Speaking at the V&A last week, the former Foreign Office Architects partner said that she was "dubious" about volunteers who see working in these places as an "easy option". — Architectural Record

The source of the disconnect between San Francisco's transit-first heart and its car-centric hand is an arcane engineering measure called "level of service," or LOS. In brief, LOS suggests that whenever the city wants to change some element of a street — say by adding a bike lane or even just painting a crosswalk — it should calculate the effect that change will have on car traffic. — Eric Jaffe

Technologies, such as building information modeling and integrated-product delivery, have enabled architecture firms to design better buildings and deliver them more quickly and more efficiently. Yet in today's fiercely competitive global marketplace, efficiency and speed alone are not enough to guarantee market viability. The real differentiator is design—as an engine of innovation and a productive force for creating economic value. — Michael Speaks, archrecord.construction.com

...the city should reverse its approach, zoning neighborhoods like Midtown, Lower Manhattan and Williamsburg, Brooklyn, by thinking first about the shape of public space instead of private development. — New York Times

Lautner's homes have appeared in Hollywood movies, but the architect himself wasn't particularly well-known when he died in 1994. Still, in 2011 — the centennial year of Lautner's birth — his hometown of Marquette, Mich., has honored him with two exhibitions: one at Northern Michigan University's DeVos Art Museum and one at the Marquette Regional History Center. — NPR

For many Americans who bought more home than they could really afford in the giddy days before the crash, the big-house dream has become a nightmare in the ashes of foreclosure and regret.

So after all that, how does 84 square feet sound? — New York Times

In its five-year history, DesCours has become my favorite annual art outing, but it hasn't become any easier to describe. You'd be accurate if you called it a self-guided nighttime tour of lighted experimental architecture installations set in little-seen downtown locations. — nola.com

Superman has gotten a makeover — well, another makeover — two years ahead of turning 75 years old in 2013.

As the first and most widely known representative of the spandexed set, Superman remains the popular face of that uniquely American creation, the superhero.

But America has changed a lot since 1938. And as it did, that face changed, too. — npr.org

It is not uncommon today for an architect to give a public lecture about a building and gloss over the parameters of its program or the specific needs of its users, speaking instead mostly about the building's site — its measure, tendencies, desires, structure, mythologies, meaning — as if the problem of architectural design was primarily one of site response. — Design Observer

Is it a building filled with art with some people in it, or a building filled with people with some art in it? There needs to be enough social space to make people feel comfortable in what can be an austere environment, the white box. You shouldn’t feel like you need to be quiet in the public spaces. — New York Times

I find this perversely reassuring. I've visited The High Line, and frankly found it indistinguishable from Portfolioplis to a degree that unnerved me. A visitor moves through such spaces cautiously, half-expecting that it is all mirage — but wondering just the same if might contain, possibly, some kind of portal, some secret passageway to Porfolioplis itself. — Rob Walker's Design Observer blog

Luxury 360 is the FT's new online hub for creative and commercial coverage of the luxury goods industry, with news, views and special reports. — FT

The 2011 SCI-Arc Graduation Pavilion entitled Netscape, was designed by faculty members Dwayne Oyler and Jenny Wu of Oyler Wu Collaborative, along with their students. Earlier this week Archinect posted a video and some text detailing the construction process. In response Tima Bell, posted a couple images from the 1997 SCI-Arc Graduation pavilion which he noted did not have "quite the budget of Oyler/Wu".

The message of the 99% movement is even more fundamental -- that the 99% should have representative voice in the decisions made for this country. I feel aligned with their message and ours. We support their message and their tactics 100%. As designers, we should respect the rights of the 99% to gather in public spaces.