Green and Gorgeous: Disasters Such as Haiti's Earthquake Might Change How Architecture is Practiced

In relation to the greening of architectural practice, some areas of architectural practice and as an extension design will have to shift from a indivdual doctor to patient or architect to private client model to that of a public health model to be able to meet with increasing natural disasters around the world using approaches of public health responses to outbreak with limited resources and time for response. Design Observer

Herzog and de Meuron's Vitrahaus Showroom

...The primary purpose of the five-storey building is to present furnishings and objects for the home. Due to the proportions and dimensions of the interior spaces - the architects use the term 'domestic scale' - the showrooms are reminiscent of familiar residential settings. The individual 'houses', which have the general characteristics of a display space, are conceived as abstract elements. With just a few exceptions, only the gable ends are glazed, and the structural volumes seem to have been shaped with an extrusion press. Stacked into a total of five stories and breathtakingly cantilevered up to 49 feet in some places, the twelve houses, whose floor slabs intersect the underlying gables, create a three-dimensional assemblage....

via dvice