If wishes were wrecking balls...well, then Manhattan would have some gaping holes courtesy of Nicolai Ouroussoff (who wouldn't look half-bad in a hard hat, we must say). The New York Times' Man on Buildings recently penned a demolition wish list for Gotham, because, Ouroussoff notes with a Dickensian flair, "Even the most majestic cities are pockmarked with horrors." Although notable for its restraint when it comes to the AT&T building ("Its farcical Chippendale top was an instant hit, and a generation of architects grew up believing that any tower, no matter how cheap and badly designed, could be defended if you added a pretty fillip to the roof"), Ouroussoff's list is both ruthless and amusingly annotated. Here's what he'd just as soon see vaporized:

We're almost glad that Sophia Petrillo didn't live to see this one: hill-top houses in Salemi, Sicily are going for a mere $1.50. The catch? The homes were damaged in an earthquake 40 years ago, and once you've forked over that euro, you'll have two years to restore your new home—according to the town's standards and using local architects, designers, and workers. And did we mention the labyrinthine bureaucracy? This sounds like a job for a can-do spirit and a whole lot of stucco!

The program is the brainchild of Salemi's colorful mayor, Vittorio Sgarbi, an art critic and former deputy culture minister that the Times of London describes as "noted for his outspoken views, not to mention his distinctive wavy hair" and "a television celebrity...and man-about-town with a host of friends in the worlds of politics and show business." And the plot thickens: photographer Oliviero Toscani is somehow involved: he's Sgarbi's adviser on "creativity and human rights." Peter Gabriel has reportedly already expressed interest in one of the deeply discounted houses. Good thing he's handy with a sledgehammer.

After five years and millions of dollars, U.S. president James Madison's house has finally been restored. This Virginia home is where Madison, father of the Constitution, spent most of his youth. This residence will reopen September 17. What makes it particularly unique is that so many restorations honor Jefferson or Washington, but not Madison. Historians have made painstaking efforts to recreate the house that our fourth president knew. "It's been a mountaintop experience to witness the revelations as the house gives up its secrets," says Mark Wenger, an architect formerly on the staff of Colonial Williamsburg now working with the restoration firm. For example, researchers punched more than 300 tiny holes into the walls to find faint outlines of long-gone chair rails and stairs. We're thinking that this renovated house, along with the new nearby Center for the Constitution, will be worth seeing.

Developer Barbara Behm says she feels like she's been pregnant for the past three years, according to this Los Angeles Times article. Her baby? A Richard Neutra house, which she had moved from one part of the city of Angels to another, all in the quest to save the home, which the city declared a historical cultural monument in 2005 to keep the bulldozers away. But that wasn't enough apparently because the homeowners Jeffrey and Karen Brandlin announced that they wanted to demolish the residence, which famed architect Richard Neutra designed in 1941 for Sybil and Charles Maxwell. Enter Behm, who purchased the home alone in 2004 from the Brandlins. All legal hurdles were cleared this year, and the architectural gem was moved this past weekend from the tony Brentwood neighborhood to Angelino Heights, near the downtown area. Once re-assembled and renovated, real estate firm of Deasy/Penner & Partners will oversee the house's sale. Anyone want to live in a Modernist ranch-style house in a sea of multi-story Victorians?

For more than 40 years, the Brooklyn Paramount Theatre has been used as an athletic gymnasium for Long Island University. Thousands of seats were removed in 1962 to make room for basketball games, which were, oddly enough, accompanied by the original Wurlitzer organ, one of the world's finest, according to this web site. Now the university has announced that a theater will once again grace the premises since it has built a new athletic facility elsewhere. Apparently the grand lobby, now the student cafeteria, and the original ceiling remain, giving movie theater buffs hope that the building can be restored to its 1928 appearance. More on the theater, with a 1960s-era photo of the gym conversion can be found here.

It looks like a waterfront grain elevator complex in St. Paul, Minn. will be converted into an interpretive center, giving the abandoned buildings new life. City officials accepted construction bids for a $2 million program that has been in the works for the past 10 years, according to Preservation Online.

The structures, built in 1917, are the last of their kind along the Mississippi River. The sack house, which had been used to package grain, will be turned into a picnic site with an interpretive center inside on the buildings' background. The head house, which was used to store grain, will be also saved for possible reuse.

