Whatever you want, then, go to an architect for it; not to a carpenter, or a mason, or your own still more profound incompetence. Tell him all your practical, material desires, and insist that they shall be respected... Settle your practical desires and state them clearly; and, if you will, pour out your vague aesthetic wishes; try to explain those crude artistic preferences, those misty, formless visions which you are pleased to call “my own ideas.” — Places Journal

Harry S Truman inherited a White House that was in horrendous shape. After the British nearly burnt it to the ground in 1814, the construction of 20th-century innovations—indoor plumbing, electricity, and heating ducts—had also taken its toll on the structure. The building was nearly 150 years old, and it showed its age. In November 1948, the building was in a near-condemnable state... So it had to be gutted. Completely. — nationaljournal.com

A recent structural discovery that was recently found buried beneath 30 tonnes of rubble has the global industry abuzz.

The architectural secret, which was dubbed ‘Berlin’s best kept architectural secret,’ is a three-storey German Music Hall Theatre, designed by famous architect and business owner Oscar Garbe and built in 1905. — DesignBuild Source

Almost a million images of New York and its municipal operations have been made public for the first time on the internet.

The city's Department of Records officially announced the debut of the photo database.

Culled from the Municipal Archives collection of more than 2.2 million images going back to the mid-1800s, the 870,000 photographs feature all manner of city oversight -- from stately ports and bridges to grisly gangland killings. — dailymail.co.uk

The book answers questions like: Why did the flushing toilet take two centuries to catch on? Why were kitchens cut off from the rest of a home? And did strangers really share beds as recently as a century ago? (Yes, they did.) — npr.org

The truth I’m trying to present is one about site-specific forgetting. If our history is a history of forgetting how to remember the past, as I am arguing, then the city of Detroit is the engine of our conflicted deliverance. It’s the machinery we’ve used for particular acts of forgetting, each connected to the place and time where the forgetting got done. — Places Journal

Games gurus and architects have much in common: both design the movement of people through space. Assassin's Creed: Revelations, set in 16th-century Constantinople, writes that similarity large.

To furnish the video-game's levels with verisimilitude, art director Raphael Lacoste and mission design director Falko Poiker turned draftsmen. They made a research trip to the city (today's Istanbul) to collect images that could be turned into computer graphics. — wired.co.uk

All over Los Angeles, the places where artists, architects and engineers were busy in the postwar years inventing the future are being recast as monuments and historical shrines.

This new attitude toward the city's recent heritage can be seen in increasingly visible battles over the fate of postwar landmarks like Richard Neutra's Kronish House in Beverly Hills and in nascent efforts to preserve and display artifacts from the early years of the computer and aerospace industries in Los Angeles. — latimes.com

Historians today don’t do history, but historiography. Each aims to better the last in range of content and extremes of references, in language increasingly esoteric and dense: a babble of self referential writing that addresses only others in the lodge. Architectural writing, prone to fashion like all else in the design professions, has followed. — architectsjournal.co.uk

Institutions including SFMOMA, the Whitney, the Barnes Foundation and MoMA plan various additions and exits, a boom for contemporary architects but a bust for architectural history. — latimes.com