"I don't think that any iteration of modernism was ever intended to convey coldness, though it's certainly been codified that way in various pop cultural vehicles, Hollywood movies among them. I suppose it's funny, in the end, that even these happy, vibey California homes can somehow be retrofitted to house vice. And that the filmmakers would deem them appropriate containers for villainy in the first place is something I can't help but smile at." —Benjamin Critton discusses his "tabloid treatise," Evil People in Modern Homes in Popular Films, now on sale at Printed Matter. (via, via)

Holy Jesus, they're really going to build this Anish Kapoor structure in London for the Olympics. Higher than the Statue of Liberty! I unabashedly love Kapoor and think he's a genius and this is kind of amazing-bonkers! I wish it wasn't red though? But that's useful, because it'll disguise all the blood from the many knifecrimes that shall occur upon it.

"When people ask me why the world still does not have a single vertical farm, I just raise my eyebrows and shrug my shoulders." I can't think of what's wrong with the ideas Dickson D. Despommier writes about in his New York Times op-ed either. (I definitely can't think of anything wrong with his name. It's like a character from a porn Three Musketeers-which does, of course, exist.) So now, sites like Weburbanist and Trendhunter offer cool round-ups of design proposals that let us see what urban vertical farms-"skyfarms" is a sexier name-could look like.

This fine Hamptons home has been chopped down to $4 million-down from $5.5 mil last week! It has only been sitting on the market for a year, and OMG, it is like Pee-Wee Herman threw up Play-Doh everywhere inside Barbie's Dream House.

Curbed gets a tour of the crazy new Cooper Union building being put up in the East Village. They're giving it high marks!

The "American Institute of Architects… has branded The New York Times Building as the city's 'ugliest' building." Now, that being said? The American Institute of Architects is fronting this building on their website right now. It is a building at Central Michigan University and it is a horrible insane piece of strip mall garbage. So.

Here is how Frank Gehry designs a hat, which is pretty much like how he designs a building: "Gehry said that he had done the initial drawing on his iPhone, which an assistant then produced: a violet scribble with a black-and-blue iris at the center." SCAM ARTIST.

"Dubai raises the questions raised by any apparent utopia: What's the downside?" That's from George Saunders' great 2006 essay The New Mecca. Now, even as the shiny new tallest-building-on-the-planet staffs up, this slideshow, from Fast Company, at last delivers an answer.

This is how we all picture the Parthenon, because that is how it looks now, but in the days of antiquity it was actually tricked out like a cheap whore, all shimmery and Egyptian blue. Now you know!

Fast Company took a look recently at some offices of the 'future,' which, ha, who's going to work in offices in the future? Among others, they look at Macquarie, which is where Prison Island trading floor drones watch porn while their coworkers are doing live TV spots. One bit that is of interest is making plans that deal with the fact that, in offices, people don't actually work so much! (Hence: the existence of blogs!) The average complete workforce turnout is 50% of headcount. So they are underbuilding office plans now: "At Macquarie, 50% attendance translates to 85% occupancy in the new office." So, some day in [...]

It's an understandable thing that Manhattan is being recast as a shiny, silver-and-glass futureworld in these first thirty years of the Bloomberg era. Still, the antiquated vintage looks from many disparate decades that seem to be overtaking everything from restaurants to license plates to mustaches isn't really helping anything, such as our City's sense of self. Don't get me wrong, I like many of the establishments in the Frankie's Spuntino empire! And I got sick of feeling like I was in the Jetson's every time I walked past Astor Place, too. But when the zeitgeist gets a-rolling like this, people need to chill out. With all the [...]

Architect Charles Gwathmey is the second of the New York Five to die. Made famous in the 70s, Gwathmey's work over the years was extremely erratic in quality. Unfortunately, he will forever be remembered for the awful, hideous Astor Place Tower installed in New York City's East Village a few years back, except not for "forever" because it will probably be torn down within ten years, thank God.

"Mecca, the holiest city in Islam, is going to be redesigned and a proposed master plan just leaked to Youtube." This video is fucking amazing. It is some goddamn Dune-level shit and stuff.