Eric Hazan’s The Invention of Paris is at once a study of the evolution of the idea of Paris and an attempt to preserve the experience of its physical history—the latent historical meaning that has accrued on every corner—including the many inconvenient wrinkles that have been paved over and sandblasted and designed out of existence in the past fifty years and will soon lie beyond the reach of living memory.

An interview with zoo architect and former zoo director David Hancocks:

Zoos seem completely preoccupied with charismatic mega-fauna. They believe that without their traditional big animals people will stop visiting: “How can we call ourselves a zoo if we don’t have an elephant?!”

Japan, a year after a disastrous earthquake and tsunami, has seen recovery stall in the cleanup stage. Architects are ahead of the government in planning.

But as Michael Gross’s Unreal Estate makes repeatedly clear, the story of Los Angeles’s great houses is a passing procession. The very utility of basic shelter has moved beyond creature comfort and sound architecture and into a realm that is self-consciously social and competitive. As Lynda Resnick, co-owner of Sunset House and a devotee of Scarlett O’Hara, has famously said of her own private Tara, “It’s not home, but it’s much.”

This sense of having lived on too late, of having survived the demolition of past dreams of the future, is what gives the ruin its specific frisson, and it still animates art and writing.

Boston City Hall has come in for significant criticism over the years. Mayor Thomas M. Menino has proposed selling it and investing in a more conventional headquarters. But the truly remarkable fact is that it was built in the first place. Experimental architecture, after all, is something we expect from museums and universities, not municipal governments. Take a look at other cities — Philadelphia, New York, Los Angeles — and you’ll find city halls adorned with columns and arches, domes and porticos. Some are made of marble. Some have giant clocks. Then there’s ours, which looks like a fossilized spaceship.

What do Manhattan’s most radical new residence, D.C.’s National Museum of African-American History, and the Ghanaian home for a Nobel Peace Prize winner have in common? All were designed by David Adjaye, the Tanzanian-born architect who is suddenly everywhere at once.

Jarrett Walker’s Human Transit asks: What’s the best way to get users to embrace mass transit? Make it pleasant? Or make it efficient?

As I left the open mic, I made a left onto Cortland Street, full of once-lovely mid-century brick houses, the stoops of which now crumble into the weeds. Right in the middle of that block, a fire was engulfing one of the two-story houses. Flames flickered between yellow and orange in the night. I slowed my car down for a moment and watched the glow reflect on my windshield and hands. I contemplated dialing 911. But the house was pretty far gone, and the buildings on either side were both vacant. Highland Park’s emergency services are so overstretched that the state of Michigan recently seized control from the local government. So I sat there and watched it burn. Whether the continued presence of creativity, hope, and resilience amid such devastation seems a triumph or a tragedy varies second by second, block by block.

One warm June night in 1906, Albert Payson Terhune could be found engaged in battle for a telephone booth in the old Madison Square Garden while wearing a tuxedo. He had forcibly removed a man mid-conversation, and now, as he shouted into the phone, he kicked out a leg and swung his free arm to fend off the displaced caller and another man wielding a chair. Moments before and one floor above, Terhune, filling in as a drama critic for the New York Evening World, had been a witness to the crime of the century, and he was calling in the scoop.