Whether or not the Whitney was wise to migrate, the design suggests that it has misperceived its future neighborhood, a formerly run-down area where mottled brick, painted iron, and salvaged wood are still pleasingly rough. The district’s architecture of the past decade has put a sophisticated gloss on this neighborhood’s industrial past. — New York

The new visitor center is the first park project to be completed as part of Mayor Michael Bloomberg's Design and Construction Excellence Initiative. By making it easier to get talented architects on the job, the program aims at bringing good design to even the humblest city-funded projects. The Poe Center was designed by Toshiko Mori, an award-winning architect and a former chairman of the department of architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. — online.wsj.com

Check out this new animated film, Plan Of The City, conceived and directed by Joshua Frankel, featuring flying skyscrapers from New York and Shanghai, remixed cities, the Martian landscape and a chamber ensemble. The film is, in part, a love letter to architecture, urban planing, and impossible proposals for each. It is also an experiment in extending the concept of collage through live action video and animation. — bustler.net

One of Ai Weiwei’s better known works is “Study of Perspective,” a series of first-person photographs in which the artist gives the finger to various landmarks around the world, including the Forbidden City. A Cuban artist recently made a similar gesture, projecting a massive portrait of Mr. Ai along the side of the Chinese consulate building in New York City. — blogs.wsj.com

Mr. Koolhaas’s vision is even more apocalyptic. A skilled provocateur, he paints a picture of an army of well-meaning but clueless preservationists who, in their zeal to protect the world’s architectural legacies, end up debasing them by creating tasteful scenery for docile consumers while airbrushing out the most difficult chapters of history. The result, he argues, is a new form of historical amnesia, one that, perversely, only further alienates us from the past. — nytimes.com

So the summer is here and it's been raining all week in NYC. I'm off to DC for the weekend!
As I promised, photos from the GSAPP 2011 End-of-the-Year Show. Are you excited?

I am particularly proud of all the work everyone at our school produced. Architecture is alive and kicking. — Columbia University GSAPP (Anthony)

Our auction features a small collection of covetable artwork, collage and constructions from twelve unique talents from our incredible New York creative pool, with whom you are all on a first-name basis: Milton, Seymour, Ivan, Paula, Massimo, Maira, Todd, Christoph, Rodrigo, James, Gary and even Stephen. — aigany.org

The magic of cities comes from their people, but those people must be well served by the bricks and mortar that surround them. Cities need roads and buildings that enable people to live well and to connect easily with one another ... in the most desirable cities, whether they're on the Hudson River or the Arabian Sea, height is the best way to keep prices affordable and living standards high. — grist.org

The New Amsterdam Plein & Pavilion at Peter Minuit Plaza has now officially opened to the public in New York City's Battery Park. The pavilion was designed by Amsterdam-based Ben Van Berkel/UNStudio in collaboration with Handel Architects LLP, New York serving as associate architect. The project's landscape was conceived by Parks Dept. Landscape Designer Gail Wittwer-Laird. — bustler.net

The folk art museum’s building was designed by Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects and opened in 2001. It was not clear whether it would be torn down. The folk art museum took on $32 million of debt to construct the 53rd Street building. But attendance never met expectations, and after sustaining investment losses in the financial crisis, the museum defaulted on its debt. — NYTimes.com

Three winners and four Honorable Mentions have been revealed for the suckerPUNCH-curated Long Island Cinema Center competition in Queens, New York. The international design ideas competition challenged entrants to create a large scale center to celebrate cinema and rescue the moviegoing experience from fading into obsolescence. — bustler.net

There is no more iconic suburb than Levittown, the postwar planned community built by the developer William Levitt in the late 1940s, so it is understandable that in launching Open House, a collaborative project to imagine a “future suburbia,” the Dutch design collective Droog in collaboration with Diller Scofidio + Renfro architects would make it the focus of their inquiry. — opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com

But like other architects of his generation, especially those who formed many of their ideas working in Los Angeles’s sprawling suburban maze, Mr. Denari is less interested in perpetuating the myth of the open road than in mining it for new ideas. His work has more to do with exploring adolescent fantasies than with celebrating personal freedom. It suggests a longing for a world — free, open, upwardly mobile — that began to break down more than 30 years ago. — nytimes.com

For all its dynamism, precision and intelligence, there has always been something a bit antiseptic about Denari's work, as if it were hermetically sealed against emotion as well as imperfection. The New York building, with its fluid, digitally derived profile and facade of glass and panels of embossed stainless steel, won't dramatically change that impression. Its design personality is closer to robotic than balletic. — Christopher Hawthorne, Los Angeles Times