A proposal for two skyscrapers that would flank the Capitol Records tower in Hollywood gained the approval of the city's planning department Tuesday despite push-back from dozens of disgruntled residents.

The Millennium Hollywood plans are the most ambitious in a string of revitalization projects in the area, including the W Hotel and the Hollywood & Highland Center. The $664-million mixed-use development could include more than 1 million square feet of apartment, office and retail space. — latimes.com

Reaching 637 feet, the tower features a faceted facade filled with 428 residential units. Last month the creative team at Selldorf posted a video showing the louvered façade system, a "second skin" controlled by each individual dweller, and described thusly: "Cloaking the façade, a system of operable terracotta louvers animates the building with its changing configurations and reflectivity." — Curbed NY

The Swiss practice is one of three that have been commissioned by Canary Wharf Group to design the first phase of the Wood Wharf development.

Allies & Morrison has been appointed to design two new office buildings which will sit either side of the western end of the high street. The offices, aimed at IT services and new media companies, will sit above two storeys of retail. — bdonline.co.uk

Canada’s biggest city is getting even bigger, with a pace-setting number of skyscrapers set to join the city skyline.

According to a Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH) report dubbed “Canada Rising,” Toronto is leading the western world in terms of new buildings 150 metres or taller currently under construction. — DesignBuild Source Canada

The skyline of Chile’s capital city, Santiago, has a new addition with the Gran Torre skyscraper casting a two-kilometre shadow across the historic city.

The 70-storey residential building stands more than 300 metres tall, making it the tallest building in South America. The five-ton steel structure cost an estimated one billion dollars to build and tenants are expected to move into the building next March. — DesignBuild Source

Hadid’s tower will be built at the site that is now occupied by the BP Station at 1000 Biscayne Boulevard, directly across from Museum Park. The selection of Hadid was confirmed Monday by the investment group behind 1000 Biscayne Tower, which is managed by local developers Gregg Covin and Louis Birdman. — miamiherald.com

Encountered on the street, they are enigmatic and shifting, even voluptuous. They appear carefully controlled, but their underlying geometry is far from obvious. Driving or walking by causes the towers' profiles to change continuously, and it would require significant mental acrobatics to map the relationship between profiles and construct a complete mental model of the building. From a closer vantage point, the geometric enigma remains, but a feature at another scale begins to dominate. — domusweb.it

The ten winners of the 2011 Emporis Skyscraper Award have been announced with New York City's 8 Spruce Street tower taking home the top place. The winners were chosen from over 220 skyscrapers completed in 2011. Now in its 12th year, the award program rewards ten skyscrapers completed in the previous calendar year. — bustler.net

While becoming the tallest in architectural terms will always garner attention, taller building often harbour some of the lengthiest development periods.

With a rise in the prominence of prefabrication, however, large is no longer necessarily equated with lengthy. — DesignBuild Source

Holistic sustainability is a notion too often forgotten in a global industry heavily focused delivering on green ideals. While the notion of green building is an umbrella under which all things related to environmentally responsible construction and design efforts are categorized, the green sector actually falls under the broad-reaching holistic sustainability model. — DesignBuild Source Canada

The new buildings will be designed by Gary Handel Architects and Roschen Van Cleve Architects, but these renderings, like the rest of it, are conceptual. Landscape starchitect James Corner Field Operations (of New York's High Line and Santa Monica's Civic Center Parks) will design "extensive open space, street-level plazas, and enhanced pedestrian circulation encompassing approximately 25 percent of the entire site." — la.curbed.com

A 1,070-foot tower that will become the largest skyscraper on the West Coast received its final approvals from the Planning Commission on Thursday. — sfexaminer.com

Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture has just won another competition for a skyscraper in Asia: earlier today, the Chicago firm was announced as the winner of the international competition to design Qintai Center, a 248-meter (814-feet) tall, high-performance corporate headquarters tower and related podium structure in Wuhan, Hubei Province, China. — bustler.net

Burden's Small Skyscraper (Quasi-Legal Skyscraper), was intended to be "a modern day log cabin" that "two guys with a donkey could put up, and when the neighbor calls the building inspector, the guys can take it down again," he told LA Weekly back in 2003.

Burden's loophole (it's now closed) eventually led to the design of an aluminum-framed structure built in 2003 with the help of Linda Taalman and Alan Koch of Taalman Koch Architecture. — blogs.laweekly.com

Displaced residents will be able to move into the new apartments "as if they had just won first prize in a lottery."
The plans also include "Super-Galactic" residences, which will tempt celebrities including (but not limited to) royal families from Europe, CEOs, and "the wealthy." — curbed.com