It's fun to design – even when you have to work for free ! In fact, a freebie “conceptual design” is what two Harvard-educated women produced for Barbie’s new home in a competition to build a dream home for the Mattel doll, sponsored by the American Institute of Architects. — Globe & Mail

Boston-based firm PRAUD has shared with us their entry to the Busan Opera House competition. The international ideas competition invited visions for a massive cultural center, comprising a 2,000-seat opera house and a 1,300-seat multi-purpose theater, that acts as a landmark building for this booming South Korean city and puts Busan on the map of international tourism. — bustler.net

University of Kentucky College of Design Assistant Professor Kyle Miller led an eight-week design program in Amsterdam for twelve undergraduate students. The students participated in two courses: a six-credit design studio and a three-credit seminar that comprised a series of intensive design workshops.
The primary objective of the design studio was to prototype design and program solutions for large, recently abandoned buildings in Amsterdam. — uky.edu

The fine craftsmen of Indiana conferencing before the chop down
The yellow poplar tree hanging from the crane
The tree in a horizontal position
The truck is finally loaded
The tree outside Anderson, Indiana, ready to roll
Truck on its way to Indianapolis on narrow roads with police escort
The tree at the 100 acres ready for further refinement. — Visiondivision

I am a fighter and you're not gonna get rid of me.. — LA Times

Portal to the Point Project Advisor Paul Rosenblatt AIA, Principal of SPRINGBOARD Design, is pleased to announce the selection of five finalists for the Portal to the Point Design Ideas Exploration sponsored by Colcom Foundation. The finalists are: Marlon Blackwell Architect, MAYA Design, SCAPE Landscape Architecture, Weiss/Manfredi, and wHY Architecture. — SPRINGBOARD Design

King Abdullah of Jordan, who was once an extra in an episode of Star Trek: Voyager, has given the green light to a $1.5 billion Star Trek-inspired theme park that will boldly take Jordan where no Gulf state has gone before. While the theme park will not be powered by dilithium crystals, it will utilize green technology in order to lower its carbon footprint. — Inhabitat

Blind alleys laid out like labyrinths. Steps climbing seemingly to nowhere. Roads crisscrossing and crossbreeding smaller roads. But despite the elaborate shapes and impossible angles, the cityscapes created by Filipino artist Rudy Yu make their own sense, aesthetically. They are cities [...] mapped out playfully, whimsically by an artist who, though inspired by the likes of M.C. Escher and Manuel Baldemor, puts his own idiosyncratic spin on space and matter that occupies it. — philstar.com

at its heart, the memorial has come through at least somewhat intact. And at ground zero, that is saying quite a bit. - Christopher Hawthorne — L.A.Times

As Europe continues to battle economic and environmental gloom and doom, nations across the continent are re-evaluating how to build the cities of tomorrow with tight budgets and green mindsets. "We are at a key moment, where we as architects must become activists. We must innovate and help to find new solutions for how people can live well and do well," says Enric Ruiz-Geli, founding principal of Cloud9 architects in Barcelona. — online.wsj.com

The role that architecture plays in all of this is of course limited. New business eventually accrued from rebuilding destroyed buildings will have a negligible effect on the construction economy. So far the London riots have claimed two historic landmarks, the Victorian cottages at Croydon’s Reeves Corner (1867) and Tottenham’s Art Deco Union Point (1930), both of which survived the Blitz. — building.co.uk

Ada Louise has a voice (acerbic defender of the city); Goldberger has a voice (the artful company man); Muschamp had a voice (champion of glamour). Nicolai, alas, has no voice. Kimmelman will need to stake out some critical territory for himself, a voice on the subject. … — Observer

I believe with every fiber of my being that God turned the eyes of the world on Crystal Cathedral because God wants to make a big bold statement, he wants the world to know that he is a God who still does miracles — Reuters

The Chapel of St. Lawrence in Vantaa and the famous Temppeliaukio Church in Helsinki are both results of architectural competitions. The competition system has brought around a hundred church buildings to Finland. — yle.fi