Google has hired Ingenhoven Architects, a German firm that specializes in sustainable architecture and has completed award-winning green designs from Sydney to Stuttgart, to develop plans for what could total nearly 600,000 square feet of space. Google currently owns or leases about 4.3 million square feet of space in Mountain View, according to its securities filings. — mercurynews.com

If you want to lace your house with cool hidden passages, you can’t simply add hinges to a bookcase and shout, “To the Batmobile!” You have to account for shelf sag, and you have to build something sturdy enough to work hundreds of thousands of times. “My history in robotics helps,” says Steve Humble, founder of Creative Home Engineering—the only company dedicated to making hidden rooms and secret doors. — wired.com

A couple years out of the Bartlett School of Architecture, at University College London, the pair are still in what you might call a research and development phase; the experimentation and exploration they’re doing on the possibilities of 3D laser scanning might lead them to a business model that hasn’t quite been invented yet. — sparpointgroup.com

Foster and Partner's carbon-neutral Masdar City is springing to life in Abu Dhabi, and Inhabitat recently had a chance to take a first-hand look inside this ambitious sustainable development! Just last Friday we checked out the city's first eco street fair and Organic Market -- a family affair complete with cotton candy, clowns, and princess fairies that also gave locals and visitors their first glimpse of some of the world’s most advanced architectural and cleantech developments. — Inhabitat

"To complement the minimal styling of the Kohler Numi toilet, Marmol Radziner created an urban, sleek environment to convey the brand image of Numi as one that reinforces the leadership position of Kohler in the luxury living space.

Marmol Radziner designed a modular prefab gallery to showcase a series of Numi display models, utilizing a dark color palette of gray lacquer, ipe decking and gray carpeting to capture a mood of mystique and desire" — Ron Radziner, design principal, Marmol Radziner

Nicholas de Monchaux is an architect, historian, and educator based in Berkeley, California. His work spans a huge range of topics and scales, as his new and utterly fascinating book, Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo, makes clear. — BLDGBLOG

If you happen to be in Bucharest, Romania these days, don't miss to check out the latest exhibition piece of Swiss sound and installation artist Zimoun, "200 prepared dc-motors, 2000 cardboard elements 70x70cm". The 15x9x4.5m (49.2 x 29.5 x 14.7 ft) installation is a collaboration with fellow Swiss architect Hannes Zweifel and currently exhibited at the National Contemporary Art Museum MNAC. — bustler.net

On Tuesday, the university plans to announce that Joichi Ito, known as Joi, will become the fourth director of the M.I.T. Media Laboratory, which was originally founded by the architect Nicholas Negroponte in 1985 and has since become recognized for its willingness to take risks in developing technologies that are at the edge of the computing frontier. — New York Times

"It's a bug," Google CEO Eric Schmidt said, "that cars were invented before computers." So Ingels reimagines city streets and highways crowded with tight-packed, auto-piloted cars, taking up one-quarter of the road space and allowing for precision guidance alongside people and other vehicles -- all of which would together reboot the city's streets as vibrant public spaces. A smart transport grid, in essence, in parallel with the rise of smart energy grids. — Chris Turner, Mother Nature Network