Mr. Ito, the Japanese architect whose team won a Golden Lion Award at the 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale for its concepts for new housing after the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, recently designed flatware called Mu. Introduced in Paris by the Italian company Alessi, the pattern complements Ku, the delicate porcelain service Mr. Ito created for Alessi in 2006. — nytimes.com

... calling the Lowline a "park" isn't totally accurate. It would be a culture park that hosts art shows, performances, and events, and it would be tied to the neighborhood gallery scene. Preliminary designs call for a densely planted "ramble," but this would be accompanied by a gallery, plaza, and connecting grassy common. The whole site is currently dotted with support columns, and the design would remove ten of these to created a 5,000-square-foot column-free plaza. — ny.curbed.com

The modernists were attempting to make architecture for a class of people who were not necessarily privileged to the architectural product... that’s very relevant for our times, because once again architecture has drifted to the fringe of being a product for the elite... when the early modernists imagined that we could build light, airy, and dignified environments for working-class, they recognized that there was a limitation on the resources and capital society had available to make the work. — artinfo.com

We seem to have lost the political capacity to grapple with the big picture, the long range, the global scale. To a degree we've even lost the vocabulary. In design circles it's as if the perceived failures of mid 20th-century planning — exemplified by top-down urban renewal and personified by the power-brokering Robert Moses — have induced a kind of conceptual paralysis, an inability to formulate the public sector, or public works, in terms not beholden to a discredited history. — Places Journal

"I'm going to be intolerant of bad architecture," he says, describing how the former head of planning was a highways engineer who "let anything and everything through – including office blocks stacked on top of multistorey car parks.

"My idea of good architecture is about creating place. It's not about providing glitzy iconic buildings, competing one against the other, but how we use the best of what we've got." — guardian.co.uk

In an industry constantly pursuing innovative design that is both environmentally and ethically sound, the implementation of raw materials is directing interior design in 2013.

Natural materials are being sourced and taking on new forms as designers reinvent familiar items with sustainable credentials. — DesignBuild Source

Dutch architect Janjaap Ruijssenaars from Universe Architecture in Amsterdam has designed a house that is not only created using a 3D printer, but also ‘endless’ in its design. A visitor to the home could walk in a constant path continuously through the house, as it’s designed as a möbius strip — ca.news.yahoo.com

In an innovative response to the current property squeeze in China, a Beijing architectural and a design firm have combined creative forces to develop a portable house and garden on the back of a tricycle.

The Tricycle House and Garden is a sustainable mobile home with its design and construction inspired by the shape and movement of an accordion. The playful designed is also being described as the “adult cardboard box fort box.” — DesignBuild Source

Construction on Zaha Hadid’s anticipated Softbridge building extension to the University of Oxford building in the UK is set to commence at the end of the month.

The Middle East Centre Project is an upgrade for St. Antony’s College, one of seven graduate colleges that are part of the original building. While the the building’s foundation date is unclear, it is the oldest university in the English-speaking world with teaching on the site believed to have commenced in 1096. — DesignBuild Source

A brand new green building project is set to become one of the world’s most sustainable commercial office builds not for the new and innovative technology it has implemented but for the unique approach to green building the developers have taken. — DesignBuild Source

“With today’s groundbreaking, we’re taking a major step forward in the transformation and rebirth of the Far West Side of Manhattan,” Mayor Michael Bloomberg said from the podium at the corner of 33rd Street and Ninth Avenue. — New York Observer

Richard Meier & Partners’ mixed-use building was selected in an international competition topping submissions by Foster + Partners and Zaha Hadid Architects. The challenge, Bernhard Karpf, associate partner-in-charge, said was to create a hybrid building that was “like a city in itself,” which creates “property lines” that carves out distinct areas for rentals, offices, and shops, but still comes together in a unified and coherent design. — The Architect's Newspaper

Brooklyn-based design firm Situ Studio is the winner of this year's annual Times Square Valentine Heart Design. Over the last five years, the Times Square Alliance has invited architecture and design firms to submit proposals for a romantic public art installation celebrating Valentine's Day in Times Square.

This year's winning design, Situ Studio's Heartwalk, will be unveiled on Tuesday, February 12, 2013, and remain on view until March 8, 2013. — bustler.net