Minus a TV, a temporary bus shelter at S. 6th Street and the Nicollet Mall in downtown Minneapolis has most of the cozy comforts of your living room: pillows, books, board games, a clock, a rug and string lighting. [...]

High-traffic bus stops can be flash points for safety concerns, and projects like Living Room Station represent an opportunity to bring in creative thinkers and builders to improve the experiences for riders, passersby and neighbors — masstransitmag.com

Spiffing up materials the city puts out to promote safe driving “is definitely not what this is about,” Reynolds said. “It's going much deeper into the way we think about designing the streets. Art has the power to get people to sit up and pay attention and jolt them out of their normal ways of thinking. We can infuse unexpected elements into the design of the streets and the way of moving through the streets.” — The Los Angeles Times

Hippie modernism focused not on rigorous form but rather on a kind of socially inspired bricolage. Hippie modernism has been not only misunderstood but also underestimated. Buckminster Fuller’s concept of a ‘design science revolution’ inspired the hippie bricoleurs to shoulder their generation’s emerging notion of environmental stewardship. — PLACES JOURNAL

We believe that renderings reflect our aspirations as architects, and that our decisions about representation matter. Renderings should reflect the people in and around the site, and should project a future that values diversity and acceptance of all people. The goal of NONSCANDINAVIA is to give young architects and students access to a database of free, high-res, PNG images that reflect diversity in all its forms.  — Nonscandinavia

Le Corbusier, who died 50 years ago, is widely recognised as one of the founding fathers of modern architecture. Renault tells us this long, chamfered concept was “inspired by the architect’s modernist principles and theories”, and references the “golden era of the automobile of the 1930s”. Top Gear is no historical expert, but does not remember seeing anything like the Corbusier concept in photos from the Thirties. — topgear.com

In keeping with the Chicago Architecture Biennial theme “The State of the Art of Architecture”, Richard Meier’s architectural projects, exhibited at the MANA Contemporary, underscore the consistency of a language pursued over many years of intense architectural activity. — DOMUS

... transparent photovoltaic cells are fundamentally inconceivable, considering that solar panels can develop energy power through a transformation of absorbed protons into electrons [...] light would have to flow unrestrained to the eye, meaning that those protons would have to go wholly through the substance. Therefore what the Michigan State team developed [...] a device that utilize organic salts to take in wavelengths of light that are imperceptible to the human eye. — Next Nature

Zurich-based architects and roboticists have created the In-situ Fabricator, an autonomous construction robot capable of laying bricks into pre-programmed structures. Designers at the Swiss National Center of Competence in Research (NCCR) Digital Fabrication laboratory believe a future generation of the robot could be used widely on building sites. — Reuters

this San Diego County jail, which houses everyone from petty criminals to accused murderers and was once known for its sickening decrepitude, is at the forefront of a new and, of course, controversial movement in prison design, one that manifests a counterintuitive idea: You could build a lockup so pleasant and thoughtfully devised that inmates would never come back. [...]

Welcome to Las Colinas Women’s Detention and Re-entry Facility. — ozy.com

The corporate shift toward iPads has occurred rapidly over the past year, thanks in part to Apple's high profile global partnership with IBM. Major design firms that already use Graphisoft ArchiCAD have also been quick to adopt iPads to make use of BIMx Docs, a mobile companion app.

Apple has specifically profiled Daiwa House Industry, Japan's largest homebuilder, as a major enterprise iPad adopter, detailing how the company uses iPads and custom iOS apps for everything... — appleinsider.com

The $1.1 billion Essex Crossing project will be a 1.65 million-square-foot, mixed-use mega-development anchored by 1,000 residential units and a mix of cultural, community, and retail facilities. Though the city will lose the 75-year-old Essex Street Market, the new market will be transformed into one of the five biggest markets in the country. — 6sqft.com

In order to avoid participation in architecture and urban design becoming merely a politically required token of democratic involvement - a kind of fake participation that does not actually engage the participants in any meaningful way - architects, planners, and designers need to commit themselves and relinquish control, as Jeremy Till claims in an interview with us entitled "Distributing Power".

(Bernd Upmeyer, Editor-in-Chief, October 2015) — http://www.monu-magazine.com/news.htm