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Christine Bjerke: Hyper Home: The digitalization of domesticity is changing and challenging the physical framework of the home... Constant flows of data and information being introduced into the private sphere questions how we navigate within our homes as well as the spaces beyond the private realm. -- The FX Beauties Club

Snøhetta responds to Times Square pedestrian incident: ...22 people were injured and one was killed. However, things could have been much worse...The security bollards in the Snøhetta-designed pedestrian plaza held strong and stopped the driver...Craig Dykers...released the following statement:- The Architect's Newspaper

Amanda Baillieu: Walking in the footsteps of Jane Jacobs: Data is a useful tool but urban designers mustn’t overlook the importance of human intuition: ...while a new generation of urbanists prefer using data to solve urban problems, the human reasoning about cities that she promoted is still our best guide...“trust what you see”.- BD/Building Design (UK)

David Rudlin: It's time to reconcile architects and urbanists: A false and unhelpful division has arisen between the two disciplines: I am keen to widen this debate. Urbanism is not a stylistic choice...an architect who understands urbanism will work with it and test its limits rather than seeing it as a set of constraining rules to be challenged. -- Academy of Urbanism; Urbed- BD/Building Design (UK)

Aaron Betsky: Neo-Morphism and Woke Architecture: How architecture can be the change we’ve been waiting for: If there is one dichotomy...it is the push and pull between those who are pursuing social agendas with little interest in form or image and those who are delighting in their ability to invent shapes and colors that shock and amuse. This tension is renewing the old fight between those who think of architecture as a social and engineering project and those who think of it as an aesthetic one.- Architect Magazine

Aaron Betsky: The Return of the Unreal: The California College of the Arts gets comfortingly surreal: ...students today are drawn to the weird and, at best, haunting juxtapositions of form and image...The designs’ oddness was a call for otherness, difference, and...the possibilities of architecture within - but at the edges of - convention...Even if not all the results are up to par, the discussion they all engendered was of the highest order. [images]- Architect Magazine

Inside the Rise of Emotional Design: Brought on by isolation fatigue in the cyber age, architects and designers are increasingly seeking to imbue spaces with deeper sensory resonance. -- Luis Barragán; Ma Yangsong/MAD Architects; Hervé Descottes/L’Observatoire International; Darrel Long/Hirsch Bedner Associates (HBA); Nick Troubetzkoy- Architectural Digest

Esther Sperber: You Can’t Do It Alone - Architecture, Equity And Joint Creativity: Publicly rewarding collaborative work is new to the field of architecture: ...Denise Scott Brown is a good example of why denying the creative power of collaboration is wrong and unjust...Women have long suffered from the myth of the lone creative genius...architecture has always been a joint process. -- Studio ST Architects- Huffington Post

Ian Volner: Inside the Museum of the American Revolution: Robert A.M. Stern's attempt to "transcend the moment": ...Philadelphia project...tries to circle the square between the Georgian style...in the surrounding Independence National Historical Park...and a more contemporary aesthetic...museum is measurably less historicist than originally planned...but it is nonetheless thoroughly retardataire in spirit. -- Alexander Lamis [images]- Architect Magazine

Witold Rybczynski: The Layers of the Past: Ian Volner’s review of Robert A. M. Stern’s Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia is more even-handed than Inga Saffron’s mean-spirited screed...But both critics miss an important aspect...Stern’s museum...is really a 21st-century interpretation of an early 20th-century take on American Federal...the dialogue with the many pasts of Philadelphia is interesting and bears mention. -- Verus T. Ritter; Howell L. Shay (1934)- WitoldRybczynski.com

Oliver Wainwright: Le Havre, a short break built on concrete chic: [It] is celebrating its 500th anniversary, but its architectural gems are modern masterpieces built from the ashes of war - and now a world heritage site: Few cities make you want to stroke their walls, but [here] it’s hard to resist caressing the concrete...stands as a hymn to the mid 20th-century faith in modular construction and prefabrication. -- Auguste Perret; Oscar Niemeyer; Jean Nouvel [images]- Guardian (UK)

Battle of Diller Island Goes Another Round, With a Pier 55 Appeal: ...the long-planned $200 million performing arts center...is not dead yet... Army Corps of Engineers...filed an appeal [with] the Hudson River Park Trust...Diller said he had not abandoned...but felt “ambivalent” about the project...discouraging to be involved in a project that is “completely in the public’s interest” but has been waylaid by...a small group of critics. -- Heatherwick Studio- New York Times

Rowan Moore: A garden bridge that works: how Seoul succeeded where London failed: ...ambitious Skygarden revives a disused elevated 1970s highway: ...the London project has spent many years not happening, the Seoul one has taken two years...promises to be among the more convincing of all the many High Line wannabes in the world...It could be a garden bridge that works. -- Winy Maas/MVRDV [images]- Observer (UK)

MVRDV's elevated Skygarden opens on former highway in Seoul: ...983-meter-long park...built on a former inner city highway...will include 24,000 plants...new bridges and stairs connect the viaduct with hotels, shops and gardens at the heart of the city. -- Ben Kuipers; DMP [images]- designboom

Jenna McKnight: Big-top tents inform building for America's first circus degree programme: ...in Portland, Maine, the Circus Conservatory building...will be the main tenant on a peninsula slated for development...a white, diaphanous building...influenced by traditional circus facilities... -- Höweler + Yoon Architecture; OFIS Arhitekti [images]- Dezeen

For Urban Preservationists, Six Big Saves: The National Trust for Historic Preservation’s new list of “America’s 11 Most Endangered Historic Places" looks back at 30 years of going to bat for buildings in need...focus on preservation wins that survived urban renewal: Here’s a murderer’s row of city sites, and the battles that saved them.- CityLab (formerly The Atlantic Cities)

From High Style to Humble: Surveying America’s Built Environment: Historic American Buildings Survey...over the past 80 plus years. The Library of Congress started digitizing the survey’s records...providing public access on its website...HABS...began in 1933 as part of [FDR's] New Deal. Architect Charles Peterson...proposed that the government employ 1,000 out-of-work architects, partly to support recovery from the Great Depression, but also to record America’s architectural heritage.- Library of Congress

Daniel M. Millette: The State of Indigenous Architecture in Canada: RAIC International Indigenous Architecture and Design Symposium, Ottawa on May 27...brings together some of the architects practicing within the Indigenous landscape...I have observed a clear and accelerating shift toward...the “ taking back” of community planning and architectural design... [part of 2017 RAIC/OAA Festival of Architecture, May 24-27]- Canadian Architect

Amazing building made from 1.5 million plastic bottles withstands fires and earthquakes:...EcoARK in Taipei, Taiwan...nine-story $3 million pavilion...Constructed for use as an exhibition hall during the 2010 Taipei International Flora Expo, [it] continues to spread its message of sustainability... -- Arthur Huang/Miniwiz [images]- Inhabitat

ANN feature: Vladimir Belogolovsky: One-on-One: "I wanted to be in the middle of things": Interview with Vito Acconci: In this never-before published Q&A from 2015, the late Acconci revealed his highly personal way of imagining his architecture as a pursuit of creating a total work of art that is at once poetry and architecture.- ArchNewsNow.com