[...] a demolition application was filed for 270 Park Avenue, the current, but not for long headquarters of JPMorgan Chase. The filing is a pivotal step for the bank, which plans to replace the 1.5 million-square-foot Modernist tower with a 2.5 million square foot supertall skyscraper designed by Lord Norman Foster. — CityRealty

“We just don’t build houses like we used to.” Whether we’re criticizing an individual home or a wave of boxy buildings, it’s a common lament... It’s a statement that contains some truth, but it also misses crucial context about the material conditions, functionality, and style trends of the past. — Curbed

“Every child,” lamented Tom Wolfe in From Bauhaus to Our House of 1981, “goes to school in a building that looks like a duplicating-machine replacement-parts wholesale distribution warehouse”. Had there ever been another place on earth, he also said of Bauhaus-influenced America, “where so many people of wealth and power paid for and put up with so much architecture they detested?” — The Guardian

The weather in Hawaii is fickle, always shifting depending on the island, the time of day, and the direction of the trade winds. How to design a building in such a place? One must account for the abundant sunshine, the humidity of the air, the salt of the sea, and the damp layers of maritime fog that settle around the smoky mountain peaks. For Vladimir Ossipoff, whose brand of midcentury modernism would define Hawaiian architecture, the answer lay in simplicity. — Artsy

Zoo workers withdrew the birds from Berthold Lubetkin’s 1934 Penguin Pool after it was claimed the concrete was causing them a bacterial infection known as “bumblefoot”. His daughter Sasha said it was “terribly sad” to see her father’s design sitting unused in the zoo. “Perhaps it’s time to blow it to smithereens.” — Evening Standard

The Los Angeles Conservancy, which spearheaded the landmarking efforts, canceled plans to name the property a Historic-Cultural Monument after agreeing to a deal with owners Paul and Gigi Shepherd to “take demolition off the table.” That means buyers must be willing to relocate the home if they plan to build on the stunning hillside vista where it sits. — Curbed LA

The Tel Aviv coastline is crowded with a mishmash of skyscrapers, Ottoman-inspired villas, and four-story cubes painted a sunlight-reflecting shade of white. But in a place where stylistic jumble is the standard, one strain stands out as the defining architectural aesthetic and a beloved household name: Bauhaus. — Artsy

In the construction of the new Yugoslavia, modernist thinking and design were deployed to guide the country’s rapid urbanization and industrialization as well as to unify the ethnically, religiously, and culturally diverse population. — Places Journal

Over the last two years, the Central European University (CEU) has been subjected to verbal and thinly-veiled legislative attacks by Hungary's prime minister, Viktor Orbán. [...]

Should the university choose to relocate, it would be forced to abandon not only the country it has operated in since opening in 1991, but also its recently opened premises. — CNN

The Bailey House, one of the approximately 20 surviving Los Angeles residences from Arts & Architecture magazine’s Case Study House program is once again up for grabs.

Designated CSH No. 21, the Hollywood Hills home was built between 1956 and ’58 by Pierre Koenig for psychologist Walter Bailey and his wife Mary, whom Arts & Architecture described as a “contemporary-minded” couple with no children and an informal lifestyle. — Curbed LA

As Lake Point Tower, once the world’s tallest all-residential high-rise, celebrates its 50th anniversary this weekend, it’s an apt time to reflect on its legacy. The 70-story condominium tower, which sits just west of Navy Pier at 505 N. Lake Shore Drive, is both hero and villain, though it is more the former than the latter. — Chicago Tribune

Yet now, in our era of elegantly restrained and frequently dour minimalism, when architecture is almost always the province of the rich, it may be that Goff, with his aesthetic idiosyncrasies and affinity for middle-class Midwestern clients (schoolteachers, farmers, salesmen, small-town newspaper publishers), still has lessons to teach us, 36 years after his death. — The New York Times

On August 24, 2018, the Atlanta Fulton Central Library was unanimously nominated to the National Register of Historic Places and listed on the Georgia Register of Historic Places by the Georgia National Register Review Board. It will now be sent to the National Park Service for listing on the National Register. Fulton County spoke in opposition to the nomination. [...]

Atlanta’s Central Library is currently closed for extensive renovations. — Docomomo US

If Michigan isn’t the first place that comes to mind when considering [the Modern era] — unlike, say, Germany or France in the 1920s — it should be. The presence of Ford in the city and Booth in the country was enough to make Michigan ground zero for the Modernist experiment [...] making the state home to perhaps the most diverse and best-preserved collection of early Modernist experiments in the world. — The New York Times