In the 1950s, Soviet engineers built a massive city in the Caspian Sea off the coast of Azerbaijan. It was a network of oil platforms linked by hundreds of kilometers of roads and housing 5,000 workers, with a cinema, a park and apartment blocks. Gradually disintegrating but still closely guarded, this astonishing place inspired a fiery scene in a James Bond movie. — Spiegel

The Ecological Urbanism app adapts content from the GSD’s book of the same name for a tablet. Much more than an ebook, it’s an entirely new way of looking at the information interactively.

With the majority of the world’s population expected to live in cities by the year 2050, Ecological Urbanism addresses the expanding practice of sustainable design. A timely evolution of the book, this iPad app visualizes the growing body of discourse surrounding the design and management of cities — vimeo.com

This year’s rankings by deans, administrators, students and practitioners show that there is considerable quality in design schools but also reveals an unrelenting and increasingly dynamic restlessness for renewed strength and fresh relevance. Any drifting away from quality expectations is most certainly the enemy to the design professions of the future. — di.net

One of the most fascinating things we at MONU recently experienced during a trip to Brasilia had nothing to do with its famous Oscar Niemeyer monuments or the city itself, but with the context surrounding the city.

(Bernd Upmeyer, Editor-in-Chief, November 2012) — http://www.monu-magazine.com/submit.htm

In mid-June, we published the first round finalists of the TEX-FAB APPLIED: Research through Fabrication competition, and today it was announced that the overall winner was the entry CAST THICKET by Christine Yogiaman and Ken Tracy. The jury, consisting of Nader Tehrani, Andrew Kudless, Branko Kolarevic, and Vlad Tenu, selected the winning project from the four finalists. CAST THICKET will now be built for the next TEX-FAB Event in Dallas next Spring, 2013. — bustler.net

The Royal Institute of British Architects today recognized four outstanding architectural research projects with the RIBA President's Awards for Research. — bustler.net

Nine student/architect teams will assemble at a private residence in Portola Valley,  Calif., on Friday, Oct. 26, for dinner to launch a weekend of intense design and serious competition. The assignment is to design an artist's cottage to be built on Sonia Dhillon-Marty's property, Champ de Portola, by 2014.

Nine architects from four countries will be paired with the students. Teams will be given site plans, a project description and a philosophical statement, but little else. — news.stanford.edu

... with New York as her project's chosen location, Lau explored the spatial possibilities offered by informal street vending, eventually inverting, in her words, the concept of the floating market. Boat-like structures are, instead, routed through the sky via rails, lifts, and crossings bolted onto or otherwise suspended from the fronts of buildings. — bldgblog.blogspot.com

Husband-and-wife team, and 2012 SCI-Arc graduates, Liz and Kyle von Hasseln are the recipients of the inaugural Gehry Prize. The couple was recently presented with the prize for their outstanding masters thesis Phantom Geometry, a unique 3D printing method developed in the SCI-Arc Robot House with advisers Devyn Weiser and Peter Testa. This summer, the school had received a $100,000 gift from architect and SCI-Arc trustee Frank Gehry for the establishment of the institute's annual Gehry Prize. — bustler.net

After seeing “Best School in the World,” a Center for Architecture exhibition on the progressive learning environments where Finnish students to the top of world rankings, New York’s Justin Davidson aligned the layout of these schools more with tech company offices. We’ve rounded up a few of the design perks that your middle-school self never dreamed of. — blogs.artinfo.com