REX presents drawings, diagrams, 360° panorama image of Yongsan Tower, residential building in Seoul. Read More...

LucasFox presents photos and a video of Las Boas, apartment in Marina Botafoch Ibiza, Spain designed by Jean Nouvel. Read More...

Estimates put the number of unpaid interns every year between 500,000 and one million. So, in a country where working for free is mostly illegal, a student population somewhere between the size of Tucson and Dallas will be working for free, in plain view. Read More...

the plaza features include “a terraced amphitheaterlike space and a drainable reflecting pool that could be used as a stage in summer and a skating rink in winter. Waterfalls absorbed noise; garden rooms offered intimacy and softened concrete edges.” Kathryn Shattuck writes the battle over the fate of Peavey Plaza, a two-acre outdoor public space in downtown Minneapolis designed by M. Paul Friedberg.  The American Society of Landscape Architects recognized the plaza as Read More...

[Images: From ZATO: Secret Soviet Cities during the Cold War at Columbia's Harriman Institute; right three photographs by Richard Pare]. Speaking of Van Alen Books: earlier this week, they hosted a panel on the topic of “Secret Soviet Cities During the Cold War.” These were closed cities or ZATO, “sites of highly secretive military and scientific research and production in the Soviet Empire. Nameless and not shown on maps, these remote urban environments followed a unique Read More...

[Image: Michael Maltzan's Inner City Arts building, Los Angeles; photo by Iwan Baan]. I’ll be speaking tonight, May 17th, at Van Alen Books with architect Michael Maltzan about his book No More Play: Conversations on Urban Speculation in Los Angeles and Beyond, edited by Jessica Varner, previously discussed on BLDGBLOG here. The book includes interviews with Matthew Coolidge of the Center for Land Use Interpretation, Charles Waldheim, Qingyun Ma, Catherine Opie, Edward Soja (who quips Read More...

Phaidon has published Ronan & Erwan Bouroullec’s new monograph titled ‘Works,’ and Studio Bouroullec presents preview images of this book. © Studio Bouroullec Read More...

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Memorial Coliseum (photo by Brian Libby) BY FRED LEESON Here’s question that might be novel in the history of architecture. Can a single building have two exteriors? The issue arose when the Portland Landmarks Commission on May 14 considered proposed renovations to the “exterior” of Veterans Memorial Coliseum. Under Portland’s zoning code, the commission cannot rule on changes to an interior space unless the interior space itself has been designated as a landmark. That distinction Read More...

Old Town at First & Couch (photo by Brian Libby) BY FRED LEESON Perhaps no one in Portland knows the Old Town/Chinatown district better than George  “Bing” Sheldon,  the  “S” in SERA Architects, one of the city’s most prominent partnerships.  Sheldon has housed his office north of Burnside in the historic district since 1968. With almost 45 years under his belt, Sheldon makes his feelings clear these days:  He doesn’t like what he sees. “To me it’s obvious the system Read More...

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The Brooklyn Botanic Garden, entering its second century, is hardly a novice at branding, but at the new Visitor Center it is exercised with comprehensive aplomb. … the green roof is no small engineering feat. With a pitch of up to 27 degrees, it requires complicated networks of special soils held in place with cleats and geo-nets involving drip irrigation systems woven into capillary fabrics, and other impressive techniques with specialized vocabularies known only to au courant Read More...

I’m off to Washington, D.C. for the AIA Convention, so posts will resume early next week, and my weekly page will be on hiatus until the Tuesday after Memorial Day. Read More...

The deadline for NYIT’s sLAB Costa Rica Kickster campaign, a project I featured previously, is six days away (May 21). As I type this they are ~$7,500 short of their new goal of $24,000. Below is a video about the project, which will result in students from NYIT helping to build a recycling facility they designed for Nosara, Costa Rica. Read More...

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A Weekly Dose of Architecture Updates: This week’s dose features Mini-Studio in Mexico City, Mexico by FRENTEarquitectura: The featured past dose is the Azteca Multimodal Transfer Station in Mexico City, Mexico by CC Arquitectos: This week’s book review includes three journals: Boundaries #3, City Limits #5, Log 24: **NOTE: The next weekly dose will be 2012.05.29.** american-architects.com Building of the Week: BSA Space in Boston, Massachusetts by Hӧweler + Yoon Read More...

To do things differently, it helps to connect with new people and contexts. Universities and design schools seldom make that easy… This handout contains the most interesting ones we’ve found so far. It includes [with their permission] the findings of a scoping study for Schumacher College in England. No quality judgment is implied by inclusion in (or omission from) this list. Read More...

Congrats to Jimenez for getting his project funded, with minutes remaining. Can’t wait to see the results! Read More...

[Photos by John Hill, unless otherwise noted] Last week, a bunch of press folks squeezed into MoMA PS1‘s Performance Dome to listen to artist Marina Abramović, architect Shohei Shigematsu (of OMA‘s New York office), and others unveil the design for the Marina Abramović Institute for the Preservation of Performance Art (MAI) in Hudson, New York. The unveiling kicks off a fundraising effort on the part of the artist, who aims for an optimistic completion of the project in Read More...