‘El mejor anuncio de la historia’, or ‘the best ad in history’ is a picture taken in February 2008, which neatly encapsulates several aspects of the city’s urban landscape: the formal, the informal and the promotional.

'[...]Around and in between the super bloques a carpet of slums has grown, an organism that now seems to bind the blocks together in some symbiotic relationship. These are the kind of hybrid forms that are developing in Latin American cities [...]’ — failedarchitecture.com

For those former guests and architectural buffs who lamented the demolition of the iconic Hotel Okura Tokyo, they can soon preserve a piece of it in their homes.

Hotel officials plan to sell on the Internet some of the furniture and fixtures used in the guest rooms and restaurants during the main building's 53-year history, with the proceeds going to charity. [...]

The 11-story main building, which opened in May 1962 [...], was called “a masterpiece of Japan’s modernism architecture.” — ajw.asahi.com

Hippie modernism focused not on rigorous form but rather on a kind of socially inspired bricolage. Hippie modernism has been not only misunderstood but also underestimated. Buckminster Fuller’s concept of a ‘design science revolution’ inspired the hippie bricoleurs to shoulder their generation’s emerging notion of environmental stewardship. — PLACES JOURNAL

“Let us usher in a great golden age of construction,” exhorts one of the 310 official patriotic slogans published this year. The ambition is already evident in the number of cranes that dot the skyline [...]. The most prominent structures are the 47-storey shafts of the Changjon Street apartments, an 18-tower complex completed last year in less than 12 months and nicknamed “Pyonghattan” by foreign diplomats. But other emerging skyscrapers go undiscussed and unphotographed [...]. — theguardian.com

When the 70th regular session of the General Assembly convenes on Sept. 15, it will do so in a complex of buildings that hasn’t looked so good or felt so secure in generations.

“We now have a very safe compound,” said Michael Adlerstein, [...] executive director of a seven-year, $2.15 billion renovation, known as the capital master plan, that is nearing completion. More visible than anything else is the robust yet crystalline new glass facade of the 39-story Secretariat building. — nytimes.com

Tokyo’s venerable Hotel Okura is getting a remake, starting next week.

Over the course of the past 53 years since its opening on May 20, 1962, the Okura, located in Toranomon, has earned an unsurpassed reputation both at home and abroad as a luxury hotel to represent Japan.

The hotel said in a statement that it will maintain the Japanese traditional aesthetics and the basics of the architecture style of Hotel Okura. — japantoday.com

In the mid-1960s, the De Gaulle-instigated Mission Racine to develop Languedoc-Roussillon’s tourist economy created six modernist seaside resorts from scratch, each a day’s boat ride apart – still one of the largest state-run development schemes ever.

...there was some ideological overlap between the purifying doctrines of naturism and modernism: Le Corbusier himself enjoyed airing his bits on the Cote d’Azur and shared the same teacher as Cap d’Agde’s chief architect, Jean le Couteur. — the Guardian

'His signature style helped bring Palm Springs to the international stage and his body of work is still as fresh today as when first created...' — The Desert Sun

The father of modern architecture Le Corbusier and the most influential architects of the 20th century Louis Kahn will not find place in the latest heritage conservation list of Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation (AMC).

Ahmedabad happens to be the only place in the world where Le Corbusier had designed four different buildings. Louis Kahn's IIM-A building too does not figure in the list of heritage buildings. — Times of India

The Hotel Okura, built in 1962 in time for the 1964 Olympics, is slated to be torn down in September to make way for a bigger, fancier Okura, in time for the 2020 Olympics. (The less-good, less-famous southern wing of the old Okura, added in 1973, will be allowed to stay.) [...]

There will never be this particular hush again in the middle of Tokyo. You will have to have been there to know what you will soon miss. — nytimes.com

Tokyo is known for its mix of modern and traditional architecture, but for long-term residents it is easy to feel like the concrete is winning out. [...]

The buildings done by acclaimed Tokyo-based architect Kengo Kuma are different. [...]

Kuma’s campaign to bring Japanese-ness back to architecture has had fascinating results. — qz.com

The interior of the Four Seasons restaurant, a vision of Modernist elegance with its French walnut paneling and white marble pool of bubbling water, should not be changed, New York City’s Landmarks Preservation Commission decided [...].
The decision was a setback to Aby J. Rosen, the owner of the Seagram Building, which is home to the restaurant. Mr. Rosen had proposed what he characterized as minor changes to the interior that was designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson in 1958. — nytimes.com

This modernist villa on the Côte d’Azur, designed by Irish architect Eileen Gray, has witnessed wartime shootings, murder and vandalism by Le Corbusier. Now, at last, it has been brought back to life [...]

Le Corbusier visited and, apparently outraged that a woman could have made such a significant work in a style he considered his own, assaulted it with a series of garish and ugly wall paintings, which he chose to execute completely naked. — theguardian.com

“The Landscape Architecture Legacy of Dan Kiley,” an exhibition at the Center for Architecture, shows how modern landscapes often make a better case for modernism than the architecture itself.

Over a span of 60 years, Kiley (1912-2004), a founding father of modern landscape design, worked for the best architects around, among them Eero Saarinen, I.M. Pei and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. He was fully versed in architecture’s modernist strategies and overriding focus on form and abstraction. — wsj.com