"This is a project that interprets our industrial past," local preservationist Bonnie McDonald told Preservation Online. "It's going to explain why our heritage is so important."

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We're sure to get lots of hate mail for this one, which we're okay with (better angry mail than a life of sob-filled solitude, right?). So after reading stories like "The New Trophy Home, Small and Ecological," which is about people like John Cusack and Pierce Brosnan jumping on the green bandwagon by thinking about purchasing $2.8 million dollar, gigantic luxury homes that will produce their own energy, despite the fact that it will take the power of seventeen villages to build the behemoths, we get a little cynical and return to a story from a while back about the co-opting of the green movement, taking the message from "Buy less and use less" to "Don't change a thing and maybe even buy more! Just make sure it's vaguely, sorta green-ish!" And when we're really fired up at this black and white perception of earthiness, we like reading stories like this one in the SF Gate about the big troubles with building using recycled home furnishings, because it shows that things aren't so simple in dealing with all the junk we have and keep making. Okay, lecture over. We're going to go back to clubbing baby seals.

We've shifted back and forth over the past few weeks between the renovations being made to Paul Rudolph's Art and Architecture Building on Yale's campus and the desperate plea to save the architect's Riverview High School down in Florida. Now that the latter has come to an unfortunate end, we thought we'd check in on what's going on over at the building which is sure to stay up. Luckily, we found The Sun's James Gardner offering up a whole slew of details on the project to give Rudolph's most creation a nice polish and some extra features, all on the path to get it ready to open come November 9th. It's a piece that's heavily focused on Rudolph himself, which is always a good thing, given how much people either love him or hate him (same with his buildings, too). Here's a bit:

When it reopens on November 9, the original building will be officially renamed Paul Rudolph Hall, in honor of the charismatic figure who not only designed it, but ran the entire school as his personal fiefdom between 1958 and 1964. Rudolph was the sort of polarizing figure who, both in his pedagogy and in his practice, inspired an equal measure of devotion and ill will. Even today the building remains obviously and instantly controversial. But 45 years ago, at its inauguration, it possessed the fury of a polemic. A sullen gray megalith fashioned out of corduroy concrete, this bully of a building was perhaps the first on our continent to introduce the more subjective, Brutalist aesthetic that Le Corbusier had developed in the postwar period. To a culture that, for two decades, had been fed a mortifying diet of glass and steel, the abrupt intrusion of so much raw emotion was a shock to the system.

Speaking of Paul Rudolph, Robert A.M. Stern, and Sarasota, Florida, as we were yesterday, we now offer up a two-fer. First comes a quickie, looking back at the Herald Tribune, which helps to explain just what the "Sarasota School of Architecture" is and why followers of such school would care so much about saving Paul Rudolph's Riverview High School. And second comes an interesting update from Art Daily about the ongoing restoration of Yale's Art & Architecture Building, also designed by Rudolph, and the pet project of A.M. Stern, who is doing all he can to preserve the building and make it all nice and new again. Here's a bit about what exactly they'll be doing to the building:

Work on the Art & Architecture building has included a mix of literal restoration, interpretive renovation, and sensitive intervention, all sympathetic to Rudolph's vision. Mr. Gwathmey's design restores open spaces that have been fractured, revives vertical views that have long been blocked by prior renovations and ill-placed partitions, recaptures Rudolph's concept for the building's fenestration, and restores the exterior walls. The renovation also includes the complete restoration of the penthouse and rooftop terrace, creation of an easily accessible entrance to the main lecture theater, Hastings Hall, and installation of replacement windows that use contemporary technology and materials. In addition, new lighting and furnishings are being introduced throughout the building.

While Robert A.M. Stern pools together the millions of dollars donated to save his favorite Paul Rudolph creation on Yale's campus, several thousand miles away finds the people of Sarasota, Florida deciding what to do with their own Rudolph buildings, chiefly, if they should tear down his Riverview High School. It's an interesting story from the local press, in the Herald Tribune. Getting away from the money involved with restoration projects like Stern's and into a place where, despite the town already building a $135 million dollar replacement, a handful of architecture fans and the Sarasota Architecture Foundation are trying desperately, and even succeeding on some occasions, to not see the building demolished and turned into a parking lot (which is exactly what's in the agenda and has been for some time). If you're at all a Rudolph fan, it's definitely worth a read (and maybe a donation to their cause, Revive Rudolph's Riverview).