Each year Palm Springs dedicates a week to celebrating Midcentury Modernism architecture in the desert city. Now, it has more reason to celebrate.

The Architecture and Design Center, Edwards Harris Pavilion, is set to open Nov. 9. It will provide a place to showcase the sleek style pioneered by architects such as Richard Neutra, Donald Frey and E. Stewart Williams.

The project is an expansion of the Palm Springs Art Museum, which also is housed in a Williams building. — latimes.com

On a breezy summer afternoon here in the newly renovated Sanayeh Garden, children are climbing the monkey bars, pedaling on bikes and kicking a ball by the huge water fountain in the park’s center. [...]

While this would be an ordinary scene in Paris, New York or Singapore, it’s practically a new invention for today’s residents of Beirut. Functional public parks have been virtually nonexistent here for decades. — citiscope.org

In 1963, a man in the Nevşehir Province of Turkey knocked down a wall of his home. Behind it, he discovered a mysterious room and soon discovered an intricate tunnel system with additional cave-like rooms. What he had discovered was the ancient Derinkuyu underground city in Turkey — sunnyskyz

The absence of these rules can frustrate the newly sighted, whose visual world can be both blurry and two-dimensional—paintings and people are often described as “flat, with dark patches”; a far-away house is “nearby, but requiring the taking of a lot of steps”; streetlights seen through glass are “luminous stains stuck to the window”; sunbeams through tree branches collapse into a single “tree with all the lights in it. — New Yorker

This month, audiences will be able to check out the first program to emerge from Vergne's nascent administration: Step and Repeat, a multidisciplinary festival of performing arts, takes place at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA over four Saturday evenings, beginning Sept. 13 [...] Step and Repeat will feature a unique nightly lineup of poetry readings, noise/experimental music, performance art, stand-up comedy, live bands and deejays, all presented side by side. — LA Weekly

Haven’t we all a huge pile of very handy but hardly used things in our house that fill our closets and make us need even more space than we already occupy? Swiss initiative Pumpipumpe wants to encourage urbanites to share all these occasionally used items with a handy set of stickers. The Pumpipume stickers, that can be stuck to front doors or mailboxes, allow urbanites to easily indicate which items they are willing to loan to neighbors. — popupcity.net

Pittsburgh has done it again! After being named “America’s Most Livable City” by Forbes in 2010 and one of the “Best All-American Vacations” earlier this year by The Travel Channel, it was recently named as the second “most livable city” in the United States by the Economist Intelligence Unit’s 2014 livability survey [...].

Pittsburgh is ripe for Placemaking [...], making it the perfect host city for this seminal gathering of Placemaking leaders and walking and bicycling professionals. — Project for Public Spaces

The North Korean government has approved plans by two Norwegian artists to open an art academy in the country. Henrik Placht and Morten Traavik travelled to North Korea together for the first time in August to flesh out the proposal and to look for potential sponsors. So far they have received financial support from the Prince Claus Fund. [...]

“One of the reasons for us going to North Korea is that we don’t believe in sanctions and the boycott of art,” Placht tells The Art Newspaper. — theartnewspaper.com

The next edition of the prestigious Buckminster Fuller Challenge has already begun! Every year, the highly competitive international challenge searches for the most inventive -- and effective -- holistic solution strategies to the world's most pressing problems. The Challenge Review Committee selected 20 semi-finalist initiatives out of 450 proposals worldwide. Each project went through three rounds of rigorous evaluations. — bustler.net

In collaboration with fifteen poets and community activists from StartUp Box South Bronx, I recently created Memories of the Future, a location-based cinema project viewed on mobile phones. The group experimented with spoken word poetry, site specific performance, and on-site spectatorship to reframe the predominant view of Hunts Point and speak about possibilities for its future from a position of power. — urbanomnibus.net

“More is more,” was the motto of Deborah Sussman, the graphic designer behind this brilliant visual riot, who died last week at the age of 82. Trained in the office of Charles and Ray Eames, she took their love of colour and pattern to new heights, establishing a studio with her husband, Paul Prejza, that would tackle everything from shop fit-outs to city wayfinding, sprinkling her distinctive brand, like sugary confetti, from Philadelphia to Santa Monica. — theguardian.com

Women are architecture's original rebels. Over 120 years ago, they insisted that architecture schools and professional organisations open their doors to women, arguing that the field would thrive (or wither) according to the diversity of its students and practitioners...And yet despite this long history of challenging architecture to be inclusive, women have been given little credit for their contributions. — Al Jazeera

In the wake of economic reforms in the 1990s that helped set off the largest urban migration in history, China had the rare opportunity to embrace cutting-edge city-building approaches as it expanded its skyline. It could have avoided the mistakes that made Los Angeles into the land of gridlock, or bypassed the errors that turned the banlieues of Paris into what one American planner calls “festering urban sores”.

But China looked back instead of forward. — theguardian.com