I like these bookshelves. Interesting shapes in beautiful wood.

Quoted: California's housing market may be in a slump. But one prominent home recently sold for an unexpectedly high price. Richard Neutra's Kaufmann House, a five-bedroom Modernist masterpiece in Palm Springs, Calif., was sold by Christie's last month for $16.8 m

A beautiful looking book about houses that are used temproarily (such as vacation home).

David Byrne went and toured Philip Johnson's famous architectural "Glass House" and wrote up a very detailed response to what he saw and experienced there.

Quoted: The repetitive minimalist patterns — the grass, the carpets, the little ripples on the (round) pool, the dappled light — it all seems like one very considered vast modernist artwork, or stage set, as if to say that modernism doesn’t stop at the door of the museum or at a building’s edge. It’s a way of remaking the world.

The Seattle P-I has a wonderful exploratory piece on the failures of the new library. Lauded for "[...launching] both the image and substance of the Seattle Public Library into a new era" while chastised for lacking spaces "conducive to intimacy with a book," this is a fair and well-executed opinion piece placing its finger on a distinct lack of warmth. Indeed, I have found that the mixing chamber looks a little too inspired by Gilliam's "Brazil." This is a building which focuses on the design of access to information without much thought to the ingestion of that information.

I love taking visitors to see the new library but I've never actually gone there to read even though it's a scant two blocks away from my work. This seems odd to me considering that I spend about an hour a day reading at one of several local coffee shops. I do want to try going for a good read on the 10th floor, if for nothing other than the view, but I'd love to see what the author of this piece is calling for - a timely reconsideration and re-examination. Many of the issues (furniture / warmth) are with superficial and not structural elements, they can be changed.

Quoted: I'm beginning to suspect that the building's celebrated splotches of weirdness -- the red sea-monster-bowel corridors on the fourth level, the bile-yellow elevators and escalators, the vertiginous canyon overlooks on the upper levels -- exist to draw attention away from the fact that most of its work and pleasure spaces are actually cheaply finished or dysfunctional. And that the building's working viscera are failing at fulfilling the promise of its stunning skin.

They're going into production on this "push-button house" next month. It's cool to look at but who actually buys these things? It might be appropriate for the penal system to hold white-collar criminals (and subject them to the degradation of a restroom in the wide open) but I can't think of this being reasonable for anyone else. A roof and outer-wall are, in my opinion, somewhat required for this invention to take off.