"I think that the press has been too fast to reduce the conversation to heroes and villains and martyrs, and to suggest that what MoMA is doing is necessarily bad. We want to get more information out. We want to share the problem with others and invite them to really take a hard look" - Elizabeth Diller — LA Times

The Working Group plan puts forward a number of recommendations that are worth pursuing under any financial model. However, we believe that the contingencies and risks inherent in the proposals are too great to supplant the need for new revenue sources. Regrettably, tuition remains the only realistic source of new revenue in the near future. — Richard S. Lincer, chair of The Cooper Union Board of Trustees

[Diller] had great respect for the Folk Art Museum, calling it a “bespoke” design tailored to the needs of the museum. She went through several scenarios on how to integrate the museum in the expanded footprint. [...]

Adapting the Folk Art Museum building, however, would basically compromise the building’s interior beyond recognition. [...]

The architects would have had to destroy the Folk Art Museum building in order to save it. — Architect Magazing

"It looks like a prison to be honest with you," said Lynda Johnson, an assistant professor at the Fashion Institute of Technology and editor and founder of KidStyleSource.com who has owned a townhouse on St. Nicholas Place for 20 years and is a member of the Hamilton Heights Homeowners Association.

Some feel the design does not fit into the context of the nearby Hamilton Heights-Sugar Hill Historic District, which is filled with Beaux Arts and Queen Anne-style 19th-century row houses. — dnainfo.com

In the wake of the controversial demolition of Bertrand Goldberg’s Prentice Women’s Hospital, Northwestern University has moved forward with the process for selecting an architecture firm to design the building's replacement. Firms that protested the demolition, however, have been excluded from consideration for designing the building's replacement—and may be blacklisted from other projects at Northwestern. — architectmagazine.com

Zaha Hadid, the world’s best-known female architect, is none too pleased with critics like Jon Stewart, who have mocked her Al Wakrah Stadium—designed with AECOM for the 2022 World Cup in Qatar—and likened her to the “Georgia O’Keeffe of things you can walk inside.”

“It’s really embarrassing that they come up with nonsense like this,” Hadid tells TIME exclusively. “What are they saying? Everything with a hole in it is a vagina? That’s ridiculous.” — newsfeed.time.com

New tumblr blog that looks at "outrageously gender-imbalanced lecture series, etc." send observed inequalities to feministwall at gmail dot com. — feministwall.tumblr.com

After passing to the widow of Barragán’s business partner, it was sold in 1994 to a wealthy Swiss couple, Rolf Fehlbaum, chairman of Vitra, the international furniture company and design museum, and the woman who was to become his wife, Federica Zanco, an architectural scholar. In the years since, Ms. Zanco has devoted her life to promoting Barragán’s legacy. But her determination to keep the archive at Vitra headquarters near Basel has rankled many in Mexico... — nytimes.com

Many top designers whom the general public may believe to be architects are, in technical terms, not allowed to use the terminology. And this isn’t raising ire just in America. A British architecture publication was instructed last year to stop calling Renzo Piano and Daniel Libeskind architects since they aren't officially registered as such in that country. — fastcodesign.com

Six months after the Japanese government approved Hadid’s proposals, the country’s parliament has signalled a reverse in its support.

Hakubun Shimomura, the minister in charge of education, sports and science, said that the New National Stadium would cost 300 billion yen (£1.8 billion) to build and that was “too massive a budget”.

The design of the 80,000-seat stadium will be preserved but Mr Shimomura said: “We need to rethink this and scale it down.” — standard.co.uk

Is it necessary to poll hundreds of coffee drinkers to determine that round tables "protect self-esteem for those...flying solo"? Or could an architect have come to the same determination by believing their impression that round tables work better in some environments than square tables, be it by observing patrons at a local cafe or in a public park, or by choosing a round table over a square one themselves? — archidose.blogspot.com

Modern architecture, despite breaking with the past stylistically, nonetheless maintains this image of the gifted architect as a lone autonomous genius who overcomes gravity and prevails over his client [...]

Rather than an inner activity done in solitude, it has been found that people often discover their thoughts and ideas through interactions with others [...]

The centrality of collaboration in architecture is often overlooked in a culture celebrating and branding “starchitects.” — Lilith

Creativity was now the most valuable quality of all, ran Florida’s argument, “the decisive source of competitive advantage.” This made creative people into society’s “dominant class” — and companies that wished to harness their power would need to follow them wherever they went...

Every element of Florida’s argument infuriated our future correspondent. Was he suggesting planned bohemias? Built by governments? To attract businesses? — salon.com

Japanese architect Fumihiko Maki has gathered a throng of designers including Toyo Ito, Sou Fujimoto, Kengo Kuma and Riken Yamamoto to oppose the design of Zaha Hadid's 2020 Olympic Stadium in Tokyo.

Maki, who was awarded the Pritzker Prize in 1993, has organised a symposium where Japanese architects will protest against the scale of the proposed 80,000-seat stadium, which is set to become the main sporting venue for the 2020 Olympic and Paralympic games. — Dezeen

Art Critique Of Gramsci Monument: A Work in Public Space by Thomas Hirschhorn at Forest Houses, the Bronx, New York. — newcriterion.com