Apple design chief Jony Ive and retail head Angela Ahrendts are working together on a redesign of Apple's retail stores — a different approach that will make them better suited for selling the fashionable Apple Watch, according to a new report. [...]

And while Apple Stores are known for their carpet-less floors, Ive did tell Parker that he overheard someone say they wouldn't buy a watch from a store if they weren't standing on carpet. — appleinsider.com

[...] "wooden textiles" by designer Elisa Strozyk are a beautiful and surprisingly simple rethinking of the idea of a textile—and they have some interesting implications for terrain modeling and even gaming [...] Strozyk writes that she wanted to find "a new tactile experience" for wood, which she achieved by producing wooden tiles that "are then attached to a textile base. Depending on the geometry and size of the tiles each design shows a different behavior regarding flexibility and mobility." — BLDGBLOG

Mueller is the product of the "new-urbanism" concept: the idea that a built environment can create meaningful community. Planners minimize the supremacy of the automobile and shape the environment around pedestrians. [...]

One of the criticisms of new urbanism is that its communities look too much like a movie set — too quaint, too utopic. Yet Mueller feels real, with its ample greenways, eclectic yard art and Craftsman-style homes built with lots of native limestone. — npr.org

For months, three architects would meet at the waterfront of Izmir, Turkey’s third-largest city. [...] Eventually it came to them – if you really wanted to bring people in Izmir together, transform the waterfront. But the very idea was daunting: Turkey’s bureaucracy is infamous, and a large-scale project to redevelop the waterfront seemed impossible.

So the friends [...] built eight floating docks out of plywood. — theguardian.com

Princeton University’s campus is, in Rick Joy’s words, “a beautiful sculpture garden of famous architects’ buildings.” Now Joy, the Tucson-based architect, has added his own sculpture to that garden, in the form of a train station made of blackened stainless steel and precast concrete. — Architectural Record

The neoclassical monument designed by Henry Bacon has become an iconic piece of architecture, but had one of the designs from the other competing architect been selected, the familiar Lincoln Memorial would have looked jarringly different—perhaps in the form of a ziggurat, Mayan temple or Egyptian pyramid. — history.com

The popularity of video games shows no sign of waning, and museums have ramped up their interest in the medium. [...]

“Sorry MoMA, video games are not art” was the headline on Jonathan Jones’s blog [...] after New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) announced the acquisition of 14 video games, including 1980s classics “Tetris” and “Pac-Man”. “All hell broke loose in an interesting way,” said Paola Antonelli, a senior curator in the museum’s department of architecture and design [...]. — theartnewspaper.com