We have heard your cries, and we are finally taking our Architecture City Guide international. We like the new bottom-up approach, and we will be sticking with that for format as we branch out. So we need your help. To make the City Guides more engaging we are asking for your input on which designs should comprise our weekly list of 12. In order for this to work we will need you, our readers, to suggest a few of your favorite modern/contemporary buildings for the upcoming city guide in the comment section below. Along with your suggestions we ask that you provide a link to an image you took of the building that we can use, the address of the building, and the architect. (The image must be from a site that has a Creative Common License cache like Flickr or Wikimedia. We cannot use images that are copyrighted unless they are yours and you give us permission.) From that we will select the top 12 most recommended buildings. Hopefully this method will help bring to our attention smaller well done projects that only locals truly know. With that in mind we do not showcase private single-family residences for obvious reasons. Additionally, we try to only show completed projects.

Phaidon Press recently made us aware of a video they posted on what makes a successful city. It is part of a series by Ricky Burdett that promotes the book Living in the Endless City. This video features Ricky Burdett, Richard Sennett and Saskia Sassen. This is an important topic as three quarters of the world’s population will live in cities by 2050.

This week, with the help of our readers, we visited Indianapolis for our Architecture City Guide. Our readers suggested a lot of really nice buildings and we greatly appreciate their help. Indianapolis’s numerous sporting events and conventions continually draw crowds to this industrious state capital throughout the year. It is only fitting that there is an architecture city guide for its various contemporary buildings. As a seat of government and industry, Indianapolis also boasts a nice variety of historic architecture that is worth seeing. Take a look at the list our readers help put together and add your favorites to the comment section below.

The Architecture City Guide: Indianapolis list and corresponding map after the break.

If you happen to be in San Francisco this evening, June 21st, you might want to attend SPUR’s Pecha Kucha Night. Starting at 6:30 you can hear and see designers, thinkers and doers cover a range of topics around population growth and its effects on building, open space, transit and you in Pecha Kucha’s world-famous, rapid-fire format. Speakers will present 20 slides (20 seconds per slide), making for a fast, furious and fun celebration of urbanism. This event is generously sponsored by the Koret Foundation. Cosponsored by the SFAIA, SFHAC, and Pecha Kucha San Francisco. For more information click here: Pecha Kucha Night

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Published in 2008 this book details the SOM’s design of the International Terminal at the San Francisco International Airport. The mid-rise terminal is a case study in light and lightness. It has plans, sections, elevations, models, text by Anne-Catrin Schultz, and photographs by Timothy Joseph Hursley.

Our friends at Phaidon Press recently informed us of a short profile video they put up about Roger Diener of Diener & Diener Architekten. In the video Diener talks about how he got into architecture and what he strives for in architecture, namely creating rich spaces in which one feels really comfortable in and are not strictly driven by the gesture of the designing architect. Check it out.

We invite you to watch an intriguing lecture Rem Koolhaas recently gave at the Berlage Institute. The lecture covers three interrelated topics: the growth of Preservation, and its blind spots; architecture and democracy; and the ongoing development of the office itself. The video has become extremely popular since it was posted 3 days ago on OMA’s vimeo channel (more views in the first 24 hours than any other of their videos). Check it out.

I never can get enough of Volume. This issue is loaded with provocative articles that stimulate discussion about a pressing reality, the dramatic demographic shift in the age of human populations. Throughout this issue there are articles like Martti Kalliala’s that push the boundaries of the discussion. Looking at the rapid increases in average life expectancy, Kalliala’s asks what the world will be like if we could live to a thousand? These types of articles are supplemented by exposés into existing and proposed retirement communities and nursing homes. This, as Volume always does, gives a nice balance to the intellectual inquiry and practical application.

