The value of an institution isn’t measured in public square feet. But its value can be devalued by bad architecture...The designs have all the elegance and distinction of a suburban mall. I was reminded that Mr. Foster is also responsible for the canopied enclosure of the inner court at the British Museum, a pompous waste of public space that inserts a shopping gallery into the heart of a sublime cultural institution. — New York Times

We often see our homes as sanctuaries from the outside world. We try to leave our problems at the door and just make our dwellings a neat and comfortable place. Dutch Artist Frank Halmans’ was obviously bored by this syndrome thus he created the ‘Hoover Buildings’. The machines literally suck up dirt into the interior of a dollhouse. Halman has created functioning vacuum cleaners and dust busters in the shape of buildings in an attempt to show how ‘dirt and debris’ clutters our personal space. — ignant.de

"The Falcons and the Authority have reviewed the Statements of Qualifications received in response to the RFQ, and the Authority has selected the following firms to be finalists and eligible for further consideration (listed alphabetically):" — Georgia Procurement Registry

"Sometimes if you do a competition, you know you’re taking a risk of it not happening. Many of them that we’ve done remain unbuilt for us, and unbuilt for anyone. We always look at competitions very carefully to try and determine whether it’s just emotion on the part of the sponsors or it's something real." — DWELL

The redevelopment of the Richardson Olmsted Complex will...transform the former Buffalo State Hospital from a place of healing to one of hospitality.

The design builds upon Olmsted's original intent while conserving existing resources, preserving the fabric of the space, and creating connections and purpose. — Buffalo Rising

Chinese artist Ai Weiwei has faced censorship and imprisonment by China's government. Rita Braver reports on a U.S. exhibit of the dissident's creations. — youtube.com

Built in 1989, the five-bedroom, five-bathroom residence has been described as "a village that looks inward." There is a main house, an office, a guesthouse and a garage-and-gym structure with a breezeway. The half-acre of grounds include a reflecting pond, a swimming pool and an olive orchard. — latimes.com

Making a mess of the built environment and the politics of space, one issue at a time. — SOILED

In New York City, an elevated freight rail lane in west Manhattan became the High Line, a celebrated linear park running through a busy part of the borough. Design firm Workshop Architecture hopes that one of Toronto’s hydro corridors can be similarly transformed into a continuous recreation area for Toronto’s pedestrians and cyclists, and that an international contest soliciting ideas for the space will help hasten the process. — torontoist.com

In 2009, Dennis Maher... bought an abandoned property from D’Youville College for $10,000...After he sorted through the junk he found inside, he began to build, reconfiguring the pieces of things like a home entertainment center...and dollhouse furniture... He attached the structures he created to the floors, walls and ceilings, like Joseph Cornell sculptures run amok...You can sense dust bunnies everywhere swelling with importance. — New York Times

It all leads one to ponder the what-if Los Angeles, to imagine the city that would exist today if the best proposals for remedying its ailments had been realized. Los Angeles would now include a ring of thousands of acres of urban and regional parks, a bold, space-age airport, a winged nature center for Griffith Park and hillside housing developments sculpted to the contours of the landscape rather than sitting on graded and terraced scars. We would be living in a very different city. — latimes.com

Joshua DeMonte, who is based in Philadelphia, said he looked to 'ancient' structures to develop the unisex range, which costs between $700 and $5,000.

Talking about his designs he told Modern Luxury magazine: 'I enjoy playing with scale and connecting architecture to the body.’ — dailymail.co.uk

We seem to have lost the political capacity to grapple with the big picture, the long range, the global scale. To a degree we've even lost the vocabulary. In design circles it's as if the perceived failures of mid 20th-century planning — exemplified by top-down urban renewal and personified by the power-brokering Robert Moses — have induced a kind of conceptual paralysis, an inability to formulate the public sector, or public works, in terms not beholden to a discredited history. — Places Journal

"I'm going to be intolerant of bad architecture," he says, describing how the former head of planning was a highways engineer who "let anything and everything through – including office blocks stacked on top of multistorey car parks.

"My idea of good architecture is about creating place. It's not about providing glitzy iconic buildings, competing one against the other, but how we use the best of what we've got." — guardian.co.uk