Zhang, a Chinese real estate developer, is the seventh richest self-made women in the world, worth $3.6 billion, according to Forbes. She's worth $800 million more than Oprah Winfrey, the world's best known self-made female billionaire.

Not only does Zhang's rags-to-riches story mirror that of China itself, but it is Zhang who has shaped much of the country's modern urban landscape, with the logo of her company SOHO China, on the side of buildings wherever you turn in Beijing. — cnn.com

“I have always appreciated those who dare to experiment with materials and proportions,” Hadid stated. “Our collaboration with United Nude reinterprets the classic shoe typology, pushing the boundaries of what is possible without compromising integrity.” — wwd.com

One of the most gratifying bits of feedback I ever received from one of my Ranger projects came from a 60-something woman who’d attended a campfire program on freeway landscapes in Los Angeles. Months later, she told me that she never looked at a freeway in the same way. Who knows what this kind of change in perception might ultimately lead to? — Places Journal

Steven M. Davis, a partner in Davis Brody Bond, which designed the museum, said he and his colleagues had been guided by the principles of memory, authenticity, scale and emotion.

The museum will not open to the public until next spring, but officials have begun taking reporters through the unfinished galleries, confident that what was a construction zone a year ago, and a disaster area after Hurricane Sandy, now looks more like a museum. — nytimes.com

Now that the exhibition has opened at the museum's Geffen Contemporary branch in Little Tokyo, where it will limp along through the middle of September as part of the Getty's Pacific Standard Time Presents series, it's clear that it is the product of an architectural ruling class in Los Angeles that is not so much dysfunctional as increasingly insular. — Christopher Hawthorne, LA Times

It’s odd how little architects have had to say on the subject of sex. If they’re routinely designing the buildings in which sex happens, then you might expect them to spend more time thinking about it. Buildings frame and house our sexual lives — Aeon

"We hoped the canals would simply make it easier to move around the city, for civilians and police but the reality is Water Level is one giant port of entry for whoever has the cash."
- Yoko Aramaki, City Planner — Flickr

Wainwright -
"So Leandro we are sitting on a window ledge in Dalston. Can you tell us why we're here?

Erlich -
"The idea is to create a facade that will resemble the architecture of the . . . neighborhood and um - that has always been part of my interest to bring the ordinary architecture as a stage for the public to participate in a kind of fiction that would be built through the experience." — The Guardian

Crank the A/C in the office just to stay awake,
Espresso and Red Bull till I got a stomach ache.
With our cotton blazers high, we have a sense of style,
But to the rest of the world we just point and smile
I read code books, while I'm on vacation
Take pictures of, my latest creation
We wear black and gray, with no logos on our threads
So many sleepless nights we're like the walking dead — youtube.com

The solution, or so the city’s traffic planners hope, is to encourage people to cycle for longer distances by creating the cycling equivalent of freeways, which will provide fast, direct routes of up to 22 kilometers into the center. A total of 28 highways are planned, providing 495 kilometers of dedicated bike tracks... Nine routes are under construction and should be completed by 2015 at a cost of 208 million krone, or $36 million, divided equally between central and local government. — nytimes.com

The prototype of the shelter is now being tested in a refugee camp in Ethiopia. The refugee families who would be making the shelter their homes will have a direct say in how the product is developed, putting their experience at the heart of this collaborative process. — ikeafoundation.org

The Empire State Building starred in first-ever music video over the weekend as the Yeah Yeah Yeah’s released their latest single, “Despair.” High atop the observation deck from 2 a.m. to sunrise (the only hours that the tourists are at bay), the quintessential New York band rocked the quintessential New York building — blogs.artinfo.com

Chee Pearlman, a design consultant and curator, ventured that nests are “probably the purest antidote to the heavy steel-and-concrete building footprints that, city by mega-city, are overtaking the globe.” — NYT