Our next featured pavilion for the fast-approaching 2014 Venice Biennale hails from Down Under in New Zealand, who will be participating in the keystone event for the first time. Curated by award-winning Auckland architect David Mitchell, the New Zealand exhibition is titled "Last, Loneliest, Loveliest" from Rudyard Kipling's The Song of the Cities poem. — bustler.net

After success in Oslo and Tokyo, the Norwegian Icons: Important Norwegian Design exhibition is ready to make its U.S. debut in New York's Openhouse Gallery starting May 23.

Highlighting Norway's contribution to mid-century Scandinavian design, the selling exhibition will showcase over 500 high-end designer objects created by 44 Norwegian designers between 1940-1975. — bustler.net

The most striking Bauhaus designs, such as Marcel Breuer's tubular steel chair or the Wagenfeld table lamp, have been endlessly copied and mass produced.

But the architecture of the design school has left a more complicated legacy in Germany.

[...] reopens two of the art school's most significant houses on Friday, almost 70 years after they were bombed, the move is sure to reignite the old debate about what to do with historic buildings damaged during the second world war. — theguardian.com

The new commission for cultural heritage protection, an adviser to the Czech National Heritage Institute (NPÚ) director, has recommended that the state start protecting relatively young works of architecture from the second half of the 20th century [...]

“Unlike the architecture of the interwar Czechoslovakia, the post-war architecture has been omitted by protection programs so far, also because its valuable pieces are more difficult to distinguish." — praguepost.com

The White House may be the centre of great power, but it is not in itself that big or that shouty. It’s just a nice, white house, rather elegant, with a fine sweeping drive, but utterly dwarfed by the US Treasury next door – a fact that is, in itself, a bit of a clue to the relative significance of wealth in American society. [...]

If the White House gleams simply because of the influence of the man inside it, the rest of the Washington complex is designed to make its case for significance. — telegraph.co.uk

New York’s United Nations Headquarters, completed in 1952, pioneered the global workplace. Now nearing the end of a $2.1 billion makeover, it’s again in the vanguard. [...]

It might have been easier -- and possibly cheaper -- to tear the whole structure down and start from scratch. However, for an organization for which precedent and symbolism govern every handshake, the historical meaning of the UN’s architecture still resonates. — bloomberg.com

The Buffalo Planning Board will be reviewing plans to construct 48 apartments in eight new buildings next week. The complex at 270 Niagara Street sits in the shadow of City Hall. It currently contains 472 units on 9.5 acres and was completed in 1972. — Buffalo Rising

When the Pepsi Headquarters was built in 1960, the 13-story building at the corner of Park Avenue and 59th Street exemplified the International Style in America. Moreover, it pushed the limits of what was technically possible; its nine-feet-high by thirteen-feet-long glass panes were the largest that could be created and only a half-inch thick. To avoid using heavy mullions or frames the glass was cushioned by neoprene glazing strips, allowing an almost completely flush exterior surface. — blogs.smithsonianmag.com

Our way of life is still based in twentieth-century ideas, specifically a modernist philosophy that assumes we can use science and technology to conquer nature. So we try to isolate ourselves from nature; our cities are completely segregated from the environment. [...] That kind of modernist thinking has reached its limit. — artforum.com

Modern homes, both real and fake, as featured in the movies. — vimeo.com