What’s that, Doctor Grima? Spacebusters is coming? You! Hop in the Ecto-1 with us and travel around the city, catching lectures and performances and talks and events, all in an inflatable pavilion courtesy Raumlabor and the Goethe (pronounced Goethe) Institute and Storefront for Art and Architecture! But what is it, Doctor Edificial?

The pavilion is comprised of an inflatable bubble-like dome that emerges from its self-contained compressor housing. The dome expands and organically adjusts to its surroundings, be it in a field, a wooded park, or below a highway overpass. The material is a sturdy, specially-designed translucent plastic, allowing the varying events taking place inside of the shelter—dance parties, lecture series, or dinner buffets—to be entirely visible from the outside and likewise the exterior environments become the events’ backdrops.

Did somebody say buffet?

Spacebuster by Raumlabor [Storefront for Art and Architecture]

The news that HOK Sport Venue Event has—quite possibly—turned itself into Populous has opened the mental floodgates over here at HQ, turning off the faucet of reason and on the tap of insanity. And so, herewith, the Top Ten Ludicrous Names Given to an Architecture Firm.

1. Studio Gang

Because as much as we know it’s Jeanne’s last name, there’s just something about it that tickles our receptors, and we’re not talking in an architecture way. Because we’re talking, to be frank, in a Bunny Lebowski way.

2. Atelier Bow Wow

Because Ruff!

3. MTR, MTM, RCR, ON-A, XSPRL, EMBT, NO.MAD (tie)

Because it isn’t a Spanish architecture firm unless it’s an easily mix-up-able acronym, and because they take the cake for style over substance.

4. Coop Himmelb(l)au

Because firm names should be firm names, not titles to a junior-year intro to media theory term paper. (That means no parentheses.)

5. R&Sie(n)

Because not only does this name have a post-critical paranthetical, it sounds, when pronounced in French—AIR-ay-see-EH—like “heresy.”

Early this morning, a tipster (Gold Star to you, Sir!) sent in this late-breaking announcement from HOK Sport Venue Event, announcing their transformation to the more mellifluous Populous. Bearing in mind the time stamp and general ludicrousness of an architecture firm’s using an adjective as their name, not to mention the extremity of the site’s advertising-friendly slickness (Populous: Drawing People Together) we assumed this to be a joke.

A dig or two later and we’re just not so sure it is. Looks like HOK Sport Venue Event broke off from its status—held since 2000—as wholly owned subsidiary of St. Louis-based but globally practicing HOK Group on December 31st of last year, with the understanding that they’d launch a “new corporate name and brand in 2009.”

The memo that kicked this all off:

HELLO!

Today, we are excited to unveil our new name and brand.

Our new name reflects the successful completion of our management buyout from HOK Group in December 2008 and allows us to enthusiastically embrace the expertise we uniquely claim — drawing people together.

With clarity of vision and purpose that only amplifies our expertise; all of the people, portfolio, capabilities and expertise formerly known as HOK Sport Venue Event continue under our new name.

Beyond discovering our new name and brand, we invite you to stop by and join our global conversation about “What Draws People Together?”

We thank you for your relationship with us over our first 25 years, and we look forward to continuing to work with you to create environments that draw people and communities together for unforgettable experiences.

Which is all just enough mumbo jumbo to make us think it’s real. So, to parse. Populous. Densely populated; filled to capacity.

Alternately, “a computer game developed by Bullfrog in 1989 and … regarded by many as being the seminal god game.”

Michael Boodro is heading back to Elle Decor after totally screwing it up a few years ago! He used to be at Martha Stewart Living, with crazy Martha Stewart, who has a blog! Mitchell Owens is gonna be the new Editor at Large! (Whatever that means!) Battlestar Galactica has ended but we still haven’t seen the final episodes so don’t tell us who Number 7 is! We can’t stand the fact that full-length Star Trek trailers are playing in theaters near you! Rem and Miuccia are superfriends! Frank Gehry is coo-coo for kooky cats!

