How should the state pursue the goal of making decent housing affordable and accessible to all its citizens? How can we mobilize our collective resources in the service of social justice? In what other ways might we imagine living together? What is a house? — Places Journal

Who needs a fancy designer when builders all over the country know how to construct a peaked-roof single-family house?

The Museum of Modern Art’s small but magnificently ambitious new show “Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream” makes an overwhelming case that the two camps need each other now. Today’s suburb has little to do with the outwardly tidy, seething, monochrome world of Updike or Revolutionary Road. — nymag.com

Too often during the bubble, banks and builders shunned thoughtful architecture and urban design in favor of cookie-cutter houses that could be easily repackaged as derivatives to be flipped, while architects snubbed housing to pursue more prestigious projects.

But better design is precisely what suburban America needs, particularly when it comes to rethinking the basic residential categories that define it, but can no longer accommodate the realities of domestic life. — nytimes.com

New York-based HWKN has been selected for this year’s MoMA/PS 1 Young Architects Program. Their proposal, called “Wendy,” uses standard scaffolding to create a visually arresting object that straddles the three outdoor rooms of the PS 1 courtyard. Tensioned fabric coated in smog-eating paint provides shelter and programming areas including a stage, shower, and misters. — blog.archpaper.com

Some 600,000 commuters, riding Amtrak, Long Island Rail Road and New Jersey Transit, now suffer Penn Station every day. That makes it probably the busiest transit hub in the Western world, busier than Heathrow Airport in London, busier than Newark, La Guardia and Kennedy airports combined.

To pass through Grand Central Terminal, one of New York’s exalted public spaces, is an ennobling experience, a gift. To commute via the bowels of Penn Station, just a few blocks away, is a humiliation. — Michael Kimmelman, nytimes.com

The design shows Eisenhower as a youth gazing out at images of his adult accomplishments against a backdrop of the Kansas plains. But the Eisenhower family objects to the design and is attempting to delay approval of the project in a dispute that has pitted a leading American family against one of the country’s most recognized architects. The family says Mr. Gehry should portray Eisenhower as a man in the fullness of his achievements, not as a callow rustic who made good. — nytimes.com

[Beijing] started expanding the system in the run-up to the 2008 Olympics, and has kept pushing forward ever since. In 2001 it had 33 miles of track. Today it has 231.

Meanwhile, when you hear the completion dates for big U.S. transit projects you often have to calculate your age to figure out if you’ll still be alive. — salon.com

Baker is an architect who has just purchased one of [Richard] Meier’s raw space apartments with his wife and is supposed to be using his design skills to turn it into a home. But he is suffering through an artistic slump, a malaise his wife hopes to remedy by forcing him into a competition with a younger, up-and-coming architect, whose wife was once her best friend. Through constantly shifting perspectives, the private design competition provides a funny, insightful look at love and ambition... — phillyburbs.com

Liang Sicheng (1901-1972) is known as China’s “Father of Modern Architecture,” but he expressed strong sentiments throughout his career when it came to preserving the country’s heritage and identity. In the 1950s, when Beijing was selected as the nation's capital, he lobbied to keep its ancient buildings intact and urged the government to build an entirely new city instead. The ruling party disagreed, and ancient Beijing has become a distant memory. — artinfo.com

The Herzog & de Meuron and Ai Weiwei collaboration – the 12th pavilion – breaks the mould of the sequence so far as the criterion for the commission had been for an architect not to have built in England. But Herzog & de Meuron are also deeply engaged in the art world, having built the Walker Art Centre in Minneapolis and the de Young Museum in San Francisco. They are currently working on art museums in New York, Miami and Kolkata. — ft.com

It sparked a thousand childhood nightmares – now the original workhouse from Oliver Twist has been discovered. But a row has erupted over what to do with the building. — telegraph.co.uk

Designers in Buffalo have proposed stripping down a mall to its foundation and reinventing it as housing, while an aspiring architect in Detroit has proposed turning a mall’s parking lot there into a community farm. Columbus, Ohio, arguing that it was too expensive to maintain an empty mall on prime real estate, dismantled its City Center mall and replaced it with a park. — nytimes.com

We’ve received emails from people just starting out or thinking of going into architecture asking for advice. It gets heavy sometimes. People who have been laid off in the recession have also written to share their stories. One architect I know told me without irony that he wishes he had read it before starting out on this path. — metropolismag.com

In pre-industrial days, copying used to be a positive act. It was seen as a skill. Artists were looked upon as handworkers. Copying became a negative notion with the cult of the individual artist and the arrival of mass production, which made replication extremely cheap and easy. Copyright and intellectual property laws were created to protect the original. In those days, the amount of new products reaching the market was relatively small. — rennyramakers.com