“For us, it was really a blend of what’s the right concept for Park Avenue, a place that has not had a new building for almost 50 years, an avenue that is quite possibly the most important commercial boulevard in New York City, quite possibly the United States, and what is the place of a new build down the street from Seagrams and Lever House, two of the greatest buildings ever built,” Daivd Levinson said. — New York Observer

“Google didn’t exist 25 years ago, Facebook didn’t exist 25 years ago, even AOL didn’t exist 25 years ago,” Cornell's Andrew Winters said recently. “The challenge is how do you create a tech campus today that is still flexible enough to grow and evolve for the next 25 years?” — New York Observer

Taking Kubrick’s 2001: Space Odyssey as an inspiration for the mood of the Sound Portal, Arup created an intimidating black rubber shape that sits in the centre of Trafalgar Square but opens up to reveal light and sky within. The facility provides the perfect environment for some of the most thoughtful and innovative recording artists in the world, including one of my favourite Tom Jenkinson a.k.a. Squarepusher I spoke to him about using ambisonic arrays and exploring sound in three dimensions. — cosmopolitanscum.com

In 2011, Tejlgaard built a plywood dome for Denmark’s famed Roskilde Festival (think Scandinavian Coachella) that became the hit of the event. This year, he and Jepsen were invited to build a pavilion to house attendees of Folkemødet, an annual town hall–esque gathering of Danish politicians and voters meant to generate national dialogue. Given the optimism of the event, the duo decided to test a new type of exploded geodesic dome--an icon of optimistic architecture if ever there was one. — fastcodesign.com

Kahn drew up the design in 1973, rendering it with soft charcoal on yellow tracing paper. He had readied it for construction in 1974, but New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller, a prime mover of the project, became vice president to Gerald Ford and got distracted by mightier demands...
Then Kahn died of a heart attack in a public bathroom in New York’s Pennsylvania Station at age 73. — bloomberg.com

replete with two waterfalls that splash into plunge pools, Euro-style toilets inside individual private stalls and leather chairs custom-built extra wide to accommodate even the heftiest linemen...The locker room looks like a modern SoHo apartment — that is, if modern SoHo apartments had space for shoulder pads — all high ceilings and dim lights. — NYT

Retiree Walter R. Tschinkel is an entomologist and former professor of Biological Science at Florida State University. He recognizes ants as "some of nature's grand architects" and, curious to understand their self-created habitats, devised a clever (if cruel) way to do it: By pouring molten aluminum down into the hole.

... after the aluminum cools... he unearths these wondrous, chandelier-esque shapes revealing the alien architectures of the colony. — core77.com

Who said architecture couldn't win you one of the world's most esteemed entertainment awards? This year's Emmy for "Outstanding Individual Achievement in a Craft: Graphic Design & Art Direction" went to dbox for its CGI and Branding work on the Discovery Channel's six part mini-series Rising: Rebuilding Ground Zero. — bustler.net

Conditions of scarcity demand new ways of thinking, an expansion of the role of the architect and designer outwards in order to function more broadly and imaginatively as spatial agents. In contrast to the regimes of austerity ... the territory of processes and networks opened up by scarcity is far more conducive to creative intervention. It is here that scarcity — which can seem at first a bleak prospect — can become the inspiration and context for constructive and transformative action. — Places Journal

"I was very fortunate because the first building in Germany was the Museum for Applied Art, which was a competition that I won. After that I was invited to do other competitions. There's an appreciation for architecture in Germany that doesn't exist in many other places." — Deutsche Welle

Though unemployment is widespread among designers and architects, there exists a world of products, places and processes in desperate need of redesign. Imagine if designers — uniquely trained to listen and observe, and to improve the way things function, feel and look — were, like the Enterprise Rose fellows, embedded in schools, nonprofit organizations, health clinics, religious institutions and government offices, where they could experience community needs and behavioral patterns firsthand. — John Cary and Courtney E. Martin (NYT)

In his own unique graphic language, he details his extensive creative pursuits, including clothing lines, jewelry, and accessories designs for Louis Vuitton, furniture and other product design, limited-edition toys, graphic designs, skate graphics, and collaborations with Moncler, Marc Jacobs, the artist KAWS, and with architects Zaha Hadid and Masamichi Katayama/Wonderwall. — rizzoliusa.com

Terminal workers speak a florid corporate language of “space optimization” and “key performance indicators.” Longshoremen click computer mice and complain about Microsoft Windows as everyone else in the white-collar world does. — NYT