A Michigan native who as a boy played with Legos and wrote a fifth-grade essay titled "Why I Want to Be an Architect," Ronan wears the black-on-black palette that is a modernist uniform and goes well with his fluffy gray hair. The recognition for the Poetry Foundation headquarters is his second national Honor Award from the AIA. The first, given in 2009, was for the brightly colored Gary Comer Youth Center in the South Side's Greater Grand Crossing neighborhood. — Blair Kamin, Chicago Tribune

Reviving the Maida Vale model is often talked about but rarely done, and although the athletes' village version hasn't quite captured the lushness and generosity of the originals, it is at least there. It is also welcome that there is a degree of calm to the buildings, compared to the frenzied gesticulations, the visual shouts of "buy me, buy me" that typify most works of regeneration. — Guardian

Y Design Office has proposed Unit Fusion, a modular, plug-in high-rise residential typology for Hong Kong. However, as of yet, the 75-story tower project is still in its conceptual design phase. Liebchen quipped "Who wants to bet it won't leave the conceptual design phase?"

Pallets are omnipresent. (We) have found pallets not only in the small architectures of informal settlements in Buenos Aires, Istanbul, and Panama City, but in the blogs of self-builders throughout North America and Europe...Urban pioneers in Detroit, Camden and other failing Rust Belt cities reclaim pallets...But none of these builders have negotiated the gap between informal and formal economies with a permanent pallet building authorized by a building permit. - Wes Janz, Cabin(s) in the Woods — The Speakeasy: A Curatorial Research Blog

Eva Zeisel, a ceramic artist whose elegant, eccentric designs for dinnerware in the 1940s and ’50s helped to revolutionize the way Americans set their tables, died on Friday in New City, N.Y. She was 105. — nytimes.com

Anthony Stephens offered up his euology for Ricardo Legorreta. "Ricardo Legorreta is the reason I began to study architecture...The spaces he designed had something long gone from most architects, soul. Unlike so many of the steel, glass and white wall designs that seem so clever and popular nowadays, his buildings could convey a feeling to those that laid eyes on the spaces he designed."

People are searching for something more authentic, says Kenneth Frampton, a British architect and critic and professor of architecture at Columbia University, who helped define this movement as "critical regionalism." Mr. Frampton says these houses are a reaction to the past couple decades of "compulsive uniformity," whether it's McMansions or the proliferation of "white box" modern houses. — Nancy Keates

British journalist and author (then) and now Design Museum director Deyan Sudjic's awesome London loft, designed by Ridley Scott and Stanley Kubrick. It actually itself looks like a small Design Museum itself, or a spaceship that's been travelling around galaxies, curating. — warymeyers.blogspot.com

Tim Maly reviewed Google Engineering's new London offices designed by PENSON., which he finds to be a "giddy exercise in science fiction set decoration". Eric Chavkin, commented "The Kubrick set design allusion is to his long time collaborator Ken Adams (Dr. Strangelove, etc)...Adams declined to work on 2001but his influence here is clear. The interior design references watered down NASA enlivened with 60's disco sci-fi camp. This has all the warmth of a sperm-donor clinic."

Working with the actual drawings for the project’s underground and infrastructure work, done by the architecture firm HOK, the students said they were consistently struck by the complexity of the site’s context and underpinnings. “It just seemed like a big mess,” Mr. Cencer said. “You couldn’t just place what you thought was going to be beautiful. It made so much more sense why it was taking forever. — NYT

Putting aside the legal and constitutional issues that have been the focus of the Zuccotti debate, design really can help balance the competing imperatives of openness and order. And in fact Zuccotti Park’s particular design manages this relatively well—it certainly can’t be faulted for having made the recent situation any worse. — The New York Observer

Koolhaas, who once proposed his own unrealized plans for the Secretariat building decades ago, will be joining 3-D designer Hella Jongerius, graphic designer Irma Boom, and artist Gabriel Lester on a team selected by the Dutch government to redesign the North Delegates' Lounge, an informal meeting space where major policymakers and representatives go for a drink at the end of the day. — artinfo.com