Below is the presentation from the Danish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2010 by Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) that outlines their plan to use a proposed new rail line to link Copenhagen and Malm and their surrounding cities into a binational metropolitan area. Ideas as big as this demonstrate that the solutions to our modern problems need to step beyond the preheld definitions of things even as foundational as nations and territories in order for us to use the world as efficiently and sustainably as we can.

I was chatting with an architect friend of mine on the weekend — as we watched our one-year-old daughters unleash havoc upon the playground — about the social component of architecture, that as an architect you are responsible for creating an environment and that your design ultimately has a direct affect on how how people interact within it. He related to me two scenarios: The first one was of a courthouse that was rebuilt and after some time in the new building, it was noted that there were less instances …

“…the headquarters of CCTV, the Chinese television network, by Rem Koolhaas and Ole Scheeren, of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture—a building which I had thought was going to be a pretentious piece of structural exhibitionism—turned out to be a compelling and exciting piece of structural exhibitionism.”
–Paul Goldberger, The New Yorker
“Word has it that the building is close to explosion. Whole thing pretty much toast, all in all.”
–@DavidFeng

“Whether or not this is even true – after all, I never think truth is the point in stories like this – … the idea of appropriating a construction crane as a new form of domestic space – a kind of parasitic sub-structure attached to the very thing it’s helped to construct … is totally awesome;”
-BldgBlog

“The amount of building becomes obscene without a blueprint. Each time you ask yourself, Do you have the right to do this much work on this scale if you don’t have an opinion about what the world should be like? We really feel that. But is there time for a manifesto? I don’t know.”
–Rem Koolhaas

It was only after seeing the rendering for the Hines tower next to a photo of the Institut du Monde Arabe in today’s NY Times Magazine article that I made the connection and realized, holy shit, Jean Nouvel is hands down my favourite architect. Then I got lost in his website for about 3 hours…

I want to live in the world that kokkugia is building.

A current favourite online visit, Bryan Finoki’s Subtopia is a discourse on military urbanism, the architecture of occupation and oppression, and the overarching question of why we, as humans, have it in our nature to build walls between ourselves.
To give you an idea of the subject matter, a recent entry features Jonathan Olley’s stark, haunting photos of Northern Ireland’s police stations, barracks and watchtowers; structures from a troubled past that are quickly disappearing to progress; to be too readily forgotten rather than stand as a reminder/memorial of how …

As premature as it might be, GQ magazine has released its Top 10 list of The Most Important Buildings of the 21st Century. PSFK has the details.
If you like a little more history with your architecture, check out Lisa Rochon’s Seven Wonders of Architecture from entries past.

Jacque Fresco designs the civilizations of the future; and in the process, he defines how the human race will need to change in order to get there.