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ANN feature: Norman Weinstein: Book Review: "The Work of MacKay-Lyons Sweetapple: Economy as Ethic": Transforming the local and commonplace into the global and rare: Robert McCarter (with a little help from his friends) crafts a majestic survey long overdue.- ArchNewsNow.com

Diana Budds: Luxury Developments Are Creating Cities In Cities. That’s Not A Good Thing: Waterline Square...on Manhattan’s West Side, ups the ante for residential perks: ...developments like this are exacerbating class divides...One Manhattan Square...on the Lower East Side...room to breathe is the ultimate perk...and it’s available for purchase. -- Kohn Pedersen Fox (KPF); Richard Meier; Rafael Viñoly; Rockwell Group; West 8 [images]- Fast Company / Co.Design

Olympics Architect Wants to Bring Wood Back to Tokyo's Concrete Jungle: Kengo Kuma wants to restore woods...lost half a century ago in the blitz to build highways, bullet trains and skyscrapers...The government...is offering subsidies to builders of wooden public constructions...The stadium is not without issues. Activist group...called for an investigation into the use of plywood possibly originating from Malaysian forests... [images]- Bloomberg News

Jared Green: Are Modernist Landscapes Worth Saving? For lovers of Modernism, the answer is always yes. But, in reality...many will need to better respond to contemporary expectations...Many are...intrinsically linked with the mistakes of urban renewal...they also came of out stated good intentions... -- Brad McKee/Landscape Architecture Magazine; Elizabeth Meyer; Lawrence Halprin; Jan Gehl,; Oscar Niemeyer; Lucio Costa; I.M. Pei; Dan Kiley; Gary Hilderbrand/Reed Hilderbrand; Kallmann McKinnell & Knowles; Campbell, Aldrich & Nulty; Sasaski Associates; The Cultural Landscape Foundation [images]- The Dirt/American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA)

Brentin Mock: Behind the Black Architectural Resistance: In the early 1970s, Sharon Sutton got an Ivy League education at Columbia University - spurred by insurgency - that helped her become a leading African-American architect today. This story is captured in "When Ivory Towers Were Black: A Story About Race in America’s Cities and Universities" by Sutton..."The capacity of young people to bring about change - that’s the message..."- CityLab (formerly The Atlantic Cities)

"The Monster Builder" explores architecture and conflict at SCR: Not since Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal collided in Ayn Rand's “The Fountainhead” back in 1949 has the subject of architectural design been featured so prominently...In Act II, however, things get out of hand, and Amy Freed's creations vacillate between sci-fi and farce, toying with the Faustian legend and suggesting historical improbability. -- South Coast Repertory, Costa Mesa, CA. thru June 4- Los Angeles Times

Christopher Hawthorne: SCI-Arc show cleverly tweaks the myth of the all-powerful - and typically male - hero architect: “The Duck and the Document: True Stories of Postmodern Procedure"...definitely not a SCI-Arc kind of show...On the surface, [it] is a modestly scaled and deeply photogenic exhibition about the physical decay of the landmarks of Late Modern and postmodern architecture...And full of melancholy... -- Sylvia Lavin; Sarah Hearne; Erin Besler- Los Angeles Times

Craig Hodgetts reviews Sylvia Lavin’s “The Duck and the Document: True Stories of Postmodern Procedures” at SCI-Arc: Connecting the dots with intellect, passion, and forensic precision...She plays Lazarus to a fault, raising tired old post-modern architecture from the dead...and breathing new life into the age-old contest between meaning and symbolism...A provocative and thoughtful peek behind the masks of those masters tells us a lot about ourselves... -- Hodgetts + Fung; Sarah Hearne; Besler & Sons [images]- The Architect's Newspaper

Mimi Zeiger: Sylvia Lavin Rethinks Postmodernism at SCI-Arc: "The Duck and the Document" revolves around the beguiling question: Does it quack? The gallery is filled with actual building fragments and reproduced construction correspondence...A drawing-room comedy full of historical innuendo and half-whispered asides...inspires moments of delight and recognition. But the old PoMo baggage dies hard. -- Sarah Hearne; Besler & Sons [images]- Architect Magazine

