New York Mayor Bill de Blasio has addressed the “crisis of affordability” by implementing a five-borough, ten-year plan that will build and preserve 200,000 affordable units over the coming decade. Believing affordable housing to be part of “the bedrock of what makes New York City work,” Blasio hopes the plan will make New York, once again, “a place where our most vulnerable, our working people and our middle class can all thrive.” Review the plan in detail and check out one of the largest affordable housing projects planned for the city, here.

From being isolated in a cubicle to having a ping pong table at your disposal, the way we approach work and office design has drastically evolved over the past decade. The Wall Street Journal has identified five office designs that have defined the 20th century, going over the pros and cons of each one - including the collaborative typology that exists in the offices of Google. To learn more, continue reading here.

“You don’t need big and flashy starchitecture to make a statement; the most powerful architecture is often that which blends into the landscape and reveals itself slowly.” In this article on Monocle, written by Nelly Gocheva, the late Canadian architect Ron Thom is remembered for just this reason. To learn more about Thom's architectural approach and works, including his masterplan for Trent University, which celebrates its 50th anniversary this year, read the article here.

Thanks to a group called Friends of the Flyover, Liverpool has become the latest city with aspirations to build its own High Line-style elevated parkway. The group have raised over £40,000 on the civic crowdfunding website Spacehive to conduct a feasibility study on the elevated Churchill Flyover, with the aim of creating a park, events space and cycle route. Liverpool Council currently has plans to demolish the flyover at a cost of £4 million - however they are said to be open to the proposal by Friends of the Flyover, who hope to show that they can deliver a better solution for around half the cost. You can read the full story on the Independent.

Jonathan Kirschenfeld, founder of the Institute for Public Architecture and principal at Jonathan Kirschenfield Architect PC, has been selected to receive the inaugural Henry Hobson Richardson Award. The award, presented by the New York State chapter of the American Institute of Architects (AIA), lauded Kirschenfeld for his "contribution to the quality of New York State public architecture."

If you lived in a region repeatedly devastated by storms, would common sense be enough to make you leave your memories behind? Two of the ten proposals for the Rebuild by Design competition (which included proposals from OMA and BIG) tackle this issue, providing designs that compel communities to move to safety. To learn more about this sensitive and increasingly relevant social and political issue, known as "Managed Retreat," check out James Russell's article on The Atlantic Cities.

The owners of the Montréal-Mirabel International Airport have confirmed that, after a decade lying vacant, it will finally demolish the airport's sleek black terminal building. When it was completed in 1975, Mirabel was the world's largest airport, but it quickly became unpopular with airlines as it was simply too far from Montréal, and was re-purposed as a testing site and cargo airport. Now, with the terminal building requiring $15 million in emergency repairs, owner Aéroports de Montréal have announced that it is "irreparably obsolete" and are seeking tenders for its demolition. You can read the full story at CBC News.

London-based architect John Simpson, a leading practitioner of New Classicism and New Urbanism, has been commissioned to design a new School of Architecture for the University of Notre Dame. As Dean Michael Lykoudis stated, Simpson’s work reflects the “principles and highest aspirations” of Notre Dame’s school, “which embraces the timeless classical values of durability, functionality and beauty.” The 80,000-square-foot building will be located on the campus’ south end.

The modern suburb has become an unruly sprawl, homogenous in style and over-dependent on the automobile. However, according to Robert A. M. Stern's new manifesto “Paradise Planned: The Garden Suburb and the Modern City,” there is a superior alternative for suburban development that could attract millennials and preserve quality of life in terms of health, economic savings, and physical safety: the centrally planned, pedestrian-friendly garden suburb. You can learn more about Stern’s 1,072 page manifesto on the garden suburb in this article by the New York Times.

Metro 1 has partnered with DawnTown Miami to present an international ideas, design and build competition for a true urban park in the heart of the burgeoning Wynwood Arts District in Miami, Florida. The winning design team will have their idea and proposal built as well as a cash prize of $10,000.

Transport for London today announced TateHindle as the winners of the competition to transform their London Underground Headquarters into a residential building. The building, designed by Charles Holden and completed in 1929, was once the tallest office block in London and has been home to Transport for London ever since. However, TfL say the building at 55 Broadway is "no longer fit for purpose", and will move out in 2015 when TateHindle will begin the renovation. You can read the full story on the Architects' Journal.

From CLOG. In many countries, architects assume that designing to meet the local building code assures that their buildings are safe for the public. But what if a building’s harm is not in the risk of the building falling down, but in the building performing as intended? If designed for the wrong purpose, can a building be a human rights violation, and if so, what should an architect do about it?

Coinciding with the release of CLOG : PRISONS, the J. Max Bond Center on Design for the Just City and the Masters of Urban Design Program at the Spitzer School of Architecture are hosting a lecture and panel response organized by CLOG that will critically examine the architecture of incarceration.

In this article published by the National Women's History Museum, Despina Stratigakos delivers a fresh perspective on the current phenomenon of women leaving the architecture profession. Starting with Architect Barbie and jumping back to the likes of Julia Morgan, the successes and struggles of pioneering female architects are chronicled, offering women pursuing architecture careers today a firm understanding of their roots. Read the article here.

The Berlage is currently accepting applications for the 2014–2015 academic year. It offers an international, one-and-a-half-year English-language accreditated postgraduate-level Master of Science-degree program in architecture and urban design. The program focuses intensively on how architects and urban designers practice in a globalized world, concentrating on the complex development of the built environment within different contexts.

The Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art (MOCCA) is calling for submissions that respond to the thematic of an upcoming exhibition, entitled TBD, that will be on view September 5 to October 25, 2014 in Toronto, Canada.

A collection of 41 interviews conducted by students at the Strelka Institute, entitled Future Urbanism, is now available online. The interviews feature architects, urban planners, sociologists, researchers, and other professionals from fields related to urban studies, emphasizing the Strelka Institute's mandate for interdisciplinary thinking. To take a look at the interviews, see here.

The Robert A.M. Stern Architects has awarded McGill University Masters candidate Anna Antropva with the 2014 RAMSA Travel Fellowship, a $10,000 award presented annually to "promote investigations of the perpetuation of tradition through invention" - key to the firm's own work. With the award, Antropva will travel to Japan to further her research into ancient wood joinery techniques and their potential to be transformed and manipulated into modern day construction. “This elegant and efficient mode of construction could meaningfully inform our western building industry," she stated during her presentation to a jury that included Melissa DelVecchio, Dan Lobitz, and Grant F. Marani.

The U.S. Pavilion has launched an international search for 90 architects to collaborate (via satellite) with the eight principles of OfficeUS. The radical experiment, which will last the duration of the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale, is calling for architects to lend their “voices, expertise and skills” in an effort to “redefine the terms of design and production of architecture on the global scale.” See if you qualify and learn more about the intentions behind OfficeUS here.