Work is already underway in Bel Air on a megacompound that will include the largest single-family house in the US. The enormous project, at the dead-end of Airole Way above the Bel-Air Hotel, comes from megamansion developer Nile Niami, and is slated to total 85,000 square feet with a 70,000-square-foot main house. [...]

The [Los Angeles Business Journal] guesses America's newest mega-megamansion will be listed "in the $150 million-plus range." — la.curbed.com

Police simulations such as these offer a peculiarly spatial insight into the ways humans attempt to make sense of the world. [...]

Someone builds a surrogate or a stand-in—a kind of stage-set on which to test their most viable theories—then they control that replicant world down to every curb height and door frame. Architecture then comes along simply as ornamentation, in order to give this virtual world a physical footprint — bldgblog.blogspot.com

... the ball most commonly seen today was first designed in the 1960s by architect Richard Buckminster Fuller, whose forte was designing buildings using minimal materials. Previously, leather soccer balls consisted of 18 sections stitched together: six panels of three strips apiece. The soccer ball Fuller designed stitched together 20 hexagons with 12 pentagons for a total of 32 panels. Its official shape is a spherical polyhedron, but the design was nicknamed the “buckyball.” — mentalfloss.com

The Wall Street Journal calls this "Fighting Urban Blight With Art". Liz Thomas, the curator of the project, calls it "an experience that asks people to think about this space that they hurtle through every day".

The project is not actually fighting blight, of course - only the ability of Amtrak customers to see it. — Al Jazeera

Family-owned Swiss luxury watchmaker Audemars Piguet have chosen BIG, HG Merz, Luchinger & Meyer, and Muller Illien as having the winning design for a new expansion of their headquarters in La Vallée de Joux, La Brassus, Switzerland. Adding quite the literal twist to the timeline concept, BIG's proposal -- titled Maison des Fondateurs -- dons a 25,000 ft. spiral-shaped museum that tells the centuries-long history of Audemars Piguet. — bustler.net

Downtown Los Angeles’s historic core is about to get its first major museum, if that’s what you want to call it. Local developer Tom Gilmore and architect Tom Wiscombe are teaming up on the complex project, which they are calling the Old Bank District Museum. It will be dedicated to contemporary Los Angeles art and located in the sub-basements, basements, ground floors, mezzanines, and roofs of three interconnected buildings along Main and Fourth streets. — archpaper.com

Pay-per-minute benches, 'pig ears' to prevent skateboarding, devices that emit an unpleasant sound only teenagers can hear … cities have many tactics to discourage 'unwanted' behaviour — theguardian.com

Brutalism, a muscular and monumental architectural style known for its unsparing use of cast concrete, has grown old enough since its heyday in the fifties, sixties, and seventies to have aged badly, but not old enough to inspire much sympathy. The austere, domineering artifacts of its philosophies now face widespread enmity; a number of institutions, with varying degrees of exertion, have sought in recent years to replace their Brutalist inheritances with practically anything else. — theawl.com

THANKS TO preservation efforts and the museum-building boom of the past decade, America's hot zone for modern and contemporary architecture is still the Midwest. And driving is the best way to see it all, including the star attraction, Chicago. "It's the birthplace of tall buildings," said Zoë Ryan, an architecture and design curator at the Art Institute of Chicago — online.wsj.com

A $700,000 home was teetering over the edge of Texas' Lake Whitney — until officials set it on fire.

The home, which had been gradually crumbling into the lake for weeks, was set on fire shortly after 10 a.m. local time after authorities deemed it the safest and cheapest option. Officials had considered pulling the home closer to land using a giant net — deemed unsafe — or letting it fall into the lake on its own — too expensive to clean up. — mashable.com

Some people might mentally retch that the United Nations, believing the world's population could hit 9 billion by 2050, thinks we should prepare to eat bugs.

Not the folks at Sweden's Belatchew Arkitekter, though: They want to fast-track the insect-munching. Thus they've whipped up plans to build "vermin farms" upon Stockholm's major intersections, so that by 2018 everybody in the city will be guaranteed plentiful rations of six-legged foodstuffs. — citylab.com

On Thursday, Mayor Rahm Emanuel belatedly jumped into the fray after a public campaign against the sign on Chicago's second-tallest building spearheaded by the Chicago Tribune’s Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic Blair Kamin.

“Mayor Emanuel believes this is an architecturally tasteful building scarred by an architecturally tasteless sign,” Kelley Quinn, the mayor’s newly-appointed communications director, said in an emailed statement. — politics.suntimes.com

Styled after American corporate identity throughout the 20th century, our next featured 2014 Venice Biennale pavilion is "OfficeUS" representing the U.S. of A. Organized by NYC's Storefront for Art and Architecture in collaboration with PRAXIS Journal, the two-part exhibition will showcase and critically reinterpret the global influence of American architecture in the last century...For each week of the Biennale, OfficeUS will also address 25 issues relevant to its project archive. — bustler.net

Architecture, however, is a social art, rather than a personal one, a reflection of a society and its values rather than a medium of individual expression. So it’s a problem when the prevailing trend is one of franchises, particularly those of the globe-trotters: Renzo, Rem, Zaha and Frank.

It’s exciting to bring high-powered architects in from outside... But in the long run it’s wiser to nurture local talent; instead of starchitects, locatects. — tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com