Oliver Wainwright: Designers on acid: the tripping Californians who paved the way to our touchscreen world: Ever wondered why email, trash cans, Google Docs and desktops look the way they do? The answer lies in 1960s hippie culture and LSD-taking creatives: London Design Museum’s..."California: Designing Freedom"...aims to shine a kaleidoscopic spotlight on the cross fertilisation of counterculture and tech culture on America’s “left coast” over the last 50 years. thru October 15 [images]- Guardian (UK)

John Hill: Caracas's "Living Ruin": El Helicoide de la Roca Tarpeya, a spiraling mall designed by Venezuelan architect Jorge Romero Gutiérrez in the late 1950s, is the subject of an exhibition ["El Helicoide: From Mall to Prison"] and forthcoming book ["El Helicoide's Downward Spiral"] that trace its evolution into a current-day prison. Center for Architecture, NYC thru July 13 -- Celeste Olalquiaga [images]- World-Architects.com

John King: SF 1st stop for exhibition of Lawrence Halprin photos: “The Landscape Architecture of Lawrence Halprin”...The Palace of Fine Arts setting is appropriate - it is downhill from one of [his] final major projects, the tumbling spill of lawns and waterways that enfolds George Lucas’ Letterman Digital Arts Center on the east edge of the Presidio. -- Charles Birnbaum/The Cultural Landscape Foundation (TCLF) [images]- San Francisco Chronicle

“Spaces without drama or surface is an illusion, but so is depth” at Chicago’s Graham Foundation: Each contribution...implies its own narrative, separate from the other pieces. Yet, as a whole, the entire show has a clarity that resonates across the disparate objects and installations...a delight for the academic, as well as those simply interested in beautiful images and objects. thru July 1 -- Ruth Estévez; Wonne Ickx; LIGA, Space for Architecture [images]- The Architect's Newspaper

"Constructing Culture, Hong Kong's West Kowloon Cultural District": a closer look at the emerging Cultural District looking at its role as both a supporter of traditional culture and a pioneer in contemporary art and innovation...buildings by leading international architects; Aedes Architecture Forum, Berlin, May 26 - July 13- Aedes Architecture Forum/Aedes Architekturforum (Berlin)

The Ultimate List of Wonderfully Specific Museums: Delightfully singular collections, from umbrella covers to pencil sharpeners: ...how can a museum sustain an entire collection of bananas? Or dog collars? By amassing thousands of the same object, their curators do us a great service, revealing unexpected details about the easily overlooked items all around us. [images]- Atlas Obscura

London is a playground for Pritzker Prize winners, as "New London Architecture" demonstrates: ...refreshingly and succinctly, makes no allusions as to what it’s about...photographers Agnese Sanvito and Richard Schulman present...the abstract and intimate relationship between old and new...presenting an honest...take on a city still working out where it wants to go. -- Edwin Heathcote- The Architect's Newspaper

Darryl Holter: Can the Center Hold? "City of Dreams: Dodger Stadium and the Birth of Modern Los Angeles" by Jerald Podair...the battle for [the stadium] raises important questions...how might Downtown Los Angeles have developed if the expansive public housing plan designed for Chavez Ravine by Richard Neutra and Robert Alexander had actually been built...Maybe the Dodgers should have ended up in Inglewood.- Los Angeles Review of Books

Victoria Lautman: The mysterious Indian architecture that's vanishing with barely a murmur: India was once covered by stepwells...but they are now facing extinction. "The Vanishing Stepwells of India" by Victoria Lautman: ...the most fascinating and mysterious structures I have ever seen but had never heard of...many breathtaking, many heartbreaking, most often both...that desperately deserves attention. [excerpt] [images]- BD/Building Design (UK)

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

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