On this 13th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, a shiny new skyscraper towers over what was once a smoldering pile. It’s touted as “an ever-present symbol of renewal and hope,” but the process to build One WTC, the tallest building in the Western Hemisphere, has been arduous and much-delayed. The project, which has had its share of critics, is finally set to open in early 2015. — qz.com

World-renowned architect Bjarke Ingels challenges himself and all of us to think beyond the status quo and dream big. Why shouldn’t you be able to ski down a power plant? He refers to his projects as “promiscuous hybrids”—they combine seemingly disparate elements and turn fiction into fact. — Future of Storytelling

Weizman has also made a name for himself as the chief proponent of “forensic architecture”, by which he analyses the impacts of urban warfare for clues about the crimes that were perpetrated there. To Weizman, buildings are weapons. When he looks out across the landscape of the occupied Palestinian West Bank [...] he sees a battlefield. “The weapons and ammunitions are very simple elements: they are trees, they are terraces, they are houses. They are barriers.” — theguardian.com

Safety regulations are weird. All the exits are viewed with cameras; each door is equipped with an alarm (or even two), which notifies the police and building security in case of an alert. However, usually you don’t need any permission to get to the business center, and all the doors are open during working hours Monday to Friday, all the alarms are switched off. So, if you are interested in city views from the height without having any problems with the police, just buy a ticket to Hong Kong. — ontheroofs.com

There has long been a subculture of so-called “urban explorers” who have made a game of accessing off-limits places. [...] Urban explorers take photos mainly to document that they’ve been there, while for Deas the image is the whole point. The outlaw Instagrammers have more in common with graffiti artists, another subculture of underground creatives who make their work in the cracks of the urban landscape. — nymag.com

Mohammad Reza Domiri Ganji [...] is capturing truly stunning photographs of the colorful, architecturally gorgeous interiors of historical Mosques throughout the Middle East. [...]

Using wide angle lenses, fisheye lenses and panoramic photography techniques he has traveled to some of the most historically significant mosques in and around his home country of Iran to capture the kaleidoscope-like architecture inside. — petapixel.com

City of Darkness Revisited is a photo book and cultural history of Kowloon Walled City, a largely ungoverned, densely populated enclave within Hong Kong.[...]

It was like nothing else in Hong Kong: a mass of interconnected 12- and 14-story buildings forming a single huge structure, its facade glowing from the light of hundreds of apartments and shops. Clearly there was no administrative oversight. It was too dense, too ad-hoc, too unrestrained. All this was clear before even entering the place. — Kickstarter