[Calatrava's] at work in the new transit station at the World Trade Center in New York, but that project is massively over budget and behind schedule and it's highlighted some of Calatrava's legal troubles back in Spain. [...]

The architect was supposed to be in Spain this week testifying as a suspect in a fraud case. Prosecutors say he got 3.6 million dollars to design yet another Spanish convention center that was never built, but Calatrava didn't show up for his court date. — npr.org

Big real estate projects sometimes go through name changes, but the announcement August 4th that the Atlantic Yards mega-development near downtown Brooklyn, which has faced steady controversy since it emerged in 2003, would become Pacific Park Brooklyn, was an unusual, strategic and dubious adjustment. — nextcity.org

From the horizon, the new Botín contemporary art center hovers over Santander’s agate-colored bay like a fleet of spaceships poised for a close encounter. [...]

The $106 million center — designed by Renzo Piano, the Italian architect, to jut over the bay — is the latest private museum emerging in Europe that matches star architects and dramatic designs with billionaires who have huge ambitions and brands to promote. — nytimes.com

Artist and animator Sam Grinberg revisits the fight over the future of the American Folk Art Museum. — ny.curbed.com

Regardless, there are two paths forward. One is to scrap the project and start over with an open public competition, which would cost around $17 million, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The other is to push forward with the existing plan to finalize the memorial design and begin breaking ground.

We favor the latter. [...] And the current design is nowhere near a “monstrosity,” as some have called it; it is a novel take on memorialization [...]. — washingtonpost.com

The march of London's skyscrapers looks set to continue unchecked after the UN watchdog charged with protecting sites of international importance delayed a move to place parliament – which is being obscured by a rash of new towers – on its endangered heritage list.

Unesco was due to put Westminster on its List of World Heritage in Danger when it met recently in Doha, Qatar. — theguardian.com

Witold Rybczynski, the architect and emeritus professor of urbanism at the University of Pennsylvania, complained recently about “starchitects” who often work in cities they are unfamiliar with, creating buildings that are out of sync with their surroundings. In an interview, he argued in favor of local architectural talent, or “locatecture.”

Are superstar architects ruining city skylines? — NY Times

Last month, the Board of Architectural Review voted 4-2 to give preliminary approval to the Spaulding Paolozzi Center design by Portland, Ore., architect Brad Cloepfil. The vote marked the second level of approval in the city's three-step review. [...]

This week, the Historic Charleston Foundation, the Preservation Society and the Charlestowne and Historic Ansonborough neighborhood associations took their fight to another venue: Charleston County's Court of Common Pleas. — postandcourier.com

Homeowners who "pretend" to care about architecture are "nimbies in disguise" who in reality want to block any development in their local area, Boris Johnson has said.

In a scathing assessment, the Mayor of London said homeowners are dishonestly claiming they care about new homes being affordable or well-designed, in fact they simply oppose new developments entirely.

Mr Johnson has promised to increase house-building in the capital, and wants to see 45,000 new homes by 2018. — telegraph.co.uk

[...] tech guru and multimillionaire Tim Draper has put forth a plan which will solve the ills of the state by – wait for it – splitting it into six smaller states! This “Six Californias” plan [...], as you might expect, divides the state into six smaller chunks, maintaining county lines. [...]

But there’s another reason to oppose the plan that few people are talking about: it would do damage to the state’s transportation systems, especially mass transit. — thisbigcity.net

City boosters in this Nordic capital dream of a Guggenheim museum of Finnish wood rising near the Baltic Sea and one day drawing millions of tourists and cruise passengers. But the huge costs of the proposed development are stirring a backlash here against an institution that is ordinarily accustomed to eager suitors. — nytimes.com

Zaha Hadid Architects has admitted it has made changes to its design for the stadium that will be the centrepiece of the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo.

The firm has faced hostility in Japan with critics complaining that the proposed 80,000-seat stadium is too big, too costly and clashes with Tokyo’s urban planning.

At the weekend, 500 protestors marched around the existing National Stadium to demonstrate over plans to replace it with Hadid’s proposal [...]. — bdonline.co.uk

On Thursday, Mayor Rahm Emanuel belatedly jumped into the fray after a public campaign against the sign on Chicago's second-tallest building spearheaded by the Chicago Tribune’s Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic Blair Kamin.

“Mayor Emanuel believes this is an architecturally tasteful building scarred by an architecturally tasteless sign,” Kelley Quinn, the mayor’s newly-appointed communications director, said in an emailed statement. — politics.suntimes.com

Late last week, Chilean police arrived at Santiago’s Centro Cultural Gabriela Mistral and removed a white bin of gray ash — allegedly all that remained of $500 million worth of student debt notes.

In the video, which went viral last week in Chile, Papas Fritas confessed he had recently stolen the documents from the for-profit Universidad del Mar. Then he set them ablaze in a defiant, brazen act of art. — washingtonpost.com