Willoughby Square, in Brooklyn, NY, however, will bring together both beauty and utility by topping an automated underground parking garage with street-level greenery in a smart new project targeted for completion in 2016.

Over a decade in the making, Willoughby Park is being called the “crown jewel” of the 2004 Downtown Brooklyn Redevelopment Plan, a scheme to help improve Brooklyn’s public spaces and foster neighborhood community and culture. — buildabetterburb.org

This project was designed to offer a kinetic and mechanical solution to a problem that would otherwise be nearly impossible to solve with static architectural components: providing shading across a building facade for both low evening sun and high afternoon sun conditions.

"It’s an attempt to really use architecture intelligence and design intelligence to unpack violations of international law," Weizman says of Forensic Architecture. Along with SITU Research, he and his team have developed a technique called video-to-space analysis to harvest spatial data from cell phone videos and photos, analyzing footage, sometimes from multiple sources, to model and recreate chaotic events to better understand what happened on the ground. — fastcodesign.com

The newly announced second building at Facebook’s data center in Luleå, Sweden, will be the first of the social network’s data centers to be built using its new rapid deployment data center concept, which leans on modular and lean construction principles, much like those demonstrated by Swedish furniture giant Ikea. — allfacebook.com

Gensler recently began a research project focused on Los Angeles and D.C., “Hackable Buildings – Hackable Cities,” exploring how building owners can adapt their properties to meet changing demand.

“It really started with some research that we were doing on the evolution of office buildings,” said Raffael Scasserra, a Gensler principal. “What we were looking at is what is that evolution like? What is it transforming to and what are buildings going to be?” — washingtonpost.com

China’s premier, Li Keqiang, announced a “war on pollution“—evidence that the highest levels of government have acknowledged that China’s smog and dirty air have reached a crisis point. And what better way to launch a war on pollution than with a fleet of smog-clearing drones? — qz.com

Silicon Valley long prided itself on building world-changing technologies from the humble garage, or the nondescript office park. The new spaces are more distinctive, as companies seek to build a consumer profile [...]

[There] is a sense that nothing is permanent, that any product can be dislodged from greatness by something newer. It’s the aesthetic of disruption: We must all change, all the time. And yet architecture demands that we must also represent something lasting. — mobile.nytimes.com

In 2013, we picture cities a little differently, with demography and photography. Cities live in Instagram, in patterns of light from space, in blueprints and visualizations and—most like Canaletto’s civic landscapes—on Google Street View.

Now, an artist in London has done some creative, comparative history, pairing Canaletto’s Venice and London with contemporary depictions, as glimpsed by the Google van. — theatlantic.com

In keeping with the designer's forest-themed interior motif, a pair of homesteader cabins from the late 1800s are being installed in Twitter's new digs in the historic Western Furniture Exchange and Merchandise Mart building, a 1937 art deco landmark on Market Street. [...]

In this spirit of reuse and reclamation, Lundberg saw the cabins as a novel way of breaking up the wide open spaces of a gutted floor in the old furniture mart that will become a casual dining area. — Marin Independent Journal

The art and technology center Eyebeam has selected WORK Architecture Company (WORKac) to design its future home in Brooklyn, another addition to the Brooklyn cultural district in Fort Greene.

“It’s a great moment in Eyebeam’s trajectory to think about the relationship between art and technology,” said Dan Wood, a principal in WORKac, with Amale Andraos — both of whom worked on the cultural district’s master plan. — artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com

The Palo Alto, Calif., company outlined plans for a factory that would employ up to 6,500 people and cover as many as 1,000 acres, including solar and wind farms to supply its power needs. It is evaluating sites in Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona and Texas, Tesla said in a regulatory filing.

The proposed 10 million-square-foot facility would make the powerful and pricey lithium-ion batteries that power its Model S and future vehicles. — online.wsj.com