Almost invisibly in her own day, Natalie de Blois, of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, helped guide the design of three of the most important corporate landmarks of the 1950s and ‘60s — the headquarters of Lever Brothers, Pepsi-Cola and Union Carbide — whose suave steel-and-glass facades still exude the cool confidence of postwar Park Avenue. — New York Times

Yin Zhi, head of Beijing Tsinghua Urban Design Institute, said, "The technique that Broad Group uses has no precedent in the world, and the cost they promised is very low. So they either have some record breaking techniques or it’s a lie. They are gambling. If they win, they will change the history of world architecture, but that's one chance in a million." — news.xinhuanet.com

My own conviction is that the most meaningful prolonged response to the Pritzker — but much more, to the entrenched discrimination it both reflects and reinforces — will involve political action directed toward measureable change. It will involve ramping up the current professional and cultural conversation — now focused on sharing experiences, promoting awareness, influencing leaders in the field — and articulating specific goals, definable outcomes. — Places Journal

Photos from Detroit taken the summer of 2013. They include shots from Hamtramk, the Fisher Body Plant, the Thornapple Slaughterhouse, Michigan Central Station, the Brewster-Douglass housing projects, the Packard Auto Plant, the Lee Plaza Hotel, Saint Agnes church, Corktown, Eastern Market, and various other scenic spots throughout the downtown area. — johnszot.com

Almost no one in America has heard of the Alaskan village of Kivalina. It clings to a narrow spit of sand on the edge of the Bering Sea, far too small to feature on maps of Alaska, never mind the United States.

Which is perhaps just as well, because within a decade Kivalina is likely to be under water. Gone, forever. Remembered - if at all - as the birthplace of America's first climate change refugees. — bbc.co.uk

“We’re not willing to back down on this.They can put forward as much pressure as they would like but I’m very committed to this program and I’m very committed to the well-being of our neighborhoods.” - Gayle McLaughlin, Richmond’s mayor — NYT

Bruce Katz, vice president of the Brookings Institution, says that many American cities show promising signs of renewal. He's written a book with Brookings Fellow Jennifer Bradley called The Metropolitan Revolution: How Cities and Metros Are Fixing Our Broken Politics and Fragile Economy. The book argues that metro areas — or, cities and suburbs together — are powerful economic engines with considerable political influence... — npr.org

Chinese cities have recently become notorious for their sheer degree of copying and reproduction, with hundreds of replicas of famous historic buildings and even of recent ones – such as the copy of Zaha Hadid's Guangzhou Opera House, under construction almost immediately after the original was completed. But in London, the Crystal Palace replica is only the most vast – and probably the least likely – of a smaller but still significant series of proposed reconstructions. — guardian.co.uk

“Urban Innovation” are two words I hear in tandem a lot these days, along with “civic hackathon” and “crowdsourced urbanism.” Contrary to what you might think, these buzzwords have not been coined by urbanists attempting to appear more innovative. They’ve been coined by tech innovators attempting to be more urbanist. — nextcity.org

It often happens that news events create a new context for existing photo projects, and such is the case with Philip Jarmain’s photos of Detroit in light of the city’s recent filing for bankruptcy. Jarmain’s series American Beauty documents architecture from a pre-Depression era Detroit — a time when the city was on the rise. They now stand in contrast to its current rock-bottom economic straits. — wired.com

He was best known for large-scale outdoor works that often involved simple if rather extravagant ideas or gestures: a SoHo loft filled with two feet of earth, for example, or a solid brass rod two inches in diameter and one kilometer long driven into the ground in Kassel, Germany, so that only its smooth top was visible (a work consistent with an artist who once noted that “the invisible is real”). — New York Times

It works like this: people empty their latrines into a sewage receptacle (currently, latrines are often emptied into rivers), the waste gets funneled through a series of tubes and is pressurized at extreme temperatures, and the byproduct is clean, possibly drinkable water. Deshusses describes the process as “a pressure cooker on steroids.” — wunc.org

As John Kerry was trying to renew negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority late last week, the "Architactics" exhibition opened at the ZeZeZe Architecture Gallery in Tel Aviv Port. This coincidence provides an injection of realism into what, a week earlier, seemed like a series of interesting mental exercises, but far from the present reality. The aim of the exhibition... is to mobilize tools from the world of design and architecture to help to promote the peace talks. — haaretz.com

Yesterday, led by Speaker Christine Quinn, the New York City Council voted to limit Madison Square Garden’s permit to operate on top of Penn Station to just 10 more years.

Building a new Penn Station and the next Madison Square Garden will not only improve the lives of the hundreds of thousands of people who use the station every day – it will revitalize the surrounding area and bring tremendous long-term economic value to the region. — mas.org