When the Bella Sky Hotel, the largest hotel in Scandinavia, launches in Copenhagen May 16, guests are greeted in the foyer by The Bella Chandelier – a living scenography of light and color created by GXN, the R&D department of Danish architects 3XN. — bustler.net

According to those reports, the project’s price tag has soared to $27 million from an initial estimate of $7.6 million. But that is not an apples-to-apples comparison. All it reveals—surprise— is that city officials low-balled the project’s overall cost when they announced that Gang and her firm, Studio Gang Architecture, had bested 107 entrants from nine countries in a design competition for the center. — Blair Kamin, Chicago Tribune

Louisville’s Speed Art Museum has unveiled plans for a new addition designed by Culver City, CA-based wHY Architecture with Reed Hilderbrand landscape architects. Located on the campus of the University of Louisville, the museum hopes to increase connections with the city and the university along with increasing gallery and educational space. — Architect's Newspaper Blog

Overall - this is a triumph for Archinect - a redesign that serves it's users and, in my opinion, sets a new bar for the design and functionality of architecture related blogs. — Design + Build

Gerkan: This idea of only wanting to work for private individuals is absurd. In a country like China, where does private end and where does government-owned begin? Private citizens turn out to be aligned with the government, or a private developer obtains government financing for his building. For architects like us, this is almost impossible to figure out. Many of those who criticize us are building the five-hundredth high-rise building in China and claim to have integrity. This is a fallacy. — Spiegel

Turner Contemporary, a brand-new public art gallery that opens on the seafront at Margate next week, glories in sunlight. — Guardian

Linked Hybrid is designed with the clear intent of carving public space out of "monofunctional" private housing — and formally constructed in porous fashion to signal and direct this — yet the social and cultural patterns which overlay, occupy and appropriate the built form deny this idea entirely. This is most obvious in the form of gun-toting guards; more subtle again in the expensive furniture shops that dominate the ground-plane. — City of Sound

Architecture in Uniform: Designing and Building for the Second World War documents the extensive contribution of architecture to the war between the bombings of Guernica in 1937 and Hiroshima in 1945, and considers how this questioned architectural methods and construction technologies, and lead to the supremacy of modernism. — CCA

“It would be easy for me to raise a picket sign and as an architect say, ‘Down with this wall!’” Rael said in a release. “I have to accept the wall because it exists, but as a designer I see that something better is possible. Why not do something intelligent, something incredible? I envision not just a ‘dumb wall,’ but a social infrastructure that connects and improves lives on both sides.” — nbcbayarea.com

Earlier this year, a UVA architecture program took top prize in an international housing competition sponsored by ARCHIVE (Architecture for Health in Vulnerable Environments). — c-ville.com

Peter Zumthor has unveiled his plans for a secret garden for this years Serpentine Pavilion. — Guardian

Eduardo Souto de Moura from Porto, Portugal is the 2011 laureate of the Pritzker Prize, the professions highest honor. As a young architect, from 1974 to 1979, the now 58-year-old, worked in Alvaro Siza's office -- Siza having been the Pritzker Prize winner himself in 1992. This makes Moura the second Pritzker laureate to be chosen from Portugal. — bustler.net

The Architecture Foundation, on behalf of London's Better Bankside initiative, just announced the winner of a competition to design a modular, portable, secure cycle parking solution to serve the Bankside area of London. — bustler.net