An unregulated squatter settlement, Slab City is home to perhaps 150 year-round residents — refugees from mortgages and bill collectors, former hippies, rebels and self-identified misfits — who live in personal camps made from old trailers, truck campers and crude lean-tos, and call themselves Slabbers. From October to April, the population swells to perhaps 2,000 as snowbirds, attracted by the guaranteed sunshine and zero fees, arrive in sometimes majestic motor homes. — NY Times

In the 1960s and '70s, like many of his contemporaries, Piano was involved in the battle to revive forlorn and decaying historic centers of cities. Now he's fighting to save their often desolate outskirts.

Unlike the suburbs of U.S. cities, which are often well off, the suburbs of many European cities tend to be the poorest parts of the metropolitan area. [...]

Piano believes "the suburbs are the place where energy is in the city — in the good, in the bad." — npr.org

When it was unveiled in New York City in April 1931, the starkly modern Aluminaire House was an overnight sensation that emboldened an architectural movement. Designed as a case study by architects A. Lawrence Kocher and Albert Frey, the three-story house, which was built in 10 days, became the first all-metal prefabricated house in the U.S. — Palm Springs Life

The State Hermitage Museum signed a protocol of intent on Wednesday, 11 March, with the St Petersburg-based LSR development group to open a satellite branch of the museum in Moscow, on the grounds of the landmark former Soviet ZIL automobile plant. [...]

Also present was the Canadian architect Hani Rashid who will design the satellite with his New York-based firm Asymptote Architecture. Russian media report that construction is due to be completed by 2018. — theartnewspaper.com

As difficult as it may be to face, the simple fact is that California is running out of water — and the problem started before our current drought. NASA data reveal that total water storage in California has been in steady decline since at least 2002... Right now the state has only about one year of water supply left in its reservoirs, and our strategic backup supply, groundwater, is rapidly disappearing. California has no contingency plan for a persistent drought like this one... — LA Times

For many longtime readers of The Times, Thursday was tinged with sadness. One of their favorite weekly sections, Home, was no longer in the paper. The section was discontinued after the March 5 edition, almost exactly 38 years after its debut. — publiceditor.blogs.nytimes.com

"From the beginning, I wanted to give a sense of the variety of scale of the studio’s projects, from the more intimate objects like the Christmas cards to large-scale mockups like those for the Paternoster Square vents. [...]

Thomas is trained as a designer and not as an architect and he has always made things as a way to test his ideas. He often mentions how unusual it is that most architects have never actually made anything themselves." – Brooke Hodge — LA Forum for Architecture and Urban Design

My name is Abdallah AlQassab, nearly 50% of us are unemployed and we are very available to show you around — Theguardian

...the $1.1 billion question hangs in the air: Is the 405 any more relieved of congestion than when Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, Congressman Brad Sherman and County Supervisor Gloria Molina demanded in 2006 that L.A.'s "fair share" of state bond money be used to add carpool lanes to the 405? The answer is no. A traffic study by Seattle-based...Inrix has shown that auto speeds during the afternoon crawl on the northbound 405 are now the same or slightly slower... — LA Weekly

To put that number in perspective, these folks make up the upper 0.002 percent of the world’s 7 billion inhabitants and hold over $20 trillion of its money. — 6sqft