A federal commission that oversees plans for monuments in the nation's capital voted Thursday to reject the current design for a memorial honoring President Eisenhower, sending the concept back to its architects for revisions.

The National Capital Planning Commission voted 7-3 to endorse its staff's report opposing the current design. The objections focus primarily on the scale and placement of columns that would hold large stainless steel tapestries framing a memorial park honoring Eisenhower. — bigstory.ap.org

A major exhibition opens in Berlin this week of the work of Ai Weiwei, China's most famous artist. Events like this are the very thing that protect him against further repression at home. The show is packed with moving works that are critical of the regime. — spiegel.de

The plan’s backers say it represents a rare chance at economic revitalization for the neighborhood. Its opponents say it would destroy the fabric of Holy Cross, and might represent the first step toward changing the traditionally low-rise New Orleans waterfront into something very different [...]

“The argument is that the Lower Ninth Ward has to take what it can get,” says DeBacher. “We believe that we deserve—as any community deserves—good development, not just any development.” — The Atlantic Cities

Saadiyat Island, off the coast of Abu Dhabi, has seen $27 billion in investments pour in as the island hopes to become a new beacon of culture in the region

developers behind the island have received international attention for the poor conditions in which migrant laborers work and live. Reports have found that in some cases, the control employers hold over the island's workers, such as withholding their passports to prevent them from returning to their home countries, amounts to forced labor. — Al Jazeera America

... when it comes to buildings that have cultural significance – like museums and arts centers, those buildings have also been dominated by foreign architects like Zaha Hadid or Norman Foster, who designed the Beijing Airport for example. But I think with the Pritzker Prize winner being a Chinese, Wang Shu, in 2012, you ‘ll find that when a building is important culturally and needs to relate to more to the Chinese culture, more and more that work will be done by Chinese architects. — forbes.com

In this latest installment of the “What Made Me” video series by Poppy de Villeneuve, Renfro reveals how a childhood bully helped set him on his life path, remembers his early education gawking at Houston skyscrapers and explains his architectural philosophy. — tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com

Freud, Dickens, Tchaikovsky, Darwin, and John Milton took daily walks, while Le Corbusier did morning calisthenics and Victor Hugo did “long strenuous exercises on the beach.” — hyperallergic.com

A spoof Guggenheim website, globalguggenheim.org, went live this morning with a satirical “Sustainable Design Competition” for the global museum’s embattled Abu Dhabi branch. The website, a slightly modified replica of the official Guggenheim version, features images of Saadiyat Island, where the museum is to be built, overlayed with the hashtag #futureguggenheim, as well as references to Gulf Labor’s ongoing 52 Weeks campaign. — hyperallergic.com

Since the Civil War, the majestic dome of the U.S. Capitol has symbolized the unity of the United States, despite the discord in the government it overlooks. [...]

But the dome has lately grown as fractured as the federal government, and Tuesday the Architect of the Capitol announced that a $59 million project to save it would begin next month. [...]

There are now hundreds of cracks and deficiencies, and water already has stained parts of the Capitol’s interior. — The Washington Post

Practitioners create visually dazzling and unexpected forms that’re seemingly unrelated to anything as prosaic as function or context. They exploit advances in design and construction technology to build ever more visually arresting and extraordinary buildings.

The future of this movement is likely to be limited because the law of diminishing returns inevitably applies to the search for ever-newer and ever-more unexpected architectural forms. — INDAILY

We conclude with Tom Pritzker, Chairman and CEO of the Pritzker Organization on this year's winner of the annual Pritzker Architecture Prize, Shigeru Ban. — hulu.com

The Rendering Eye: Urban America Revisited presents 3D screenshots of the urban US as they appear in Apple Maps: deserted streets, post-apocalyptic buildings and industrial plants, melting harbors. Cars and boats turn into shadows, trees into sculptures, containers into wax.[...]

The cityscapes captured by artist REGULA BOCHSLER for the publication are abstract, machine generated, and cold. And yet they are poetic, not least because of their “mistakes,” which give them a painterly composition. — 032c.com

In collaboration with the Preservation League of New York State and New York Landmarks Conservancy, along with $39 million of private, state, and federal funds, Common Ground and Beyer Blinder Belle (the architects behind the Grand Central Station renovations) were able to successfully convert the decrepit building back into a livable residence with 416 single occupancy apartments. — untappedcities.com

Latino Placemaking goes beyond creating great public spaces. It also includes cultural identity, which is shaped by needs, desires, and imagination. The Latino quest for cultural identity parallels the African-American Civil Rights Movement of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, which has its genesis in protests – many of which were carried out in public spaces. — pps.org