Venezuelan soldiers and officials began moving hundreds of families on Tuesday out of a half-built 45-story skyscraper that dominates the Caracas skyline and is thought to be the world's tallest slum. Residents from the "Tower of David” were going to new homes in the town of Cua, south of Caracas [...]. President Nicolas Maduro's government has not yet said what it will do with the tower, but one local newspaper reported Chinese banks were buying it to restore to its original purpose. — nbcnews.com

Here is another reason to buy a mega-million-dollar apartment in a Manhattan high-rise: Earthquake forecast maps for New York City that a federal agency issued on Thursday indicate “a slightly lower hazard for tall buildings than previously thought.”

The agency, the United States Geological Survey, tempered its latest quake prediction with a big caveat.

“The tall buildings in Manhattan are not where you should be focusing [...]" — nytimes.com

225 West 57th Street‘s facade will top-out 1,479′ above street level, while a surprise spire on top will cap the tower at 1,775 feet. Adrian Smith and Gordon Gill are designing the building.

The new height details will result in several superlatives: Manhattan will finally retake the ‘tallest roof’ in the United States from Chicago’s Willis Tower, which stands 1,451′, and 225 West 57th Street will become the tallest residential building in the entire world [...]. — newyorkyimby.com

Imagined with bright pink and green lights, standing more than 150m taller than the Burj Khalifa and emerging from an island in a lake in central China, these plans for Wuhan’s Phoenix Towers seem a world away from grey old London.

Yet the ambitious design revealed this week has been put forward by the British architectural firm Chetwoods, and owes much of its inspiration to an award-winning project for a new, greener London Bridge. — independent.co.uk

The Walkie Talkie – or 20 Fenchurch Street – became known as the Walkie Scorchie because of its apparent ability to bounce heat from the sun on to buildings in the next street in the City of London.

Yesterday, the developer, Land Securities, said that it had received planning permission for a “brise soleil” sunshade to be attached to the building to replace a temporary system erected last summer. Work is due to start this month. — telegraph.co.uk

He merely wanted to immortalize the most iconic of Berkeley’s icons—the Sather Tower campanile—in a Lego kit.

“A couple of months ago I started fooling around with Legos and I made a couple of mock-ups of the Campanile,” he recalls. “I knew that Lego has a suggestion site—if you submit a proposal and it gets 10,000 votes, they’ll consider making a kit. I thought it would be very cool if they included the Berkeley Campanile in their architecture series.” — alumni.berkeley.edu

The Swiss architect Gion A Caminada is something of a cult figure. Now in his 50s, he's spent much of his working life since the late 1970s practising out of a small village called Vrin in the canton of Graubünden. [...]

Caminada's idea was to boost the place with a collection of well-designed and functional private and communal buildings, among them the Aussichtsturm Reussdelta, an ornithologists' observation tower, and Waldhuette, a woodland cabin containing a school classroom. — Phaidon

The urban planning community is constantly touting the benefits of building dense communities around public transportation. But according to designers Chad Kellogg and Matt Bowles, few solutions have been ambitious enough to do the whole Transit-Oriented Development idea justice. So they came up with their own.

Behold the Urban Alloy Towers, a proposal to take over spaces immediately surrounding transportation infrastructure like elevated train lines and highways. — theatlanticcities.com

Up until recently Canary Wharf was the only place for skyscrapers in London. [...]

Now it seems that London is going to receive a more cohesive skyline, with a new study produced by the New London Architecture (NLA) thinktank suggesting that at least 236 tall buildings (those over 20 storeys in height) are currently proposed, approved or under construction in the capital. — independent.co.uk

The "folie" continues with the winning team that will build a new "Architectural Folie of the 21st Century" for Montpellier, France. The team -- which includes Sou Fujimoto Architects, Nicolas Laisné Associates, and Manal Rachdi Oxo Architects as the architects -- won the closed competition with their project, "Arbre Blanc" (White Tree), a 10,000 m² mixed-use tower... — bustler.net

The tallest residential block in Germany is to rise up next to Berlin's needle-like TV tower by 2017. Designed by the US architect Frank Gehry and paid for by US real estate firm Hines, the 150-metre (492ft) building on Alexanderplatz will have 39 floors, with about 300 apartments, restaurants, a hotel and a spa. [...]

Nonetheless, the city senate's building director, Regula Lüscher, welcomed the plans for "an extremely striking new landmark". — theguardian.com

Six years after Comcast Corp. moved into the tallest U.S. skyscraper between Manhattan and Chicago, the cable-TV and Internet giant expects to break ground this summer on an even taller, more dazzling $1.2-billion tower. [...]

One of the world's leading architects, Britain's Norman Robert Foster, has designed the trophy building with a host of innovative features. — philly.com

On stormy days and windy nights, Tribeca residents say their neighborhood is filled with a strange, high-pitched whistling sound coming from the redeveloped World Trade Center site. It's an inopportune location for howling (although, really, where is?), but it's hardly the first building to surprise its neighbors by humming or whistling. [...]

But just to be clear? It's not haunted. Port Authority's rep told Pix 11 he hopes ghost stories won't "become part of the dialogue." — gizmodo.com

UNStudio was recently chosen to design the Baumkirchen Mitte, an office and residential complex in Munich, Germany. In collaboration with OR else Landscapes, UNStudio won out of six shortlisted finalist teams that included BIG, J Mayer H Architects, and Schneider + Schumacher Architects. — bustler.net