With the help from a few of our readers, our Architecture City Guide headed to Charlotte this week. By American standards Charlotte is an old city, but it has undergone a huge transformation in the last few decades with the influx of banking headquarters. It is now the second largest banking center in the United State and this is partly reflected in its growing skyline. We, with the help of our readers, have put together a list of 12 buildings worth seeing. There are plenty more that could have made the list so please add your favorites to the comment section below.

The Architecture City Guide: Charlotte list and corresponding map after the break.

(Amsterdam) The C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group (C40) released two landmark reports on June 7th that underline the critical role played by cities in confronting climate change. The complementary reports were published to coincide with the C40 Cities Summit being held this year in Sao Paulo, Brazil (May 31 – June 2). Representatives of the core C40 cities are attending the event with delegates from cities affiliated with the global climate group and a host of international experts to discuss strategies for building a low carbon future. The C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group releases two complementary reports to help megacities mitigate and adapt to climate change impacts. Arup produces one of the reports that details how cities are already confronting climate change and highlights opportunities for action.

Situated in the Issaquah Highlands just east of Seattle, zHome is envisioned as a ten unit, net zero energy and net zero carbon town home community. The 0.4-acre site is part of a larger parcel located at the entrance to the Highlands neighborhood. The larger parcel was planned as a combined project including the zHome site along with a mixed-use project that is being constructed by the YWCA.

EDUN is a progressive fashion company launched in Spring 2005 by Ali Hewson and Bono. In May 2010, Spacesmith was retained to design the lifestyle fashion brand’s new 8,600 square foot space to house offices; a showroom; design, production & marketing teams; and a sample room on the corner of Grand and Mercer Streets in Soho. The design intent was to keep the new construction to a minimum while allowing natural daylight to penetrate into the space and to embrace EDUN’s commitment to sustainability. It was fundamental to EDUN that Spacesmith design the space using reclaimed and salvaged materials and furnishings and to work with local vendors, craftsmen and craftswomen.

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Architect: Spacesmith Location: New York City, New York, USA Project Area: 8,600 sqf Project Year: 2010 Project Team: Jane Smith, Partner in Charge; Charles Patten, Design Principal; Ambar Margarida, Stefan Danicich Photographs: Courtesy of Spacesmith

We recently featured the companion to this book, Louis Kahn On the Thoughtful Making of Spaces. This large format book draws together over two hundred—mostly unpublished—drawings of Kahn’s Dominican Motherhouse. It offers a fascinating look into Kahn’s design process and his struggles with ideas about space. It shows the project changing over the years and goes straight to the heart of one of Kahn’s most quoted sayings, “A building is a struggle, not a miracle.”

This week our Architecture City Guide is headed Kansas City. With more boulevards than any other city except Paris, Kansas City is commonly called “Paris of the Plains.” Although its architecture might not rival Paris, there is plenty of great architecture, and as always it was difficult to keep our list to only 12 designs. Kansas City is also the headquarters of this year’s AIA National Firm Award, BNIM. Take a look at the list and add to it in the comment section below.

The Architecture City Guide: Kansas City list and corresponding map after the break.

From previously unpublished material and new analytic drawings this book explores Louis Kahn’s Dominican Motherhouse, his unbuilt masterpiece. Kahn pushed and prodded modern architecture into a crisis that questioned aspects of space that modernism had proudly banished from its program. The Dominican Motherhouse is an exemplary exhibition of Kahn’s relentless questioning of architectural space: seeking the sources of its meaning in its social, morphological, landscape and contextual dimensions. The questions brought up again and again in this book are as pertinent today as they were Kahn was asking them.

This project is one piece of the Los Angeles Police Department’s (LAPD) new headquarters facility, originally awarded through a competition to a team that included the LA office of DMJM/Design (now part of AECOM), Denver-based Roth+Sheppard, Studio 0.10, and John Friedman Alice Kimm Architects (JFAK).

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Architect: John Friedman Alice Kimm Architects Location: Los Angeles, California, USA Project Area: 300,000 sqf Project Year: 2009 Photographs: Fotoworks