Beware of putting too much stock in glossy development plans, but if Treasure Island is reborn along the lines being touted, the result will be a neighborhood like none the Bay Area has seen. San Francisco Chronicle

Walk into Thomas Heatherwick’s studio and you feel like Alice falling down the rabbit hole. Down a dark passage, off the thundering Gray’s Inn Road in Central London, and through a door, sandwiched between the ground and first floors of a Travelodge, and a vast wonderland unfolds, of freakish beasts never before seen by human eyes. A model of a building that looks like a giant crystal. A huge tower of flaps. Hairy lumps. Contorted shapes and textures of structures, some already built in the world outside, some possibly yet to come. And at the centre of it all, Heatherwick himself, a Mad Hatter, in madcap energy, if not in hat. Times Online

In Dubai, unfinished high-rises litter the horizon, as the emirate dramatically suffers the effects of the housing downturn. In January, the emirate even experienced its first foreclosure when the British-bank Barclays won a case to take back a property. But in Abu Dhabi, office buildings, homes, and even airports continue to be planned and built, as the city pushes beyond its borders to encompass former desert lands and tidal flats. Architectural Record

[The] Finsbury Health Centre ... was designed to cope with change and remains an exemplary health care building. To see it abandoned by the authorities and, perhaps, turned into some boutique hotel or, worse, a private gym or spa, would be a betrayal of not just a great architect and a noble architectural ideal, but of the idea of a progressive public sector doing its very best to offer the finest level of service to local people. The Guardian