Developers in San Francisco are loath to take architectural risks because the city’s approval process for new development is long and rigorous, perhaps the most onerous in the country, architects say.

It’s hard to fault their caution when you consider how small San Francisco really is — 47 square miles (Manhattan alone is 23 square miles) — with much of the area consumed by neighborhoods zoned for single-family homes. — The New York Times

“Why do they come to us? Because of 15 Central Park West,” Mr. Stern, 73, said earlier this month from his office on the West Side of Manhattan. The Chinese “don’t want to go home at night to their three-bedroom shelf on the 44th floor,” he added. “They want to live in a place. That’s what we do: we’re place-makers.” — nytimes.com

Günther Domenig passed away on June 15, 2012. Wolf D Prix, design principal at Coop Himmelb(l)au, released the following statement "I insist that Günther Domenig was one of the most important Austrian architects. Important in terms of being weighty. Meanwhile our own tammuz felt "his steinhous is an beautiful and seminal poem of architecture"

Well, if it’s too traditional or uninspiring to them, there are others who find it traditional in an inspiring way — that one can go back to go forward and restate things that are there. I think that the obsession with the new-new thing is O.K. for computer apps. Architecture is about place and time in the long sense of the word. — nytimes.com

“What we’re going for is a building that fits in and reflects the general character of the historic district, that expresses the period of the American Revolution but in a fresh new way for the 21st century,” Mr. Stern said. — NYT