Both the two- and three-story buildings, quakeproof and made from freight containers, were designed by architect Shigeru Ban. The second and third floors have balconies. Units are built in a staggered fashion to curb noise disturbance. — japantimes.co.jp

One of our favorite architectural design competitions has just announced the winning entries of its 2011 edition: the Zombie Safe House Competition. Sure, laugh about it, but once the postapocalyptic days are upon us and roaming hordes of the undead come for your guts, the term "sustainable design" takes on a whole new meaning. — bustler.net

On Wednesday Lord Foster announced a plan so big that even Burnham would have been impressed. The Thames Hub, a £50bn project devised by architects Foster and Partners, planners and builders Halcrow and Volterra, a consultancy group of British economists, aims to revolutionise Britain's often creaking and largely inadequate national transport and energy infrastructure. — guardian.co.uk

What little new housing that's being built in this country right now is being closely geared to the ways the American economy -- and its society -- are changing. Fewer sprawling suburbs. More urban living.

And in Kansas City, Mo., a nod to demographics. Developers there are building homes that cater to a very specific changing family dynamic. — marketplace.publicradio.org

Walker showed his idea around. The response was near freezing.

"So far, people don't like them," he says. "They say, 'I want something I recognize.'

"The baby boomers are coming of age, and I always imagined that they were more design-minded than they turned out to be."

Or they just haven't caught up to Gordon Walker. — seattletimes.nwsource.com

When I mention that architecture seems to be an afterthought in many new houses, Brady interjects: "If at all." It's a serious point because, she says, many homes are simply constructed off-the-shelf from manuals; even the once ubiquitous term "architect designed" has been ditched. — Guardian

Jordan Parnass Digital Architecture’s reorganisation of a 44 sq m studio apartment in New York in 2009 shows how architects in the Big Apple are designing better, smaller homes. The practice transformed an untidy, student-style pad in Manhattan’s East Village into “a live/work sculpture for a grown up” for its owner, Michael Pozner, head of retail development at American Apparel. — ft.com

The accelerating decline of suburban neighborhoods from Florida to California suggests that the contradictions of the system are finally catching up with it. The Great Recession is challenging not only the economics of homebuilding but also the essence of the suburban dream. Residential construction has slowed dramatically, and yet there remains a massive oversupply of single-family houses, especially on large lots. — places.designobserver.com

The rise of housing followed the rise of a prosperous middle class driven by the Industrial Revolution, an event that helped to reshape architecture from the 18th century until now. — guardian.co.uk

Quebec tent designer Maurice Monette thinks he has the solution to Haiti's housing crisis in his prototype home of foam and aluminum dubbed The Human — vancouversun.com

If you believe the adage about real estate -- that bit about the three most important things being location, location, location -- then one would think there are few places worse to own a home than the Gaza strip. [...] And yet, home prices are up sharply. — marketplace.publicradio.org

Gapyong Space Invader is a recent competition win for a housing project in Gapyong, northeast of Seoul, South Korea, by Dutch NL Architects in collaboration with Yo2, who had also developed the master plan, and MSA (Marina Stankovic and Tobias Jortzick), CAT (Kazuhiro Kojima), Unsangdong (Joon Gyo Jang), and FOA (Alejandro Zaera-Polo). — bustler.net

New home sales rose 11 percent in March from February to a seasonally adjusted rate of 300,000 homes. It was the first monthly increase since December. — Alex Veiga, Forbes

Earlier this year, a UVA architecture program took top prize in an international housing competition sponsored by ARCHIVE (Architecture for Health in Vulnerable Environments). — c-ville.com