD (Dongwoo Yim & Rafael Luna) were one of the three finalist teams which have now been invited to compete in the second phase of the competition through April until the final presentation in May. — bustler.net

Urban Intervention: The Howard S. Wright Design Ideas Competition for Public Space has selected 3 finalists and 7 commendations. In the spirit of the 1962 World’s Fair, Seattle Center and AIA Seattle invited multidisciplinary design teams to compete in an international design ideas competition to re-envision a nine-acre site in the heart of Seattle Center and use it to explore innovation in public space in the coming century. — bustler.net

Initial designs for the third and final section of the High Line were released Monday by Friends of the High Line. Section 3 will wrap around the striking stretch of rail yards at the center of the Hudson Yards project.

The new stretch will pick up where the completed section ends at 30th Street between 10th and 11th Avenues, continue west to 12th Avenue, turn north, and then head back east at 34th Street for about half a block. — NY Times

More visibly, this shift means that the familiar security architecture of airports and international borders – checkpoints, scanners, ID cars, cordons, security zones – start to materialise in the hearts of cities. What this amounts to, in practice, is an effort to roll out the well-established architecture and surveillance of the airport to parts of the wider, open city. — The Guardian

one driving idea of the show holds firm, Bergdoll’s binder notwithstanding: Suburbs are generally an architect-free zone. Insofar as such creatures are spied at all, they’re employed to rubber-stamp a builder’s plans. Beyond that, they’re not wanted. Suburbanites are conservative, wherever they might lie on the political spectrum: There’s a good reason why builders have kept on churning out houses which have remained essentially the same for decades, even as they have grown steadily in size. — architectmagazine.com

College towns have weathered the recession and housing collapse more than the rest of America, but the neighborhood around USC is an exception. Now USC is planning what local officials call the biggest project in South Los Angeles in a generation — 35 acres, complete with restaurants, shops, a six-screen theater, faculty office space and student housing. Will gentrification push local residents out, or is the university — often accused of ignoring its neighbors — be doing them a favor? — Which Way, L.A.?

eVolo Magazine has announced the winners of the 2012 Skyscraper Competition. The annual contest—now in its sixth year—honors visionary ideas that redefine skyscraper design through the use of new technologies, materials, programs, aesthetics, and spatial organizations, along with studies on globalization, flexibility, adaptability, and the digital revolution. — bustler.net

Viennese architectural firm Wolfgang Tschapeller ZT GmbH 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. johnszot commented "fucking hot, that".