The practice of using corporate largess to finance restoration projects for public antiquities was once fairly rare here. But with the nation struggling with a stagnant economy and crushing public debt — Rome is flirting off and on with bankruptcy — politicians are now looking to private companies and international sources to help preserve Italy’s cultural heritage. — nytimes.com

[...] the Crystal Bridges acquisition reflects an increasingly popular attitude toward architecturally significant homes among private collectors. Such buyers now see that historic homes can be collected, preserved, and appreciated much like fine art. — blouinartinfo.com

“Words like ‘holocaust’ have been used in reference to the idea that our house could inspire a rash of tear-downs which could then be replaced with modern homes. I designed my house specifically within the design guidelines of this historic district and to be compatible, a good neighbor. But the term ‘modernism’ just clicks a switch in people’s brain and they can’t see the house for what it is.” — nytimes.com

Workers are digging the foundation for a twin-towered apartment building that will obscure the great flying buttresses and stained-glass windows of the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine in Morningside Heights.

Preservationists, neighbors and architects are justly up in arms. [...] Even the developer laments how the approval process for new buildings in New York spews out too many projects that nobody really likes. — nytimes.com

Decades of socialism and military rule kept Myanmar — or Burma, as it was known — poor and isolated.

There was one upside, though. The economy was so lousy, there was no drive to demolish the big British colonial buildings in Yangon, Myanmar's largest city, and replace them with the glass and steel towers that now define much of the skylines in East Asia.

[...] remarkable architectural heritage, which has come into the cross hairs of developers trying to cash in on rising land prices. — npr.org

I have been trying trying to understand what makes historic places special to so many of us. Part of it is that they are relatively rare in the United States, I guess. For several decades our newer everyday architecture – our subdivisions, strip malls, office buildings – has been simultaneously bland and deadening in its consistency. [...]

But I also think there may be something deeper going on. We gravitate to older places because they ground us in space and time. — huffingtonpost.com

The most striking Bauhaus designs, such as Marcel Breuer's tubular steel chair or the Wagenfeld table lamp, have been endlessly copied and mass produced.

But the architecture of the design school has left a more complicated legacy in Germany.

[...] reopens two of the art school's most significant houses on Friday, almost 70 years after they were bombed, the move is sure to reignite the old debate about what to do with historic buildings damaged during the second world war. — theguardian.com

Lewis Mumford wrote that, in a city, “time becomes visible.” Not, it would appear, in Raleigh, North Carolina, where a city board has just decided that a rather discreet and understated modern house might need to be torn down because it damages the ambience of a historic district, which is to say it destroys the illusion that the neighborhood is a place in which time has stopped. — Vanity Fair

In a city where real estate values are as dizzying as the skyscrapers, the angst over Manhattan’s changing profile and streetscape is becoming louder. The most recent outcry came over the demolition of a five-story building on West 57th Street, former home of Rizzoli Bookstore. [...]

"There won't be anything left to love if we don't stop this kind of development," State Senator Liz Krueger said during a rally protesting the Rizzoli building's pending demolition. — theatlanticcities.com

[...] architectural historian William J R Curtis has set off the alarm bells by warning about the looming threat of destruction on Chandigarh's architectural heritage, terming the damage to buildings as "vulgarization" and "massacre."

According to Curtis, there is a clear and present danger to the legacy of city creator Le Corbusier and that the restoration measures are needed to be taken now. — timesofindia.indiatimes.com