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Never Built: Los Angeles at the A+D Architecture and Design Museum revives a century of ambitious schemes that might have been. B+UDowney Office Building, 2009 A history of what didn’t happen can sometimes be even more revealing and thought provoking than what did. That curious inversion of circumstance fuels Never Built: Los Angeles, a show at the A+D Architecture and Design Museum focused on more than a century of ambitious designs, some right on the brink of realization—that never broke ground in the city. Alongside visionaries who have vanished into obscurity, the thwarted include such famous names as Neutra, Lautner,

Barry Bergdoll has decided to step down from his post as Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in September to assume the Meyer Schapiro Chair of Art History and Archeology in Columbia University’s School of the Arts and Sciences. Photo © Robin Holland Bergdoll, who has been at MoMA since January 2007 (while still teaching at Columbia where he has been a professor of art history since 1985) managed to create an impressive track record for well-received architecture and a design exhibitions for MoMA’s architecture and design department. He will

CityCenterDC under construction. Addressing an audience at the National Building Museum composed largely of architectural college students in town for recent American Institute of Architecture Students (AIAS) conference, architect Shalom Baranes urged the rising generation to consider the benefits of lifting the century-old historic height restriction in Washington, D.C. “By overturning the 90-foot height cap [on residential streets], you’d get a lot more interesting architecture with a lot more natural light,” Baranes said, citing CityCenterDC as a prime example. Qualifying for a height bonus greatly enhanced the colossal redevelopment taking shape in the heart of the nation’s capital.Baranes, whose eponymous

Photo © Flickr user Maurizio Mucciola The former Pepsi-Cola headquarters on New York's Park Avenue. Pioneering architect Natalie de Blois died on July 22 at 92. As an associate partner at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill in the 1960s, de Blois helped design the Equitable Building in Chicago and New York's Lever House and the former Pepsi-Cola headquarters on Park Avenue. In the third edition of the AIA Guide to New York City, the Pepsi-Cola building is described as such: "An understated elegance that bows to the scale of its Park Avenue neighbors rather than advertising itself as the newest (of its

Watch the video below from the Oxford American about architectural photographer Timothy Hursley's fascination with a defunct silo in rural Alabama.

The Dallas Morning News has reported that a consultant working for the owners of the Museum Tower, a 42-story residential building designed by Johnson Fain on the edge of the city's Arts District, has used fake social media accounts to try to sway public opinion about the project. Since its completion last year, the tower’s reflective glass facade has bounced sunlight into the skylit galleries of the Nasher Sculpture Center, a 2003 museum and sculpture garden designed by Renzo Piano, and led to the closing of its James Turrell "skyspace." Photo via Flickr / user jczart The Museum Tower by

This Trey Trahan-designed 28,000-square-foot building, set in the oldest settlement in the Louisiana Purchase, aims to resolve a number of conflicting demands—bringing contemporary design to a historic context and finding a common language for a program that involves both a history museum and a sports hall of fame. In deference to its neighbors on Natchitoches’ main public square, the $12.6-million museum maintains the area’s two-story scale and wraps itself in a louvered copper rainscreen that alludes to the shaded porches of Creole architecture. The architects pinched the copper louvers at various locations to create a pleated effect that animates the

Salt & Straw in Portland, Oregon Ice cream won’t solve global warming, but the sweet stuff can offer personal relief from the grips of a fiery summer day. Served in a thoughtfully conceived retail environment, a scoop of ice cream may even offer design inspiration. We went in search of such dessert oases on two continents. The journey revealed several parallel vernaculars within the project type, which range from artisanal to mad-scientist to whimsical. Click the image above to view a slide show.

The Shaheen-Portman energy bill has broad bipartisan backing, but many organizations have warned that they will fight the bill if a certain amendment is adopted. This story originally appeared on BuildingGreen.com. The historic Shaheen-Portman energy bill making its way through the U.S. Senate enjoys rare and broad bipartisan backing, with the likes of Earthjustice and the Vinyl Siding Institute both announcing full-throated support. But the American Institute of Architects (AIA) and more than 350 other organizations have warned that they will fight Shaheen-Portman (a.k.a. the Energy Savings and Industrial Competitiveness Act of 2013) if a certain amendment is adopted. Thanks

A common Freshkills vista: a former landfill, it is in the process of being capped and planted with native species. Since 1947, it has been one of New York’s most notorious locations: the Freshkills landfill, in Staten Island, the city’s least populated, least renowned borough. To many, it became a sort of running joke about the borough itself. After all, how seriously can you take a place whose best-known landmark is vast mounds of garbage? Now Freshkills is on its way to becoming Staten Island’s claim to fame rather than notoriety. The landfill stopped accepting trash in March 2001; now,