Longtime partners Bohlin Cywinsky Jackson and Eckersley O'Callaghan have been brought in to revamp the 93-year-old former United States Mortgage and Trust Company building at the corner of East 74th Street and Madison Avenue, according to New York City building permits. — appleinsider.com

A Finnish company called IndoorAtlas has figured out that all buildings have a unique magnetic “fingerprint” — and has solved how to use that to determine locations inside a structure to within six feet. That is enough to take a consumer to a product in a crowded supermarket, or figure out the location of, say, a half-dozen workers in a building full of them. It’s also much better than cell phone towers can do. — bits.blogs.nytimes.com

Super-starchitect Lord Norman Foster and his friends at the European Space Agency stunned the world last year with a plan to build a lunar base by 3D-printing it with moon dust. But what happens when you try something like that on Earth? How is 3D printing changing the way we build cities?

I got the chance to ask Foster just that question at the Center for Architecture in New York City last night. — gizmodo.com

She explains "Our role then, in Shenzhen, wasn’t to play cultural ambassador or artistic exposition-ers, but to effectively perform the moods of Los Angeles from a distance, through whatever interpretative media each individual deemed to be most fit"...

The European Court of Justice said Google must remove links in search results when requested by individuals, such as the Spanish man who brought a case against the search engine in order to remove links to a 1998 newspaper article about the sale of property to settle his debts. The court said that the “initially lawful processing of accurate data” could, over time, become “inadequate,” “irrelevant,” or “excessive” in the eyes of the people who feature in the material. — qz.com

MIT Prof. Mark Jarzombek on the notion of primitive, the worldwide evolution of the housing, and the fate of the native populations in the modern environment

When does the architecture begin? How the pit house can explain the global migrations and links between the Navahos and first men in Europe? MIT Professor of the History and Theory of Architecture Mark Jarzombek clarifies the essence of the problem. — serious-science.org

A special construction material keeps concrete whiter than white. — CNN

Most discourse on “smart” and “sentient” cities, if it addresses people at all, focuses on them as sources of data feeding the algorithms. Rarely do we consider the point of engagement — how people interface with, and experience, the city’s operating system. — Places Journal

Some writers and people who talk about 3D printing get over-enthused. Most of the stuff they talk about will happen someday—eventually. But there’s the here-and-now and the near-term future, where a lot of that stuff is definitely hype and won’t happen. I’m very steeped into what can happen in the relatively near term. So I just tend not to pay too much attention when the hype gets too obscure. — qz.com

We were participating in a little experiment trying to answer the question, “How does the brain respond to the city?” The headsets were recording second-by-second readings of our brain waves via Bluetooth to an app on the iPod. The resulting gigabyte of data, gathered from about 50 participants, will be aggregated into a visualization to be presented May 13 at Issue Project Room in Brooklyn. It’s part of the Van Alen Institute’s multiyear “Elsewhere: Escape and the Urban Landscape” project. — theatlanticcities.com

[Santa Monica will] be able to offer its residents real net neutrality, which the [FCC] is working on rolling back for just about everyone else in the US. [...]

Santa Monica has cleverly and quietly been installing its own network of city-owned fiber-optic cables for years, and they intend to keep the net neutral. [...]

Santa Monica has also made about $5 million providing internet service and leasing out the cables to other providers, and their competition has driven down rates. — la.curbed.com