Young Frank sees creative possibilities everywhere, and likes to use anything he can get his hands on—macaroni, old boxes, spoons, and sometimes even his dog, Eddie—to create things like chairs out of toilet paper rolls and twisting skyscrapers made up of his grandfather’s books. But Old Frank is skeptical; he doesn’t think that’s how REAL architects make things. — Inside/Out

As a society slowly urbanizes over time, its psychology and culture change, too... If American culture and psychology grew more individualistic as the country urbanized, wouldn't that transformation be clear in the words from American books (and the concepts that lie behind them)? — The Atlantic Cities

Great architects build structures that can make us feel enclosed, liberated or suspended. They lead us through space, make us slow down, speed up or stop to contemplate. Great writers, in devising their literary structures, do exactly the same.

So what happens when we ask writers to try their hand at architecture? — New York Times

When I first heard of Paju Bookcity, I imagined a bibliophilic paradise of human-scaled buildings with legible facades nestled side-by-side like volumes on a shelf. When I traveled to the real Paju Bookcity, I found an industrial estate created by companies related to all aspects of book manufacturing, sited north of Seoul in the marshes near the Demilitarized Zone. But if Bookcity is not the fairy tale I envisioned, it is a kind of Cinderella story: this is the industrial park remade. — Places Journal

Even the smallest architectural design proposes to make an intervention in the known world, it dares to change things as they are, and to venture how they might be. It envisions a possible future, sometimes a fantastic one, and then sets out to make it manifest. If that’s not a rich subject for children’s books, I don’t know what is. But such books should also make us question what we want architecture and architects to be. Not just in fairy tales, but in real life. — Places Journal

A $300 million renovation of the New York Public Library’s ornate marble palace in midtown Manhattan will start by evicting 1.2 million books.

The plan, unveiled today and overseen by the London firm of Foster & Partners, keeps more books onsite than had been suggested in earlier proposals. Books will be stored in space under Bryant Park and in a Princeton, New Jersey, facility. — bloomberg.com

The budding industrial designer also gave his top picks from the fair, which unsurprisingly all feature bright swaths of primary colors: a Charlotte Perriand bookshelf from Galerie Downtown accented with yellow squares; a Pierre Guariche chair from Demisch Danant, a Riteveld chair from Galerie Vivid; and a desk from Galleria Rossella Colombari by Gio Ponti, whom he was so delighted to have discovered: “He tried to make the office fun!” — blogs.artinfo.com

A literal advertisement for reading: MVRDV completes Book Mountain and Library Quarter Spijkenisse. — mvrdv.nl

University presses will endure as long as they are in a position to offer significant value to academic authors and their readers, and as long as they have the support of their home institutions. In the present and near future, we will see new models for the university press including funded open access models, collaborative publishing models, and global partnerships to develop and disseminate high quality scholarship worldwide. — chronicle.com