Something new to report from Gemany's capital: On May 26, after ten years of construction, and a whooping 950 Million dollars later, the "traffic cathedral", Berlin's new central railway station will be opened to the public, just in time...

Last Friday, hours before the end of business on Memorial Day weekend, the World Trade Center Memorial Foundation president and chief executive, Gretchen Dykstra, resigned. We totally didn't see that one coming, particularly after every public official in the...

(photo via Curbed, by plemeljr) Today, Thursday is New York City As Sculpture Day. I missed the memo: 1. Miss Representation comes back from a quiet spell to chat about the progress at Ground Zero. And to comment on...

When I was in school, there were no computers to draw with. We were intimately familiar with the material qualities of paper and graphite. So it is with no surprise that I am struck dumb in admiration by the...

Los Angeles Correspondant John Southern reports on the LA premiere of "Sketches of Frank Gehry". There comes a time in an architect’s career when self-preservation (in an archival sense) begins to seep into the sub-conscious like water under a...

Tropolism means calling bullshit. Usually it's architects. They talk a lot. Present company included. But today we call client bullshit. Sunday, The New York Times published its magazine issue entirely devoted to architecture. If there was ever a time...

Forget Apple's tired glass cube (leading to...basement!), we're interested in the completely freaky (and completely awful, but still) iceberg building in Harajuku. Glass shards abound. It's like the 1980s are here again. Jean Snow delivers....

Greg Allen is on a roll this week. Commentary on the article about Michael Arad and the WTC Memorial fiasco, as appearing in something called "New York Magazine". Our favorite line: "that Organ Grinder's Monkey For Freedom himself, Daniel...

Nothing brightens our day more than knowing that Jean Snow, our favorite Tokyo blogger, has taken a jaunt around our favorite neighborhoods in one of our favorite cities, and taken a bunch of pictures of new buildings. That's a...

We are admitted fans of Joshua Prince-Ramus. So it is with interest that we read about his taking the entire New York City OMA office and turning it, shazaam!, into Ramus Ella Architects, or REX. (Architects' current naming philosophy:...

While we were skeptical at first about the proposed Ratner Development in Brooklyn, designed by Frank Gehry (the initial models were just not helpful), the second round of images is much more interesting to us. The buildings are huge,...

In keeping with our theme of staircases this week, we thought we'd bring you one of the more beautiful stairs we've seen, ever. It's a sculpture/experience by Olafur Eliasson. We saw gorgeous digital prints of it in Tanya Bonakdar's...

Okay. Tropolism will not be all-WTC, all-the-time. But some interesting stuff has been happening lately. Today, we learn that the National Trust for Historic Preservation has put the "Survivors Stairway" on its list of most endangered historical places. As Ground...

Tropolism means build beautiful details. In that vein, we were pleased to see this suspended wood staircase across a gorge in Traversinertobel, Switzerland. Engineer Jürg Conzett and his associate Rolf Bachofner solved the problem of connecting two different elevations...

The New York Times reports that the new estimate for the WTC Memorial is now nearly one billion dollars. What a big surprise! I'm sure some of the complaining architecture sites out there already are calling it an exposé...

In case you missed last Friday's opening, Olafur Eliasson is the inaugural installation at Tanya Bonakdar's expanded gallery on 21st Street, Chelsea, Manhattan, New York. The show is stunning, even by OE standards. My favorite piece is the compass...

Stuff like this gets us up in the morning: Matthew Moore is a "visual artist" whose works include planting large fields of crops and then mutilating them to appear as if they are subdivisions. Just this side of "didn't...

We here at Tropolism believe in being very clear, so we'd like to say a little more about our admiration of Jane Jacobs, just so others don't get the wrong idea. In her time, in her context, we have...