After passing to the widow of Barragán’s business partner, it was sold in 1994 to a wealthy Swiss couple, Rolf Fehlbaum, chairman of Vitra, the international furniture company and design museum, and the woman who was to become his wife, Federica Zanco, an architectural scholar. In the years since, Ms. Zanco has devoted her life to promoting Barragán’s legacy. But her determination to keep the archive at Vitra headquarters near Basel has rankled many in Mexico... — nytimes.com

A German biohacker by the name of Tim Cannon has cut open his arm and embedded a Circadia 1.0 computer that transmits his biometric data to his Android devices. [...]

“I think that our environment should listen more accurately und more intuitively to what’s happening in our body,” Cannon explained. “So if, for example, I’ve had a stressful day, the Circadia will communicate that to my house and will prepare a nice relaxing atmosphere for when I get home: dim the lights, let in a hot bath.” — Geeky Gadgets

Could geography, by which we mean the physical geography and in particular the natural geographical features such as landforms, terrain types, or bodies of water that are largely defined by their surface form and location in the landscape, be the last hope of the planet's ever expanding, continuously transforming, and increasingly identical and indefinable urban territories to remain distinguishable and to gain a particular identity in the future? — Bernd Upmeyer, Editor-in-Chief, November 2013

In some of Detroit's most deserted and blighted neighborhoods, where residents see little more than hopeless despair, John Hantz spotted opportunity.

The wealthy businessman, founder of Hantz Group, decided to purchase and convert hundreds of acres of vacant city-owned plots into farmland.

It's taken five years, but this week Gov. Rick Snyder approved the sale of nearly 150 acres, 1,500 parcels, to Hantz Woodlands, a private business, for about $500,000. — mlive.com

Los Angeles officials are seeking to transform a stretch of the river between downtown and Griffith Park into a civic attraction offering recreational opportunities and restored habitat. With their congressional allies — Democratic Reps. Lucille Roybal-Allard of Downey, Xavier Becerra of Los Angeles and Schiff — they are working to persuade the Army Corps to go with a $1.08-billion restoration project, with federal taxpayers and the city sharing equally in the costs. — latimes.com

The Eternal Space will visually recreate the marvel of the former Pennsylvania Station using the actual photographs that documented the station’s demise. [...] Using the latest in projection technology these arresting photographs will speak to the tragic demolition of an American architectural masterpiece [...] On the 50th anniversary of that great loss, The Eternal Space will pay tribute to the station and the gifted photographers who worked to immortalize it. — theeternalspaceplay.com

After a freewheeling round of discussions, Snøhetta’s New York office settled on a unique challenge: building a Lego structure that captured the plastic bricks’ unique relationship to gravity. “A Lego building has a lightness that a real building doesn’t have to contend with,” says Craig Dykers, Snøhetta’s co-founder. “We thought wouldn’t it be interesting to capture the feeling of gravity in a Lego block, where gravity actually has very little influence in many ways on its structure...” — wired.com

The Buffalo Planning Board will be reviewing plans to construct 48 apartments in eight new buildings next week. The complex at 270 Niagara Street sits in the shadow of City Hall. It currently contains 472 units on 9.5 acres and was completed in 1972. — Buffalo Rising

What if you could earn a degree as quickly or slowly as you can learn, regardless of whether you plodded through 80 hours in a classroom lecture?

That could be the next wave of higher education, as schools come under more pressure to cut costs while proving the value of expensive degrees and competing with the growing number of high-quality free online courses. Call it the decoupling of instruction and testing. — Co.Exist