Listing of the Week: Spend life in a glass house

Beverly Hills house by modernist architect Ed Niles features comely curves and unobstructed views.A circular garden courtyard enclosed by soaring steel-ribbed walls of glass is the dramatic focal point of a Beverly Hills house by modernist Malibu architect Ed Niles.

The sprawling home built for the former owners of Architectural Digest connects the indoors and outdoors through the extensive use of glass walls and doors.Philanthropists Bud and Betsy Knapp, then the owners of Architectural Digest, set out in the 1990s to create a personal living space that allowed for large-scale entertaining and civic events, could display an extensive art collection and met their need for privacy.

Italian architect Renzo Piano is unveiling a new wing of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art this weekend, a project he said makes maximum use of the "amazing light" of a city prone to "crazy ideas."The renowned master planner's latest creation is the glass and stone Resnick Exhibition Pavilion, which will expand the museum's exhibition space by 45,000 square feet (4,200 square meters).

French architect Dominique Perrault is sanguine about the future, viewing even urban sprawl as an opportunity rather than a scourge.The challenge will be in managing the available space, he told AFP."We are in a finite world, which is completely new compared with a time like for example that of Christopher Columbus," said Perrault, who is in charge of France's pavilion at Venice's architectural Biennale this year."But even in this finite world there is still a lot of space that is available to us, which needs to be respected, protected and managed," he said.

Raimund Abraham, the Austrian architect who renounced his nationality in protest at the far right, has died in a road accident in Los Angeles, the Austrian consulate there told the APA news agency.Los Angeles police confirmed that Abraham, 72, had died in a collision between a car and a bus on the Los Angeles freeway, overnight Wednesday, said the consulate.It was confirming a report published in Friday's edition of the Austrian daily Der Standard.

Never Built: Los Angeles, an exhibition opening this spring at Never Built: Los Angeles -- an exhibition by Los Angeles's A+D Architecture and Design Museum, features a collection of spectacular projects that only saw the drawing board.