Located in Garden Valley, Nevada, Michael Heizer’s City is one of the most significant works of art in the United States. Begun by Heizer in 1972, the project is now in its final stage of completion. It will, in the future, be accessible by the public. [...]

To see the land developed into a site for military, energy, or waste purposes, would ruin it forever. After 43 years of work, can it really be destroyed like this? — unframed.lacma.org

In testimony before the House Appropriations Committee, Joseph P. Clancy, the director of the Secret Service, on Tuesday urged lawmakers to give him money to build a detailed replica of the White House to aid in training officers and agents to protect the real thing. Beltsville, about 20 miles from the real White House at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, is the location of a 500-acre Secret Service training site in the verdant terrain of southern Maryland. — NY Times

[Rem Koolhaas] addressed a packed auditorium at the American University of Sharjah on Tuesday..."Dubai has escaped from its architectural caricatures,” Mr Koolhaas said... [He] had a positive outlook on the region despite recent upheaval and said that it provided the opportunity for the dawn of something new. He also praised the involvement of the country’s rulers and the freedom they have given to designers to transform the landscape of the region. — thenational.ae

Karen Van Lengen, who created the installation with her husband, James Welty, says to really soak in a building, you need to listen to it.

'If you close your eyes, what you're going to hear are things that you can't hear with your eyes open,' says Van Lengen, an architecture professor at the University of Virginia. — npr.org

I think our hope is that it will make guests connect to the hotel in a different way by understanding the thoughts of the architect and the designer, who wanted to create more of a community than a typical hotel lobby — intransit.blogs.nytimes.com

They used computer modeling to design a pair of buildings, one of which works like a gigantic, curved mirror. The glass surface of the northernmost building reflects light down into the shadow cast by its southern partner. And the carefully defined curve of that glass allows the reflected light to follow the shadow throughout the day. — wired.com

Single-story homes, with open spaces, floor-to-ceiling glass walls and clean, serene lines. Bernie fell in love. He paid $30,000, and raised three children in the house. In fact, Parents Magazine once said an Eichler was the best house in the U.S. for raising children. — npr.org

Explaining his move, he said that, while it was ‘unorthodox in an academic setting’, the citations were removed to give the publication more relevance to the general public and less of an academic tone. [...]

In a letter to Princeton University, Koolhaas defended Zaera-Polo, saying that the publication was intended as a ‘polemic, not an academic document’. — architectsjournal.co.uk

It's a special building because it lives, grows, breathes and changes over time. Its terraces are dotted with 150 tall trees which together with 50 plants in the court produce about 150,000 liters per hour of oxygen, at night absorbing about 200,000 liters of carbon dioxide per hour. Also slashing particulate matter caused by cars, protecting from noise, following the natural cycle of the seasons, growing day by day, creating an ideal microclimate. — Divisare

The Louvre Abu Dhabi looks set to open in 2016, as work on Jean Nouvel’s colossal construction speeds up and his vision of a modern medina starts to crystallise on what was once a desert island. This vast project has been stupendously controversial...Abu Dhabi’s new cultural centre is being built by exploited and abused migrant workers...Fifty years from now, when the Louvre Abu Dhabi has established itself as one of the world’s great museums, how clearly will its dark beginnings be remembered? — Jonathan Jones / the Guardian

A lawsuit challenging plans for the Lucas museum along Chicago's lakefront can proceed, a federal judge ruled Thursday, leaving legal hurdles in place if the selected site remains between Soldier Field and McCormick Place. Friends of the Parks filed a lawsuit in November against the Chicago Park District and the city of Chicago over the museum plans, contending the proposed site near Lake Michigan violates the public trust. — Chicago Tribune

In founding a town for some 10,000 of his employees to call their own, the Facebook mogul is following generations of entrepreneurs, from the Dutch East India Company to Walt Disney. [...]

Zuckerberg’s version is to take the form of a 200-acre private municipality adjacent to Facebook’s Menlo Park headquarters, masterplanned by long-time collaborator Frank Gehry and ever-so-humbly dubbed “Zee Town”. — theguardian.com

Disney sent that article to his friends in New York City who were, at that time, helping build the New York World’s Fair, and they read the introduction and they came to Los Angeles a month later and they knocked on the door, and I opened the door and they said, “Mr. Bradbury, shall we tell you why we are here?”

I said, “Why?”
 “We are here to give you a fifty-million-dollar building.” I said, “What!? Come in, come in!” — the Paris Review