Olympic Landscape: When it comes to dreaming up grand architectural visions, repressive authoritarian regimes are clearly the way to go. In less time than it takes for New Yorkers to draw up a committee to decide whether to vote on drawing up a committee, the city of Beijing has reinvented itself in anticipation of this August’s Olympic Games. Whole neighborhoods have been gleefully wiped out in order to build the Beijing CBD, or Central Business District, situated between the capital’s 3rd and 4th Ring Roads and now the site of CCTV headquarters, designed by the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas. Meanwhile, in another part of town, the Olympics’ main venue, the titanic National Stadium (also called Bird’s Nest stadium) — designed by the Swiss firm Herzog & de Meuron — has just opened. So too has the National Aquatics Centre, known as the Water Cube, by the Australian architecture firm PTW Architects, together with CSCEC + Design and Arup. Perhaps most striking of all is the thrilling new Beijing Capital International Airport, conceived by Norman Foster. [NY Sun]

In Inner Mongolia, Pushing Architecture’s Outer Limits: At a time when housing markets across the West are contracting and American architects’ billings are at their lowest point in 12 years, according to the American Institute of Architects, Mr. Cai (pronounced sigh) was offering his guests a rare chance to build big — and paying them, improbably, in wads of cash. “Basically, Ordos is Texas,” explained Michael S. Tunkey, an American architect based in Shanghai whose firm has designed an opera house that, along with half a dozen museums and a boutique hotel, will anchor Mr. Cai’s new cultural district. [NYT]

China’s cities imperial style: Beijing is not a city that inspires deep affection. The picturesque is at a premium, regimentation prevails, and sheer size is a subject of tiresome pride. But so it always was. Unlike most European cities, the imperial capitals of China seldom grew up organically. Pre-planned in accordance with beliefs about the centrality of the emperor at the axis of the cosmos – and commensurate with the scale of this presumption – imperial cities conformed to a rigid geometry that precluded whim and often preceded actual settlement. [TLS]

Whitney’s Downtown Sanctuary: Optimism is in the air again at the Whitney Museum of American Art, which has just released a preliminary design by the Italian architect Renzo Piano for its proposed satellite museum downtown. [NYT]

Sleek modern shape of ’60s now being called landmark: By putting the flying saucerlike Assembly Hall on their list of the state’s most endangered historic places, preservationists Wednesday confirmed an ongoing sea change in their field: The sleek modern buildings of the 1960s, which once gleamed with newness and bespoke the technological confidence of the post-war era, are now considered old—and as threatened as Victorian houses. [Chicago Tribune]