Seeing photos by Janne Tuunanen of Helsinki buildings by Alvar Aalto only whet my appetite to see more. There's a preternatural calm in the architect's complex, eccentric designs. His drawings capture the thought in them, resolving details while crafting open, generous spaces.

There's a batch of pencil drawings by architectural visionary Claude Parent on view now at gallery #A83 in New York City. Completed late-in-life, these perspectives flicker between physical structure and total abstraction.

Go see this! A new exhibit of drawings by architect Liz Swanson, Blueprints for Future Outlaws, just opened at Lexington Art League’s Lillian Boyer Gallery. Her works are precise and luminous, collapsing memory, architecture and myth.

Architects lost a building and a battle this week when demolition began for the Nakagin Capsule Tower in Tokyo. At a moment when brutalism, tiny houses, and adaptive reuse are all in style, it seems like terrifically bad timing.

What's the point of perspective? Miniatures by contemporary Udaipur painter Raja Ram Sharma beg the question. They're joyfully free from the conventions of western perspective. Yet the scenes are judiciously composed, natural, startlingly clear. They loosen the mind and the eye.

The single-family house is the most loaded and sentimental architectural form. Only architects working with very special clients -- or no clients at all -- can rise above.

The exhibit "Sigurd Lewerentz: Architect of Death and Life" at @ArkDesC honors the magnificent undersung Swedish modernist. There are drawings from his modest, monumental churches (St. Peter's, St. Mark's, Skogskyrkogården Chapel) and joyful, Art Deco-inflected secular works.

The longer I work as an architect, the more supportive I am of unbuilt and even unbuildable projects. Without some dreaming we get lifeless, uninspired buildings. Looking at Zaha Hadid's competition drawings for Parc de la Villette gives a wistful sense of what might have been.