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After ISIS militants seized control of Palmyra—the ancient Syrian city called the “Venice of the Sands”— last May, they immediately set out to destroy it.

When the United States’ London embassy moves across town from Mayfair to Nine Elms in 2017, it will leave behind a monumental home: the Eero Saarinen–designed Chancery Building.

“It is much better to be good than to be original,” Ludwig Mies van der Rohe famously advised his protégé Philip Johnson.

The New York-based architect moved to the city on a part-time basis after winning a 2004 competition for the master plan and development CityLife, a new residential and commercial district just outside of Milan’s historic city center.

The New York architecture community has been in a swivet since the posting of an article titled “MoMA to Abolish Architecture and Design Galleries” in Architects Newspaper on April 12.

Architects often find competitions — which require large amounts of work for little or no pay – exploitative. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey did little to improve that situation when, on March 11, it announced a competition to replace Manhattan’s 65-year old Port Authority Bus Terminal.

Last Wednesday, just as a thousand people left the prayer service for Zaha Hadid at London’s Grand Mosque, it started to rain—appropriately enough at a dramatic diagonal—and not long after, as her family and friends motored in a caravan of buses to a cemetery in Surrey, the clouds parted and a double rainbow appeared.