I’m no architecture critic, but the word “iconic” keeps popping to mind. In an industry full of soulless suburban campuses, give Jeff Bezos & Co. credit for building this in the city, at least. — geekwire.com

Smith is one of 20 landscape architects who have helped create a new online guide to the city’s important outdoor spaces, some world famous, others, such as the Civil War memorial at U and Vermont Avenue NW, not as well known. The Web site, The Landscape Architect’s Guide to Washington, D.C., was launched Sept. 13 by the American Society of Landscape Architects, and there is a version for mobile devices. — washingtonpost.com

Phil Boucher is a self-described “architecture nerd.” And while part of that means marveling and photographing the beautiful buildings around Boston, it also means recreating the entire city as accurately as possible in the video game Sim City 4. — wbur.org

For the latest Student Works feature Elif Erdine a PhD in Architectural Design Candidate at the AA, researching on ‘Generative Processes in Tower Design: Algorithms for the Integration of Tower Subsystems’, profiled Fallen Star an installation set between biomimetics, interaction, and perception.The project led drewjmcnamara to think "I am always amazed at the resources available to students at some schools. And then to see those resources actually being put to good use".

Architectural practices and academic programs should rethink their wholesale replacement of teaching hand drawing and model making with computer skills alone. Digital tools can enhance the tactile interpretations of architectural concepts, and there should be room for teaching both when educating architects of the future. — nytimes.com

A reliable source provided us with some official blueprints for the Apple Campus 2 yesterday, and these are just a few of the images that illustrate the mammoth building currently being planned in Cupertino, Calif. A single one of these slides leaked out today, so we are putting these up now; we are resizing and still have to watermark. — 9to5mac.com

It's common when we discuss the future of maps to reference the Borgesian dream of a 1:1 map of the entire world. It seems like a ridiculous notion that we would need a complete representation of the world when we already have the world itself. But to take scholar Nathan Jurgenson's conception of augmented reality seriously, we would have to believe that every physical space is, in his words, "interpenetrated" with information. All physical spaces already are also informational spaces. — theatlantic.com

Brooklyn-based design studio and research collective Studio Mode/modeLab has sent us plenty of photos from the recent two-day workshop PATTERNING LAB: Parametric Patterns and Digital Fabrication which took place on August 18-19 in Brooklyn, NY. PATTERNING LAB focused on the topic of Parametric Patterns with Grasshopper for Rhinoceros. — bustler.net

Thanks to augmented reality technology being implemented by media design firm Local Projects LLC, visitors can look at Gehry’s steel tapestries through their smartphone cameras to see what otherwise isn’t there: video and audio recordings that tell more of Ike’s story, even in Ike’s own voice. And children carrying smartphones (which seem to be all of them these days) will be on a scavenger hunt for hidden messages throughout the memorial. — blogs.artinfo.com

IT has become fashionable in many architectural circles to declare the death of drawing. What has happened to our profession, and our art, to cause the supposed end of our most powerful means of conceptualizing and representing architecture?

The computer, of course. — nytimes.com

The Architects' Journal reported that Wolf Prix referred to the Venice Architectural Biennale as an ‘expensive dance of death’ and went on to claim a ‘great’ biennale would have featured forums and themes looking ‘behind the scenes’ at decision-making. mimiz took on the charge "having just come back from venice where I moderated several panel discussions on the behind the scenes making of interventions at the US Pavilion, I think Prix is sucking on some sour grapes."

The American Institute of Architects (AIA) reported the July ABI score was 48.7, up considerably from the mark of 45.9 in June. Noticeably, the South was the only region reporting increase in design activity. el jeffe noted dejectedly "hard to get excited.i don't think that a slightly lessened decline in billing would be a rebound; the direction hasn't changed, just the rate of decline."

"It's a clever way to save money," Anneli Sjogren, head of photography at IKEA, said during a recent interview at the company's sprawling photo studio in this sleepy southern town. "We don't have to throw away kitchens in the Dumpster after the photo shoot."

Instead, sets for entire rooms—spanning kitchens to bathrooms to porches—can be mocked up and created on a computer screen without the help of a single camera. — online.wsj.com

“Mark said he wanted to be in the same room with all his engineers,” Gehry said. “I told him we could put the building up on stilts, park cars underneath and create a room as large as he wanted.”

This is not a Gehry project of shiny fronds of fluttering reflective metal. To support his vision of anti-hierarchy, free- form collaborative work, Zuckerberg tapped the Gehry who has built furniture out of cardboard and covered his own house in chain-link fencing. — bloomberg.com

Our World Wonders Project is also supported by a broad, connected suite of other Google technologies, bringing wonders of the world within reach of an unprecedented global audience. The project website also provides a window to 3D models, YouTube videos and photography of the famous heritage sites.

Together with partners including UNESCO, the World Monuments Fund and Cyark, the World Wonders Project is preserving the world heritage sites for future generations. — google.com