From the sparsely dotted Chinese walking man to the top-hat-wearing, cane-bearing Dane, almost a hundred “walking men” are displayed life-size on banners that line the sidewalk.

“It’s important to me that they are on human scale because they really represent us,” said Ms. Barkai.

Only rarely are the icons depicted as women, she noted. Of the hundreds of images in her collection, Ms. Barkai has only “about six or seven women, mostly from European countries.” — blogs.wsj.com

Answer: Baku, Azerbaijan, where the government is spending an estimated $6 billion a year on architecture projects. As we wrote in February, Azerbaijan’s leaders want to make their capital city a destination for the rich and fabulous. The latest example: the Heydar Aliyev Center designed by Zaha Hadid, for whom it offered the rare opportunity of nearly total design freedom. Every roof and ceiling panel is different, Hadid says. — nytimes.com

Though Detroit has recently been looking like it was hit by a convoy of mile-wide firenados, there remain signs of architectural grandeur illustrating why it was once known as the Paris of the Midwest. Perhaps nowhere is this faded beauty more palpable than in the large-format photography of Philip Jarmain, a Vancouver native who's spent three years shooting Detroit's sublime edifices, sometimes just months before they were wiped out by bulldozers. — theatlanticcities.com

In this pilot episode Robert Slinger talks about the Kreuzberg Tower, where he lived on the eighth floor for more than eight years. The project which consists of a tower and its two wings was a social housing project-cum-artist’s-residences built by the architect, educator and poet John Hejduk. — blog.architectuul.com

Watch a four-part interactive documentary about the fascinating past, present and future of high-rise living in cities around the world. — nytimes.com

Andrei Pandele is emphatic: "The Palace? Ha! It is a wall in the way of the people. A dam, even...I was an architect...I could find plans [and] approximate what they would destroy. Not exactly, no-one knew that. They were wild, totally out of control." — BBC Magazine

A new video, released by the Sagrada Família Foundation, illustrates what some of those changes might look like. Combining helicopter footage with computer-animated renderings, the structure’s final stages take shape before you eyes. Spires shoot up in succession, the central cupola rises into view, and the Glory facade--the church’s principal entrance as outlined by Gaudí--materializes out of thin air. — fastcodesign.com

The houses in Ben Marcin’s project ‘Last House Standing’ seem oddly misplaced, lost and forgotten. The series reads like a homage to the forgotten solo row house. The Baltimore based self-taught photographers interest ‘in these solitary buildings is not only in their ghostly beauty but in their odd placement in the urban landscape. Often three stories high, they were clearly not designed to stand alone like this’. — ignant.de

The short film documents a live performance, captured entirely in camera. Bot & Dolly produced this work to serve as both an artistic statement and technical demonstration. It is the culmination of multiple technologies, including large scale robotics, projection mapping, and software engineering. We believe this methodology has tremendous potential to radically transform theatrical presentations, and define new genres of expression. — botndolly.com