Skywalking basically involves a photographer making his way up to a death-defying height, and snapping a photo that’s meant to give you both a perspective you’ve never seen before, and that feeling like your stomach just made its way into your throat. — petapixel.com

Almost a million images of New York and its municipal operations have been made public for the first time on the internet.

The city's Department of Records officially announced the debut of the photo database.

Culled from the Municipal Archives collection of more than 2.2 million images going back to the mid-1800s, the 870,000 photographs feature all manner of city oversight -- from stately ports and bridges to grisly gangland killings. — dailymail.co.uk

Hillman Curtis, a former rock musician who became a prominent first-generation Web designer and a visionary figure in the Internet’s evolution from a predominantly text-based medium to the multimedia platform it is today, died on Wednesday at his home in Brooklyn. He was 51. — nytimes.com

Creating anything new, particularly a creative collaboration, is an act of pathological hope. It has been said the difference between construction and creation is this: a thing constructed can only be loved after it is constructed; but a thing created is loved before it exists. It was with this sense of hope that this project began—an idea borne not only of the notion that we had something to say, but that we could express it in an engaging, thought provoking, and intellectually rigorous way. — Lantern

Chicago Past collects large photos of historic Chicago. — chicagopast.tumblr.com

On any given night in the U.S., there are approximately 60,500 youth confined in juvenile correctional facilities or other residential programs. Photographer Richard Ross has spent the past five years criss-crossing the country photographing the architecture, cells, classrooms and inhabitants of these detention sites. — wired.com

Before a city becomes a thing of steel, concrete, and glass it is a theater of visions in conflict. As a city ages, the visions do not die but come up against the physical and ideological resistance of the place and its people. This is an account of a Manhattan that could have been – might have been. A phantasmagorical Manhattan where the visionary meets the everyday. The island as we know it is but a pale reflection of a city designed by visionaries – a city of mad, incongruous utopias.

Arctic Architecture: Svalbard is the first book in a series that will explore the inevitability of northward human migration, its impact on the landscape, and the possibility that sustainable architecture can accommodate human expansion while minimizing environmental damage. Additional volumes focusing on other Arctic locations are also planned. But your support for this first volume is critical. — Kickstarter

With the firm Front, in which he is a Partner, Marc Simmons has collaborated on projects with OMA, Asymptote Architecture, ARO, Beyer Blinder Belle, Gehry Partners, Herzog & De Meuron, Kengo Kuma, KPF, Mack Scogin Merril Elam Architects, Renzo Piano, Sejima + Nishizawa Associates, Steven Holl Architects, Toshiko Mori, and many other architects. His lecture will explore themes in his recent work, including the speculative and experimental potential of the facade specialist. — youtube.com

Two top entries have been announced in the 2011 edition of the annual short film competition hosted by SMIBE, The Society for Moving Images about the Built Environment. Under the theme "Building Revolution," the contest had invited moving image stories that investigate, explore, and entertain our communities about social, environmental, political, technological, and economic issues that designers of the built world should be discussing. — bustler.net