MONTREAL -- The architect Pierre Jeanneret spent his career in the large shadow of his famous cousin, Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, better known as Le Corbusier. These Swiss-born men set up a Paris office in the 1920s, and Jeanneret, whose archive is only now becoming publicly accessible, contributed to renowned Le Corbusier designs like tubular steel chairs and cubic villas on stilts.

World War II drove them apart. Jeanneret (pronounced zhen-eh-RAY) sympathized with the Communists and joined the French Resistance, while Le Corbusier tried to get work from Italian Fascists and Vichy puppet leaders. The pair managed to patch things up after the war to collaborate on Chandigarh, a vast new capital for the Punjab state in India.

Jeanneret lived at the construction site for more than a decade, overseeing workers and tailoring the buildings to maximize cross ventilation and provide monsoon protection. Le Corbusier sent over piles of drawings from Paris, and Jeanneret replied with affectionate letters to "Cher Corbu," according to his archive, now filed at the Canadian Center for Architecture here.

After Jeanneret's death in 1967, his niece Jacqueline Jeanneret preserved 24 linear feet of his Chandigarh paperwork in metal boxes at her Geneva apartment in a glass-block building that Le Corbusier's firm designed.

"She really defended the archive" and allowed scholars occasional access, said Maristella Casciato, a professor of architectural history at the University of Bologna in Italy, who has written widely about Chandigarh. Last year Ms. Jeanneret, an octogenarian, donated the material to the Canadian Center, and Ms. Casciato is helping prepare it for exhibitions, films, online postings and publications.

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The U of MN has campus-wide access to BuildingGreen Suite. Content from BuildingGreen can be included in specific courses, and can also support efforts to integrate sustainability across the curriculum. Here is a syllabus for a 16-week course: Introduction to Sustainable Design. It includes articles from BuildingGreen.com that are directly relevant to each topic.

BuildingGreen Sustainable Design Syllabus

Click here for access through the U of MN library web site.

By CAROL VOGEL

Published: August 1, 2011

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation has long been known for creating landmark museum buildings, from its 1959 headquarters by Frank Lloyd Wright, on Fifth Avenue, to Frank Gehry's 1997 billowing titanium Guggenheim Bilbao in Spain. But this week it is opening a very different kind of structure, a pop-up gathering space on a gritty, city-owned lot in the East Village that until a few weeks ago was "all rats and rubble," as one Guggenheim official described it.

Guy Calaf for The New York Times

The BMW Guggenheim Lab opens on Wednesday in the East Village

Called the BMW Guggenheim Lab -- it is sponsored by the car company -- and opening on Wednesday, it is part think tank, part open-air forum, part community center, all nestled on a vacant sliver of land between two tenements. Its goal is to engage New Yorkers in discussions about urban living.

For the last few years pop-up shops have come and gone all over New York, giving real estate developers a temporary solution to the eyesore of an empty lot or storefront, and retailers the chance to test concepts or brands without making long-term commitments. But the Guggenheim project is believed to the first example of a major New York museum getting in on the act.

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By GISELA WILLIAMS

Published: July 29, 2011

By CHRISTOPHER F. SCHUETZE

Published: July 28, 201

Estate of R. Buckminster Fuller

The U.S. Pavilion at Expo 67 in Montreal, the 1967 world's fair. It now holds a museum.

PARIS -- Urban planning is in vogue -- again.

Before "smart cities," politicians, developers, architects and ecologists talked about "livable cities," then "digital cities," then "intelligent cities."

But there is a long and checkered history of smart ideas for urban development that turned out to be, in hindsight, not so smart, or at least not very practical.

Take the ideas of R. Buckminster Fuller, one of the 20th century's most enthusiastic champions of urban innovation.

At a time before urban planning was formally taught in universities, Mr. Fuller -- a Harvard dropout turned inventor, engineer, architect and philosopher -- directed his attention to cities. 

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For more information on Buckminster Fuller check out these books (and many more) in the Architecture and Landscape Architecture Library:

Your private sky : R. Buckminster Fuller, the art of design science

Krausse, Joachim.; Lichtenstein, Claude.; Museum für Gestaltung Zürich.

Baden : L. Müller c1999

TA140.F9 R138x 1999

Buckminster Fuller : anthology for the new millennium

Zung, Thomas T. K.

1st ed. New York : St. Martin's Press 2001

TA140.F9 B83 2001

Pilot for Spaceship Earth : R. Buckminster Fuller, architect, inventor, and poet

Lord, Athena V.

New York : Macmillan c1978

T40.F86 L67