How would the design of the built environment, the process and practice of architecture change if women were leading and equally represented?

At $3.74 billion, plus another $200 million in contingencies, the “Transportation Hub” at the World Trade Center—not even the busiest station in the Financial District—will be far and away the most expensive train station built in modern history. The Hub, as it’s known in Port Authority speak, will be the crowning artistic statement of the World Trade Center complex, perhaps the last grand gesture at a site that was supposed to be full of them.

The exhibition at the MAK Center in West Hollywood, curated by UCLA architectural historian and critic Sylvia Lavin, is a wry study of the ways Los Angeles artists and architects worked with, leaned on, stole from and influenced one another in the 1970s. In a larger sense, it charts the way Southern California architects threw off the influence of establishmen Modernism and helped remake the profession in that decade.

This summer at the almost defiantly unhip South Street Seaport, there shall be pop-up boutiques housed in shipping containers. There shall be outdoor film screenings with lounge-chair seating. There shall be SmorgasBar. And, the lords of artificial weather willing, there may be glitter rain.

The annual IS ARCH competition for architecture students and young architects has announced the winners of its second edition. The competition jury, composed of Sou Fujimoto, Benedetta Tagliabue (EMBT), Tomislav Dushanov (Herzog & De Meuron), Taba Rasti (Foster + Partners ), Rik Nys (David Chipperfield Architects), and Carlos Ferrater (Technical University of Catalonia), looked through 153 submitted projects from all over the world.

The unbending axis of architectural apologetics made for Speer is a double one...This defense, of course, is exculpatory only if it fails to make any distinction within the field of this expression or to consider any integral relationship between form and function. The more outré defense of Speer insists that he is not simply tarred with modernism’s anti-classical brush but that he was an excellent architect, full stop.

The Heron’s architect was N. D. Austin, a 31-year-old artist known for what he calls “trespass theater.” “It’s about making the invisible visible,” he said of his philosophy. Mr. Austin located a suitable water tower by scouring Buildings Department records for violations with egregious scaffold fines. That can indicate a neglectful landlord, he said, which meant it might be a vacant building ripe for adopting as one’s own.

Sears Holdings, the 120-year old retailer (which now includes Kmart), plans to start converting its struggling and defunct department stores into data centers, Data Center Knowledge reported today. A new unit of the company, Ubiquity Critical Environments, will lead the charge. Thanks to Walmart, specialty shops, an economic downturn and—the sweet irony—online shopping, department stores are heading toward extinction, and Sears is feeling the pain particularly hard.

Richard Koshalek, the director of the Smithsonian Institution’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, said on Thursday that he was resigning after the board of trustees failed to reach a consensus on the future of a long-planned project to cover the museum’s interior courtyard with a temporary inflatable bubble.

B2, a 32-story tower that is part of a 1,500-unit, mixed-use complex designed by SHoP Architects for Brooklyn’s Atlantic Yards, will soon be the tallest modular building in the world. nARCHITECTS recently won adaptNYC’s competition to design a micro-unit apartment building, and will see its concept transformed into a 10-story building by 2015. It will be the first multiunit building in Manhattan to be built with modular construction.

The Zaha Hadid-designed Riverside Museum: Scotland’s Museum of Transport and Travel keeps raking in recognitions [...]: the new Glasgow museum attraction just won the prestigious European Museum of the Year Award 2013, presented by the European Museum Forum. The announcement was made at a special awards ceremony at EMF's annual assembly hosted by the Gallo Romeins Museum in Tongeren in Belgium, EMYA Winner in 2011.

Though indebted to conventional artistic methodologies, the vibrant, playful works of Jorge Prado lack traditional notions of artistic autonomy, with multiple uses straddling sculpture, furniture and architecture. Over espresso and a cigarette in the kitchen of his Los Angeles home, Pardo shares with Oscar Tuazon his processes of transforming built environments into functionally fluid sites designed to facilitate a diversity of experience.

“Project approval delays are having an adverse effect on the design and construction industry, but again and again we are hearing that it is extremely difficult to obtain financing to move forward on real estate projects,” said AIA Chief Economist, Kermit Baker, PhD, Hon. AIA. “There are other challenges that have prevented a broader recovery that we will examine in the coming months if this negative trajectory continues... we’re hopeful that this is just a short-term dip.”

Last week, Broad Group announced it has received approval from the Chinese government and will break ground on the project next month, though according to Quartz's Lily Kuo, Broad Sustainable Building has pushed the building's schedule to a more modest seven months.

Jeffrey Johnson, an architect who runs the China Megacities Lab at Columbia, is among a number of scholars who study China's rapid urbanization. He says local governments are building museums to create a cultural life and competitive identity for their cities. But China lost a lot of art because of its civil war in the 1940s, as well as the Cultural Revolution, looting and overseas sales. Johnson says many museums are going up faster than curators can fill them with works and audiences.

The entry Trylletromler by Dutch practice FABRIC has won the international design competition for a temporary pavilion in the King's Garden in Copenhagen. The completed pavilion is scheduled to open to the public on September 13.

Chicago has many truly great buildings. It sits firmly on the map of global architecture and is the birthplace of the skyscraper. Creating a short video about just five great buildings is doing this city a massive disservice, as there are many and this is simply my thoughts.