Now Mr. Ai is answering the guards’ request in a different key. He is presenting them, and the world, with his first heavy-metal music video, one with detailed re-creations of scenes from his 81 days of detention. He also portrays fantasies he imagines flitting through the guards’ minds. Mr. Ai posted the video on a Web site, aiweiwei.com, on Wednesday morning, Beijing time. — nytimes.com

Reminiscent of a greenhouse or conservatory, the three intersecting biodomes replace an earlier plan for a six-story office building and would establish a visual focus and “heart” for the three-block project, according to plans filed with the city.

The spheres will offer “a plant-rich environment” filled with species from mountainous ecologies around the globe, chosen for their “ability to coexist in a microclimate that also suits people,” according to the plans. — seattletimes.com

The jury in the United States District Court in Houston found that Frontier committed copyright infringement by constructing and marketing nineteen houses that infringed Hewlett’s copyrighted designs. Frontier’s owner, Ronald Wayne Bopp, was also held personally liable for Frontier’s activities.

The amount of the judgment was based on the amount of profits Frontier earned from the sales of houses that infringed Hewlett’s copyrights. — yourhoustonnews.com

In his first solo exhibition in a New York museum since 1980, American artist James Turrell sets out to reimagine the iconic rotunda of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum in a dramatic transformation. The luminous and immersive site-specific work, Aten Reign, will be part of the upcoming exhibition James Turrell at NYC's Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum which opens on June 21, 2013. — bustler.net

A lot of Chinese people look up to the West as an ideal, so the construction of these towns could be seen as a way of accelerating their progress; a quick way of achieving through emulation. — psmag.com

The international ideas competition series POST+CAPITALIST CITY has announced the winners of its last quarter, 4#Move. Previous installments focused on the issues of 1#Shop, 2#Work, and 3#Live. — bustler.net

With the blank slate offered by a catastrophic attack, planners, soon joined by the mayor himself, saw a chance to re-establish a great crossroads: Fulton and Greenwich Streets, tying the second World Trade Center into New York — north, south, east and west.

Now, however, they see that vision slipping away, as security concerns trump urban planning. — cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com

For the first time since Henri Labrouste (1801-1875), currently the subject of an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, formulated the conception of the new, democratic library, the central library is fighting for survival. The relevance of these gloriously inflated book boxes is being questioned in an age that looks to the Internet for its intellectual resources. — online.wsj.com

The first life-size Barbie Dreamhouse opened in Berlin on Thursday and is being guarded by police after feminist groups and left-wing activists said they would picket the plastic villa. — globalpost.com

The Hirshhorn Museum’s proposed Seasonal Inflatable Structure, also known as “the Bubble,” a project announced in 2009 and intended as an architecturally and culturally transformative space on the Mall, would operate at a loss in each of three scenarios examined in an assessment done by the Smithsonian. — washingtonpost.com

the 40-year-old architect has emerged as one of the country’s major creative voices, building an eclectic portfolio of work that includes a 10,000-square-foot neo-Brutalist palazzo, the master plan for an art-filled botanical garden and a spiritual refuge in the Jalisco Mountains. The projects vary wildly in attitude and style — NYT

Are cities becoming "greater" these days?

(Bernd Upmeyer, Editor-in-Chief, May 2013) — monu-magazine.com

The Vatican’s presence at the Biennale is the brainchild of Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, an exuberant polymath who as president of the Pontifical Council for Culture since 2009 has tried to build bridges between the church and contemporary culture, two worlds that have often clashed. — nytimes.com

The New South China Mall was once promoted as the world's biggest mall, but it's now pretty much deserted. — edition.cnn.com