Back in early June we told you about Apple’s plans for a new headquarters in Cupertino — a crazy glass donut of a building that Steve Jobs described as looking “a little like a spaceship landed,” and was rumored to be the work of starchitect Norman Foster. Now, thanks to Archinect, we have Foster’s officially released plans for the campus, which still look more like something out of 2001 (or maybe Lost?) than any office park we’ve ever seen before. What do you think of the design?

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If you’re planning on hitting the road this Memorial Day weekend (last year, 31 million people did), then the thought of stopping for gas is probably a bit of a buzz kill. While we can’t do anything about the prices at the pump, we would like to point out that it can be an aesthetically pleasing experience; in fact, over the years some of the world’s most famous architects — from Mies van der Roh to Norman Foster — have built what we consider to be beautiful gas stations. Click through to check out 10 of our favorite examples, and leave your own suggestions in the comments.

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Today at Flavorpill, we were thrilled to hear that Patti Smith is working on a sequel to her National Book Award-winner Just Kids. We wanted to move into Norman Foster’s seaside bungalow in Cap Ferrat, France. We were shocked by many of the images Rolling Stone‘s slideshow of war crime photos censored by the Pentagon. We read about the invention of Pong, the very first arcade game. We weren’t sure how to feel about a morbid new app that predicts how many words a user has left to communicate before his or her death. We checked out Pitchfork’s chronological musings on all 43 of the songs in the LCD Soundsystem catalogue. We previewed images from Ron English’s South Park 15th anniversary tribute show, which opens today at New York’s Opera Gallery. We continued to be confused by Terrence Malick’s latest film The Tree of Life. We were happy that the WestLicht Museum of Photography has “saved” the International Polaroid Collection, which contains over 4,400 works, including pieces by Ansel Adams and Andy Warhol. And finally, we imagined a world where Maurice Sendak had actually created an illustrated adaptation The Hobbit. Too bad someone had to go and mislabel that hobbit as an elf…

Holiday travel will bring millions of people back and forth across bridges over the next few days. Most of them, we’ll be honest, are boring, pedestrian ones that barely deserve notice. Seen from many a car and bus window, I-95’s span across the Delaware River gets a nod for height and length, but offers only views Delaware and New Jersey’s grim industrial decay. So, in other words, nothing to write home about. On the opposite end of the spectrum: the 10 striking feats of engineering combined with picturesque locations that we’ve compiled after the jump.

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Nothing screams the hubris of urban life like a giant building. And while for some cities a skyscraper is just another building, plenty peg their self-worth on mammoth projects, designed to serve as iconic credentials of progress. However of those planned, only a handful ever result in a shovel in the ground — and even then their completion remains uncertain, held hostage by economic and technical realities. Chicago and Dubai, while already boasting some of the world’s tallest buildings, suffer such disappointment on a regular basis. In the grim midst of the Great Recession, not even the best laid plans of city or architect are safe. After the jump, check out some prime examples of the Tower of Babel’s modern heirs.

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Despite the clunky moniker, we read with interest as The Independent UK rattled off the seven — count ‘em, seven — relevant starchitects in the world, contrasting them with commercial building firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. SOM is a workhorse firm (established in 1936) that has put up major projects from Dubai to Beijing including five of the ten tallest buildings in the world — in other words, America’s first “super practice.” What SOM hasn’t hammered down is the je ne sais quoi of its flashier architectural contemporaries. A primer on the heavy hitters after the jump.

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While you might not be racking up the frequent flier miles of George Clooney’s Ryan Bingham character from Up in the Air, odds are that you’re going to be catching a flight somewhere in the coming weeks. And that there will be massive delays. But that doesn’t have to be a bad thing: We consider these seven beautiful airport terminals from around the world the kind of places an architecture geek wouldn’t mind getting stuck in — for a few hours at least.

Which aesthetically pleasing hubs did we miss?

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The designing mind behind the British Museum expansion, the Reichstag dome, and the Hearst Building in midtown Manhattan will be slumming it this spring. Sir Norman Foster‘s latest New York project (in addition to three currently unbuilt edifices) is an eight-story contemporary art gallery on the Bowery, former home of myriad flophouses and now neighbor to the envelope-pushing New Museum. Sperone Westwater is relocating from the West Village, into the 20,000 square foot space that Foster has designed around a massive central elevator, which will act as a secondary, mobile gallery space. Read More »

We love a good list, and today’s is no exception. The not-so-short list of nominees for World Building of the Year includes three entries from Foster + Partners, a KieranTimberlake residence that appeared in MoMA’s pre-fab exhibition last summer, and a bevy of unbuilt projects. After the jump we round up some of the cultural picks in all their architectural goodness. Read More »

Londonist pointed us toward this picture of Heathrow airport’s new terminal, designed by architect Norman Foster’s firm. The environmentally-friendly (save for all the fuel-guzzling planes that will use it, anyway) terminal is set to replace Terminal 1 and Terminal 2, longtime standbys at the world-class airport. Terminal East won’t open until 2019, but we think England is gearing up to show off its fancy design when the Olympics come to town in summer 2012.