• Australia issues final draft of an urban design protocol for cities to encourage world-class urban design.
• A British architect who set out to explore American suburbia found the good, the bad, and the ugly.
• Maki and FXFOWLE dust off the drawing board for U.N. tower: "It takes a long time for things to happen suddenly."
• Arieff offers some fine examples of "affordable housing that doesn't scream 'affordable'" with projects "that express hope and possibility."
• Safdie celebrates "theatre of the public realm" in Kansas City.
• Controversy continues re: revamp of Friedberg's 1974 Peavey Plaza in Minneapolis; critics claim the plan "fails to preserve enough of the original."
• The public gets its first look at six shortlisted designs for Aberdeen's controversial City Gardens Project (lots of pix, but designers remain anonymous).
• NYC's High Line "inspires ideas for new life for old viaduct blighting Philly's 'eraserhood.'"
• North American winners of Holcim Awards competition are "people-focused designs" (great presentations).
• Weekend diversions:
• Ruminating about Rem and "OMA/Progress" at the Barbican: Merrick finds the "clash" between the exhibition and the spaces instructive: "this utopian structure, and the Dutchman's ideas, speak different architectural languages - the former more or less dead, the latter oscillating between insight and incoherence."
• Pallister opines that the show is "noisy and invigorating, but cutting through the cacophony is a challenge," and "perhaps unwittingly, reveals a lot about our current state of modernity."
• Q&A with Rotor's Gielen re: the curatorial process behind a portrait of one of the most prolific and influential architectural firms in the world (a.k.a. OMA).
• Rykwert offers a post-mortem on Postmodernism: "Now that we are in No-Mo, what does Po-Mo really look like? A bit bedraggled, truth be told."
• The curator of Cooper-Hewitt's "Design with the Other 90%: Cities" offers an in-depth assessment of her research to find so many examples of hybrid solutions that make the planet's rapidly growing cities "more just and humane."
• Lange and Lamster munch the Skyscraper Museum's "Supertall!": the "most creative new towers all seem to fall into the curvy pylon genre."
• Kevin Roche now takes center stage at MCNY in a show that makes a case that he is "the quintessential architect of the post-industrial age."
• If "faith in Japan's model for urban planning and construction has been deeply shaken," architects "might find some inspiration" in the Metabolism show in Tokyo.
• "Detroit Revealed" at the Detroit Institute of Arts "elegantly sidesteps the familiar clichés of demise, degradation and so-called Ruin Porn."
• In Los Angeles, over,under's "Projections" asks "pointed questions about the future of urban design in our ever digitally mediated world."
• "The Pruitt-Igoe Myth" attempts to "strip away the layers of a narrative so familiar that even the film makers believed when they first set out to make their documentary."
• Q&A with John Portman on the eve of the premiere of a new documentary: Why do you design so theatrically? "Anyone can build a building and put rooms in it. But we should put human beings at the head of our thought process."
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