His writing has a patient, deliberate quality that is rare at a moment when the dominant medium of architectural discourse is Twitter. Perhaps this is why Mr. Rybczynski, despite himself, is suddenly all the rage. — nytimes.com

Inga Saffron, who writes the "Changing Skyline" column for the Philadelphia Inquirer, won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism this week.

She talks with Dave Heller about the state of criticism today, and the changing attitudes towards cities. — newsworks.org

Next week in London, The Sincura Group will be holding a similar auction of street pieces formally by Banksy. That’s the same company that last year successfully sold the Banksy “Slave Labour” wall at auction for just over $1 million. They’ve titled their auction Stealing Banksy? and it will include approximately 18 works, at least 7 of which are street pieces formally by Banksy that have been removed from their original locations, some of them specifically removed for this sale. — blog.vandalog.com

He’s waited until his ninth decade, but Frank Gehry is turning his attention to the London skyline, starting with Battersea Power Station, where he will draw on the capital’s sweeping crescents and stucco terraces as part of its £8bn redevelopment. He tells Harry Mount about courting controversy, banter with Norman Foster and working for Mark Zuckerberg — standard.co.uk

And hierarchies don’t disappear when you place everyone at a communal table or “superdesk”; they persist in more subtle modes of workplace interaction.

I suspect that people thrown into open plans might even miss their cubicles. And there are features of cubicles—such as the need to partition wide spaces—that I suspect will continue to be useful and never go away; these needs precede the invention of the cubicle itself. — theatlantic.com

Sjors de Vries is a Dutch urban planner and founder of RUIMTEVOLK (‘Space People’), a leading online discussion platform about planning and urbanism in the Netherlands. We spoke with him about the current state of planning in the Netherlands, the best ways to upscale cute and small initiatives to make them serious improvements to the city, about the power of online media in city-making and the role of their platform. — popupcity.net

What have we learned so far about how cities function — and how they don’t? What is the role of that most symbolic of city features, the skyscraper? And is it possible to “break” a city? Five experts offered their perspectives on the use of data to solve urban problems, the ways in which the skyscraper is venerated and misused, and their best guesses on what the cities of the future might look like. — nytimes.com

In a SPIEGEL interview, Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, 56, discusses how the authorities monitor his movements in sometimes bizarre detail and the feud with the government in Beijing that has kept him from being allowed to leave the country for three years now. — spiegel.de

The 2013 edition of The AF’s annual headline event and trans-disciplinary dialogue presented New York-based architect Peter Marino in conversation with fashion designer Marc Jacobs. The event, which took place at Tate Modern’s Starr Auditorium, was chaired by Penny Martin, editor in chief, The Gentlewoman explored the territories of fashion and architecture and the space in which these two art forms interlink.

"Starting from small things", motto of Japanese architect Kengo Kuma, we begin to grasp the view of a man's goal to "recover the traditional Japanese building." From philosophy of nature and materiality to personal taste in film and music, Kuma travels to San Diego to share his influences and insight on the world of architecture with design students from Woodbury School of Architecture.

He is grouchy, says a man who knows Frank Gehry well, when I ask him what to expect of my meeting with the architect. Grouchy, but sweet. I bear those words in mind as I am introduced to Gehry in the office of his Los Angeles studio, and explain in a super-polite way my role as the FT’s arts writer. — ft.com

National Building Museum and Metropolis Magazine contributor Andrew Caruso recently sat down with AIA Gold Medalist Thom Mayne to talk about the early days of his career and the major design school, public projects, and trajectory of work that followed. Thom talks innovation, politics, education… and about debunking his reputation as the “bad boy” of architecture. — metropolismag.com