"People know Mosul's Old City by its riverfront - it has some of the city's most important historic features," Fethi added, referring to the city's old wall, the citadel, palaces and other heritage sites along the Tigris' west bank.

"It [the council] should aim to preserve Mosul's heritage rather than turn [it] into another Dubai ... an absolute anathema to what should be done." — Al Jazeera

[...] iPhoto confused a human friend of mine – I’ll call him Mike – with a building called the Great Mosque of Cordoba. [...]

Rather than viewing this as a failure, I realized I had found a new insight: Just as people’s faces have features that can be recognized by algorithms, so do buildings. That began my effort to perform facial recognition on buildings – or, more formally, “architectural biometrics.” Buildings, like people, may just have biometric identities too. — The Conversation

To many longtime residents, the cookie-cutter constructions stripped Venice of its distinctive architectural character, turning parts of the neighborhood into uniform eyesores.

“Over the last year or two specifically, we’re seeing more chances being taken and more unique developments going up,” Lackey said. “This wave of architecture is great for Venice, which has always been a hub of individuality.” — Los Angeles Times

The idea, besides removing as many vestiges of Communist rule as possible, is to create a concrete expression of the nationalism [Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orban's] governing party espouses. [...]

“These projects, when lumped together, probably constitute the biggest such concentrated architectural project in Budapest in 100 years,” [...]

“He is trying to take the existing city and put it back to the shape it had before 1944...The park is a victim of this whole political machinery.” — nytimes.com

With the issues of serving openly in the military and same-sex marriage now largely resolved, the fight for all-gender restrooms has emerged as the latest civil rights issue in the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (L.G.B.T.) community — particularly the “T” part.

Schools and universities (...), museums (...), restaurants (...) and even the White House (...) are recasting the traditional men’s/women’s room, resulting in a dizzying range of (often creative) signage and vocabulary. — the New York Times

Decimated by manufacturing losses, some smaller cities are turning for help to an unlikely group of people: typeface designers. Can new fonts really breathe life into the postindustrial city? [...]

Type has a lot of effect on the atmosphere of a place, he says, calling it “the voice of the city”: “I think cities that don’t have this very dynamic energy, they don’t feel the need to change their identity.” — theguardian.com

Alexandre Gady, conservationist, historian of French architecture and professor of modern architecture at the Sorbonne, argues that changing or “renewing” Paris diverts from its real need to look outwards. Paris, he says, is a “finished” city that does not need improving or anything more doing to it. “It’s not that we should be doing this or that – we should not be doing anything in central Paris ... any plan is a diversion from the need of the city to grow outwards,” [...] — theguardian.com

Cyprus took an allegorical approach with their 2014 Venice Biennale pavilion, titled the "Anatomy of the Wallpaper". Curated by architects Michael Hadjistyllis and Stefanos Roimpas, the Wallpaper symbolizes the reconstruction of the island's complex national identity that has been affected by outside influences throughout its history. To convey Cyprus' multi-layered history, the pavilion will be covered in the timeless and appropriate medium of collages. — bustler.net

In the Korean Peninsula's response to the 2014 Venice Biennale theme of rediscovering national identity through architecture, the "Crow's Eye View" pavilion explores the divided state of North and South Korea, and extends that discussion to the global state of architecture itself. The multi-themed pavilion uses architecture as a key to discovering new narratives of the peninsula's complex past, present, and future in an architectural and social perspective. — bustler.net