Architect Josep Lluís Mateo has now completed the final phase of the Castelo Branco Cultural Center in Portugal. Mateo first proposed the design, which won first prize, in an invited competition in 2000. The new Cultural Center in the historic town of Castelo Branco features an ice-skating rink, an exhibition space, and an auditorium — all integrated into one fluid structure. — bustler.net

With help from volunteers, we took pictures of dozens of buildings and found that on average, blinds or shades covered about 59 percent of the window area. And over 75 percent of buildings had more than half of their window area covered. As the study puts it, “Tenants are moving into these rooms with a view, but more often than not, can’t see out the window.” — blog.urbangreencouncil.org

After two successful showings, the third edition of UNStudio's Motion Matters exhibition opened at the MAXXI Museum in Rome on Dec. 6. As an exploration of movement, space, and perspective, the site-specific installation has visitors interact with and experience 10 rescaled representations of UNStudio's architectural designs. — bustler.net

Google's Street View is slowly covering more and more of the world's surface, but it still has holes. Now though, you can help fill them—and all you need is an Android phone or DSLR.

Google has just launched a new Street View feature which allows any user to recreate the usual Street View experience by stringing together photo spheres along paths which they define. — Gizmodo

Called Lumiere, it's a four-day festival expected to attract tens of thousands of spectators to see the city's historic cathedrals, walls, bridges and squares illuminated by splashes of light. Projects range from LED and neon sculptures to large-scale projections by leading artists and lighting designers from Ireland and beyond. — cnn.com

Because of Beijing’s sky-high apartment rental costs, as many as two million people—about a tenth of the city’s population—are said to be living below street level in underground storage basements and air-raid shelters partitioned into cramped, windowless rooms. Many of those who have to crowd into these homes are migrant workers like Wang, from the nearby province of Hebei. — qz.com

As part of our quest to find out what makes cities smart, we throw a spotlight on infrastructure: How can information technology and urban planning help to make us more flexible and mobile? At the same time, mobility is just one aspect of a wide spectrum of complex networks that govern life in an urban context. In view of limited resources and changing climate, another factor seems even more pressing: energy consumption and conservation. — betterymagazine.com

There’s a reason it’s a struggle to save buildings like the Astrodome. They were built less than 50 years ago, the usual cutoff for inclusion on the government’s National Register of Historic Places... it’s relatively young buildings like these, from the 1960s, ’70s, and even ’80s, that preservationists are fighting to save. And in doing so, they are having to confront a tough question: What does tomorrow’s historic architecture look like? — bostonglobe.com

schmidt hammer lassen has been chosen to design the new 30,000 m2 Ningbo Central Library in the coastal city of Ningbo, China. shl's winning design will display the library's collection of more than 2 million books — including the largest number of historic and ancient books in Ningbo, one of China's oldest cities. — bustler.net

To its critics—and even many of its fans—“culture” and “Dubai” barely belong in the same sentence. The city is perhaps the world’s most extreme example of a business-first, built-from-the-sand boomtown. But Shoufani and her fellow Poeticians have become a prime exhibit in a debate that has broken out with renewed vigor in the Arab world and among urban theorists worldwide... — bostonglobe.com

"For years, urban designers and architects have claimed happiness as their goal," Montgomery says. "And yet none of the claims have been supported by empirical evidence. Which isn't to say they're not right. It's just to say that we don't know. That we haven't known."

In this spirit of empirical discovery, Montgomery takes readers around the world in search of the places where urban design has (and has not) improved quality-of-life. — The Atlantic Cities

Most of us have gotten used to smartphones replacing long-established devices such as cameras and music players.

Soon, however, they might be taking over the duties of something that is itself an emerging technology – the 3D scanner.

Researchers at ETH Zurich have created an app that allows an ordinary smartphone to capture and display three-dimensional models of real-world objects, for subsequent finessing or even 3D printing. — Gizmag