In collaboration with vacation rental site Airbnb—no strangers to zany marketing campaigns—an Ikea locale in the Sydney suburb of Tempe, Australia is opening up three of its showrooms to overnight guests for the price of just about $10. [...]

The flatpack furnishing giant also promises a "remarkable wake up call," which hopefully includes some lingonberry jam toast delivered straight to guests' MALMs. — curbed.com

Public housing in the United States is associated with failure and misery. The very words conjure up visions of concrete tower blocks, drug-related violence and concentrated poverty. But contrary to popular belief, public housing in the U.S. has not been an utter disaster [...].

Many of public housing’s failures can be traced to the American political and economic context, especially easy to see when compared with the success of similar policies around the world. — nextcity.org

The critic Martin Filler has acknowledged a significant error in a scathing article he wrote for the New York Review of Books about the architect Zaha Hadid. — artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com

It is not rare for a civilisation to abruptly falter, give way and fold into a new one. This insight seems obvious in the territories of the former Soviet Union — a universe transformed into a memory overnight. [...] that a city turned ruin continues to be inhabited, that the collapsing buildings and boulevards stained by a thousand footsteps, after the apocalypse, host new forms of human life, new memories. Harbin, in the far north-east of China, used to be a very Russian metropolis. — calvertjournal.com

I can’t think of a more fitting a place for an exhibition of art and representation that aims to capture the breadth of the world than the Queens Museum. [...]

The title of Bringing the World into the World, on view through October 12th, is inspired by Italian artist Alighiero Boetti’s assertion that art and the world contain and are contained by each other. As conceived, the exhibition couldn’t happen properly anywhere else. — urbanomnibus.net

For some historic preservationists on the North Shore, the economic downturn in 2008 had a silver lining, bringing a lull in tear-downs and new-home construction that gave scores of vintage properties a reprieve from the wrecking ball.

But six years later, officials in north suburban Winnetka tasked with preserving historic homes say that reprieve has clearly ended. They report that demolition permits have nearly doubled, with 36 issued in 2013, up from 19 in 2009. — chicagotribune.com

Extraordinary as it is, Big Bambú is not unique. The Starns’ project is part of an increasingly popular trend of installations emerging at the intersection of art, architecture, and activism. Hand-built and naturally sourced, these works employ aspects of sculpture, design, and performance to address a wide range of social, spiritual, and environmental deficiencies. They have been loosely gathered under the somewhat paradoxical term “natural architecture,” [...] — bostonglobe.com

At the world's first major geoengineering conference, two separate scientists put forward proposals to use lasers to modify the Earth's climate and fight global warming, from space. One suggested that a satellite equipped with a high-powered laser could grow clouds in the atmosphere below; the other proposed lasers that would blast greenhouse gases from orbit to effectively erase the agents of climate change. — Vice Motherboard

Eating food that’s grown locally and sustainably is a fantastic and increasingly popular idea, but it’s also expensive. Producers tend to drown under marketing and distribution costs, and struggle to find retail channels for their products. To assume that urban farms can escape that trap because of their extreme proximity to consumers would be a mistake; getting food to consumers has proven a logistical nightmare for them as well. — citiscope.org

The study from UCLA's Ziman Center for Real Estate shows that the average renter in Los Angeles, which has the highest percentage of renters in the country, devotes 47 percent of his or her paycheck to rent. [...]

It's the latest depressing news about L.A.'s rental market, and it comes with a twist: affordability is not a new post-recession problem, but one that has been getting worse for decades.

“Our studies show a severe housing burden among poor renters has existed since 1970 — scpr.org

5 Pointz, New York City’s “graffiti mecca,” is being demolished right now. This morning, a backhoe began tearing into the building that has served as a legal spot for aerosol artists for over two decades. In 2011, the property owner announced that he will be developing the site and transforming it into a massive residential condo complex. — animalnewyork.com

Hadid, who was born in Baghdad and is now a British citizen, claimed that Filler falsely implied she was indifferent to the alleged difficult working conditions of migrant workers on high-profile construction projects in the Middle East, including her own.

She also claimed Filler used large portions of his June 5 review of Rowan Moore's "Why We Build: Power and Desire in Architecture" to question her success and fault her personality, although she was not a prominent character in the book. — whtc.com