Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta said there is no question that the United States is safer with Osama bin Laden, the architect of al Qaeda, dead, though he said there is no way to completely destroy the network.

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Panetta: No ‘silver bullet’ for al Qaeda

If you find yourself in the doghouse, you can hope it would be as charming as this one: Architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s design for a child’s doghouse has been reconstructed, and is touring the country as the subject of a new documentary. Read full article > >

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Frank Lloyd Wright’s doghouse: Fallingwater for Fido?

A planned memorial to Dwight D. Eisenhower, with Frank Gehry as the architect, has raised hackles within the Eisenhower family.

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Eisenhower Family Raises Objections to Planned Memorial

Mei-Hua Ru is the director of planning for John C. Liu, the New York City comptroller. She is also the architect of his campaign fund-raising network, which is now under investigation.

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Quiet but Powerful Aide Built Liu’s Fund-Raising Network

Francisco Sandaza is the architect as Cillian Sheridan’s double gives St Johnstone a deserved win over disappointing Hearts.

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St Johnstone 2-0 Hearts

An exhibition at Yale considers the Modernist work of the architect Kevin Roche.

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Critic’s Notebook: Turning a Rearview Mirror on Kevin Roche

A new tower at 8 Spruce Street, the architect Frank Gehry’s first skyscraper, is the most significant change to the Lower Manhattan skyline since Sept. 11, 2001.

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Architecture Review: Downtown Skyscraper for the Digital Age

Ahmet Davutoglu, the tireless, talkative foreign minister, is the architect of a foreign policy designed to (peacefully) restore his country to greatness. But whose side is he really on?

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Turkey’s Rules

Mr. Shriver was the architect of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s war on poverty, an ambassador to France and the Democratic candidate for vice president in 1972.

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R. Sargent Shriver, Peace Corps Leader, Dies at 95

In Slate , the architect and critic Witold Rybczysnki celebrates the end of the architecture bubble’s literally over-the-top design: Anything that could be imagined was built. Architecture is highly competitive, and it was common practice for clients to invite several leading architects to submit designs before awarding the commission. The pressure to outdo one’s rivals pushed designers to propose increasingly outlandish buildings. Because originality was rewarded by media coverage, clients encouraged this tendency. I love well-executed rationalism — it isn’t so easy to do well — as much as the next person, but I think Mr. Rybczysnki may be oversimplifying the architect-patron relationship. Consider the independent American architects who are now building in China. It’s sad that there seems to be more aesthetic sophistication among developers in a state still ruled by a Communist Party than in the American economy that generations of European intellectuals and critics at the height of rationalism loved or hated for its boldness. Lawrence Cheek reports in the New York Times : As Americans take on Chinese clients, they are adapting to some fresh nuances in the architect-client relationship. It’s a swirl of patient relationship-building, fast-track decision-making and lyrical moments that, they say, would be unusual in American business dealings. Chris McVoy, senior partner at Steven Holl Architects in New York, says a developer in Beijing gave the firm three months to develop a concept for a high-rise housing project that replaced a Mao-era factory in the heart of the city. The firm injected into the project Mr. Holl’s long-simmering ideas about urbanism, tapping the earth underneath for geothermal energy, and fixing everything it saw wrong with the dreary Soviet-inspired high-rises in Chinese cities. “We thought they’d say, ‘You’re crazy, forget it,’ and we’d walk away,” Mr. McVoy says. “We presented to about 20 people, and when we were finished, of course they all looked to their president to respond first. He said: ‘Anybody can build buildings. Few can build poetry.’ ”. . . .. “There’s no way a U.S. developer would let us do these,” Mr. McVoy says, adding that the American mentality is, “if it hasn’t been done before, then you shouldn’t do it. It’s all about risk, risk, risk. The Chinese have a kind of fearlessness to build things.” He says there may be more involved than just an intrepid spirit. “There’s another dimension to it,” he muses. “There’s an appreciation of nonmaterialist ideas, a connection to history and culture and especially, meaning. They drive toward a solution, but there’s also a metaphysical dimension.” An architect at another firm reports no hassles about the quality of materials: “They don’t establish a construction budget in the same way we do,” says the firm’s president, James Goettsch. “I don’t think we’ve ever had a project slowed down or held up over the budget.” And the president of the American Institute of Architects, Clark Manus, praises China’s technocratic policy making: “The U.S. political establishment is mostly attorneys and other people who are involved with political science,” he says. “In China, the highest-ranking officials tend to be engineers. They see a problem, they allocate money and effort toward a solution.” The world is getting weirder all the time. A repressive state encourages aesthetic freedom, a market economy is run by the politically minded. The officially materialist nation prizes poetry and the “metaphysical dimension.” Its new national pride is enhanced by the work of foreign architects, products of a supposedly mediocre educational system. America had its own great Depression era structures, not only those conceived in the late boom, like the Chrysler and Empire State Buildings, but Rockefeller Center , Hoover Dam , New York’s public swimming pools , Airstream trailers , and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater , which is considered the finest American residence since Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello. One challenge for American architecture is that so many of America’s great patrons have been private, and occasionally government, rather than corporate. That applies to the self-made former railroad mechanic Walter Chrysler, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., Fallingwater’s Kaufmanns, the Johnsons of Racine, WI , and J. Irwin Miller (Cummins Diesel), who made Columbus, IN a pilgrimage site. Will any of today’s ultra-rich be added to this list of great patrons? Read this , watch the slide show, and decide for yourself. Whatever you think about working in a building by Frank Gehry — I use his Princeton science library , named for his patron-donor, Peter Lewis, and have no complaints  — I hope that not every patron becomes one of Mr. Rybczynski’s admired “chastened clients who demand discipline, restraint, and common sense.”

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New Architecture, Sanity or Timidity?

In 1897, when the Territory of Arizona was seeking to demonstrate its fitness for statehood, the legislature solicited bids to design a new capitol building and grounds in Phoenix. The winning entry was that of James Riely Gordon, the architect behind a number of well-regarded public buildings in Texas and Maryland. He drew up ambitious plans: an expansive dome, a grand rotunda, stately wings for each house. But funding fell short, and so the legislative wings were scrapped, and a diminutive lead-alloy top was chosen in lieu of Gordon’s more elaborate dome. Worse, in the building’s interior, a mosaic of the state seal was bungled by the contractor, who forgot to include the images of cattle and citrus, two of Arizona’s “five C’s” (the others being climate, copper, and cotton). . . .

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KEN SILVERSTEIN—Tea party in the Sonora:
For the future of G.O.P. governance, look to Arizona

Behind every green building is an architect. A recent survey conducted by Lance Hosey for Architect Magazine asked 150 green building experts, including architects, what they felt were the five most important green buildings constructed since 1980. The top vote getter, with 13 votes, was the Adam Joseph Lewis Center for Environmental Studies in Oberlin, Ohio.