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With the selection of five finalists for its memorial competition, the United States World War I Centennial Commission seems to be moving closer to a showdown with preservation groups.

After the success of its 2009 book, the firm will publish a new and expanded third edition. Every drawing in the third edition of 49 Cities will be tweaked for improved legibility. In 2007, Amale Andraos and Dan Wood, principals of the New York-based architecture firm WORKac, were teaching an “eco-urbanism” seminar at Princeton University. To grasp this relatively new term, Andraos, Wood, and their students had to first learn the history of the two fields from which it evolved. So the architects had their students dissect a number of city plans, from the fully realized (Levittown, New York, 1947)

The easy-to-assemble structures will quickly shelter those left homeless after the earthquake in Nepal. Shigeru Ban has released plans for his “Nepal Project”—modular, wood-framed structures that can be assembled quickly and easily, to house victims of this April’s devastating earthquakes in Nepal that left hundreds of thousands homeless.

Photo courtesy Passive House Institute A 16-unit apartment building (foreground) in Innsbruck, Austria, is the first of its kind to be certified under Passive House Plus—a new certification program that combines stringent efficiency standards with a renewable energy requirement. When the first Passive House building was built in Germany 25 years ago, the certification system raised the bar for energy efficient buildings by introducing a rigorous performance-based standard. This summer, the Passive House Institute in Darmstadt, Germany, has raised the bar higher with its certification of a multi-unit residential complex in Innsbruck, Austria, and a single-family home in Ötigheim, Germany,

A symposium and exhibition in China explore ways of rethinking the countryside.  Nan Xiao, Qingyun Ma, and Gary Paige at the symposium. Every year about a million people in China move from rural villages and towns to big cities. Lots of planning efforts—both good and bad—have focused on fast-growing cities, but very little work has looked at the countryside where depopulation and the changing economics of farming threaten the very existence of many villages. With that as a backdrop, the University of Southern California’s American Academy in China (AAC) and its School of Architecture addressed the urban-rural divide in

Every summer for the last 29 years, Bogotá’s University of Los Andes has programed its International Workshop in Architecture, which it holds in the Caribbean coastal city of Cartagena de Indias. For four weeks this past July, about 80 undergraduate architecture students—from countries ranging from Spain to Argentina—convened in the 16th-century walled city to absorb the culture and the rich architecture within its confines, while considering new visions for this historic center. With so many years behind its belt, the seminar, directed for over a decade now by Carlos Campuzano Castelló, has become a well-oiled program. After a week of

A design proposal called Remembrance and Reflection. The rules of an architecture competition can affect which design wins and even how it is received. That’s why opponents of the controversial Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial fault not just Frank Gehry’s design but the format of the competition that led to its selection.

"Our warning was not heeded" the firm says. Japanese officials are finding out that breaking up is hard to do, especially with Zaha Hadid. Today the starchitect's London-based firm Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA) issued a 1,440 word statement to "set the record straight" regarding its ouster from the National Stadium design in Tokyo. The rebuttal comes after Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe announced July 17 that the stadium design would "start over from zero" after contending with costs soaring upwards of $2 billion, which many attributed to ZHA's bombastic plan.ZHA begs to differ.In the statement, the firm asserts that its