A nice article in Detroitblog about the commitments to restore and reopen the Book Cadillac Hotel.
Also check out coverage by girl in the D.

“That was the logic of his buildings, that, by god, you’re not even going to move a chair.”

Detroit has a nice little free paper called the Metro Times. The latest issue has a very interesting article on one of Wright’s homes in the area, and efforts to get it preserved and restored.

Concidentally, check out these same day posts: BELT: A case against Frank LLoyd Wright, and Ecology of Absence: Considering Wright.

Bruce Nussbaum over at Business Week presents the 2006 Product Design Awards.

The 2006 Product Design Awards Are Here.

From the BBC:

“The world is fast approaching the point where the majority of the human population will be found in urban areas.

The projection is that in 50 years’ time, two-thirds of humanity will live in cities. Six experts outline their vision of the urban world in 2050.”

Photos: Dubai then and now, from the BBC site

Check out Looper, “a resident of Block 58″ and his relaunched photoblog of Chicago.

With the July 4th weekend coming up, I had been contemplating a drive “up North” to the Lake Michigan shore. The thought of everybody else in the region doing that, and the highway hassles, made me reconsider.

Coincidentally, while cruising the Web tonight, I found this reference, and an incredible series of photographs of an ephemeral city in Spain:

In Spain one can find a linear city all along the coast built for tourism, a section of land that becomes the most crowded region in Europe, but just for a short time. It’s a city for only three months in summer, when thousands of people come looking for the sea and the sun. The rest of the year it becomes a ghost city, a city without any a function, with no people and no services. It has been growing and expanding since the 60′s, and it seems it have no end. This is photographic series documents the development of this ephemeral coastal city.

(From the excellent Polar Inertia—”the journal of nomadic and popular culture.”)

(Renderings via Skidmore Owings and Merrill)

The New York Times reports on the revised Freedom Tower design, unveiled by Childs at the NYAIA today.

This uninspired plaza in front of this glass-decorated concrete fortress…If so much must be lost, and so much must be done to defend the resulting mundane, why do we pay attention? Why does this go forward?

As we learn more about the Bush administration’s deep interest in all of our lives, it is interesting to note that Taller de Arquitectura is the designer of the headquarters of SWIFT, the banking consortium that has given the banking records of millions of Americans to the government.

What are the inherent symbolic values that lie in symmetry? Can we assume certain characteristics about organizations that choose classical symmetry in a modern age? When we learn that the Taller based the entire design on the Golden Section, what should we assume about architect and client?

I’ve frequently talked about a different kind of workplace design, and my desire for “the death of the desk”—my sense that most of the value of our work is in the exchange of ideas with other people (which takes place away from the desk), and that the more I am at my desk, the less value I am contributing to my organization.

It’s therefore fun to have found “Destroy this Desk” from Vodaphone.

“We’re asking you to focus your design, not on the major pieces that are central to a room, rather to observe the extremes of the space, the unexplored areas of consciousness…

“The objective is not to design something that is placed in the middle of the room, but towards the edges, not at the centre and not directly around the centre; you should look for somewhere that evades the eye…”

Nice brief for the Muji design competition.