In Manhattan's overheated and soon-to-be-totally-over celebrity real estate moment, apparently all that is required to sell some apartments is the inclusion of a few pieces of unique furniture in the renderings. Greg Allen writes a brilliant comparison of old skool...

We've recently been taken by Magical Urbanism, a weblog by fellow Ohioan Mike Ernst. It focuses on in-depth writing about urban and planning issues in specific cities, while still maintaining the majesty and surreal imagination of a blog like...

David Childs announced a Freedom Tower "update" today. The update: a few new renderings, and a material choice for the exterior: prismatic glass covering the concrete bunker that is really surrounding the "Freedom" Tower's base. Glass covering concrete, transparency disguising...

Rural Studio is at it again. Journalist Oliver Schwaner-Albright tips us off to an article he wrote for the FT weekend edition. The studio is designing a prototype for a house that will be built for $20,000, including labor and...

Architects oftentimes have other outlets for their creativity. Some teach. Some do watercolor. Some write weblogs. Some make sculptures. This last category seems to have the most participants, to mixed results. One of the more interesting of this lot...

Continuing Tropolism's theme of Towers in West Chelsea With Interesting Skin Systems, the Chelsea Arts Tower is finally getting its non-glass cladding: a gorgeous black panel system, with what appears to be a variation of gloss finishes, creating a subtle...

The LA Times offers up a optimistic view of Jean Nouvel's new Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. During the last year Minneapolis' cultural scene has been reborn with a series of new buildings. First The Walker Art Center by Herzog...

MoMA has named Barry Bergdoll the next Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design. Mr. Bergdoll will take his post January 1, 2007; until then, Paola Antonelli will continue as interim curator. The speculation about who would succeed Terrence...

Construction Engineer Frank Sciame announced the value engineered World Trade Center Memorial today. It all sounds so reasonable: it's only $510 million! The sound of the waterfalls will totally make up for victim's names being next to the West...

While we still have concerns about how, exactly, a stadium is going to sit upon and be accessed through a former post office and future rail station, we were shocked to discover in today's Times that the current plan for...

New Orleans must have 'New York disaster area political trainwreck' envy. In January, we noted, with enthusiasm, how progressive they were in New Orleans in generating a preliminary master plan for the entire city only four months after the hurricaine...

It's been a frightfully long time since we here at Tropolismo! have looked at The Two Dozen List. The same List that put BLUE, Bernard Tschumi's, er, blue curtain wall building on the Lower East Side, dead last. Even...

Left to right: Throw a rock, hit an architect. Does anyone smell fire? The A+D's new home. I’ve had the pleasure of surviving several parties associated with the recent AIA Convention here in Los Angeles last week, but none...

Pruned points us to the gorgeous party-wall photography of José Antonio Millán (pictured above, in Alicante)....

As licensed professionals ourselves, we feel compelled to point out that despite what the Downtown Express may say, our fact-checker, who is in from his long coffee break this afternoon, looked up Frank Sciame on New York State's Online...

Tropolism readers might remember our less than enthusiastic reception to the facelift of Julliard school by Diller Scofidio+Renfro. Interesting, but kind of whacked off the face of our third favorite building in New York. The firm seems to have...

Miss Representation calls it like it is, mostly, about the choice to let a contractor lead the value engineering (read: redesign) team for the World Trade Center Memorial. It needs little comment....

Alvaro Siza, “Drawings, Models, and Photographs” Santa Monica Museum of Art, Santa Monica, California May 13th-August 19th, 2006 The big problem with Los Angeles for most of us “culture vultures” is the distance: We can’t seem to bridge it....

The Toronto Waterfront Revitalization Corporation has announced that West 8 Urban Design and Landscape Architecture, based in Rotterdam, has won the Innovative Design Competition for Toronto’s Central Waterfront. We're not sure what's going on with the maple leaf, but the...

Our Zaha/Diva entry got several replies. Most of them were speculation, or unsupported hearsay, so we decline to publish those comments. However, we do point out an anecdote that we suppose someone else saw at the press conference prior to...

We here at Tropolism like Olafur Eliasson. Not just because we know and work with O, but because we are continually entranced by his projects. A sampling of some new work can be seen in the Flickr collection of...

File under "Light-up Parks In Lower Manhattan": A Test Of Will turns it out with a spread of night-shots of the new Liberty Park. Thriller set, indeed. We'll be dancing down there soon. Even though it is weirdly called...

Does Zaha Hadid ever get tired of being called a Diva? As in "just because I'm a famous female architect and I'm plus sized and I'm a little older than the rest doesn't automatically make me a diva"? Just curious....

We all know that Toyo Ito designed an installation for Mies Van Der Rohe's Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, for their upcoming Berlin-Tokyo/Tokyo-Berlin show. Right? Keep up speedy: We Make Money Not Art has a Flickr pool showing the installation in...