Whew. Let’s get it allllll out.

But for the record, architecture is still very interesting.

And Now, a Note From Your Editors [Edificial]

Word of Trump Soho’s problems—unhappy neighbors, weird location, awful accidents, the Global Pigf*ck of Epic Proportions—has never quite reached epic fever pitch the way some New York City developments do. Part of this might be sheer disbelief that this Handel-designed Rockwell-interiored structure will ever actually happen. And part of this is sheer disbelief that Trump would actually put a tower in Soho. So it should have come as an entirely believable announcement that Robert Curran, generously described as “international photographer,” (we dare you to come up with a blancmangier descriptor although full marks for his almost-Cylon website) will, according to model Executive Vice President Ivanka Trump, “add a deeper dimension to the spaces throughout Trump Soho.” Also there will be exploration of the human condition. And a “vibrant image of iconic architecture” or three. Example above.

You know we’re in deep insanity when photography is being used to sell architecture, and we don’t mean that in a magazine way.

Not to turn this into any more of a semblance of a personal ad than it already sometimes always segues into, but a characteristic/quirk/personality element you should—as the dedicated readers we love you for being—know about us, or at least half of us, is that we pretty much want to be watching movies and/or television, all of the time. Constantly. As in, if we could have a life that involved an intravenous drip of Californication—which started us on this bandwagon with Karen’s first-season “there is no memory without architecture” Ruskin reference—punctuated with bedtime (we learned our lesson one sleepless Tuesday night) episodes of 30 Rock and the occasional speedball combo of The Office and Battlestar Galactica, we’d be good to go, David Foster Wallace style.

We have also been told more times than we can remember that life is not a novel, that experience doesn’t become manifest through just another re-articulation, but we continue to throw ourselves at the merciless feet of cruel narrative, hoping against hope that this time will be different, that this particular action we’re taking for an anecdote will prove to have been worth it, that we’ll finally learn something for ourselves.

And then it just occurred to us that there must be an easier, softer way. If we took all the wisdom doled out by various architects in sundry movies, we have a feeling we’d skip a lot of the growing pains. And so, herewith in an attempt to spare you the same difficulties we’ve had to live through, our Top Five Moments-of-Wisdom Delivered by a Person Playing an Architect (or Wannabe) in an Audio/Visual Format:

We’ll be getting into the glory that is—and it was—this weekend’s oddly placed Key for a full dose of Monday Can Be Real Estate Day in just a moment, but as an early-morning segue, we’d like to introduce you to Bed-Stuy’s Shaker House Condominium, a six-unit project inspired by a Massachussetts Shaker village. Just in case you’re an alien and in the mood to buy. But why Shaker, with all the uptight spareness and quasi-spirituality that implies? Let’s take a look inside a developer’s keen and possibly light-free mind:

Finding the building vacant and in need of a total rehabilitation, the developers were at a loss as to what thematic design to use…. Being presented with such a Tabula Rasa, the simple clean and symmetrical design of the facade suggested the use of Shaker design. It seemed providential as well that the building was located on Hancock Street, the actual name of the principal Shaker Village in Hancock, Massachusetts. And so the concept for Shaker House came about.

Yes! That is exactly how architecture gets decided! If we’d known it was as easy as picking a random theme and looking for eerie consistencies, we’d be the moguls behind Louis L’Amour House: Where Park Slope changes names, and so can you.

Looks like the world’s third-largest insurance brokerage, Willis, is moving into Chicago’s Sears Tower at the price of $14.50 a square foot. With a little bonus thrown in of the tower’s no longer being called the Sears Tower. From now on, when you’re looking to go to Chicago and marvel at the thrill of modern engineering, you’ll be pointing in the direction of Willis Tower.

Over under on its working? We’ll think about it on our commute home. Just going to make sure we go under the Met Life building, stop at 250 Greenwich for a little E.B. White fix, and finish up our evening up on U2 Way.

Sears Tower to be renamed for new tenant [Crain’s via ArchNewsNow]

One of the hilarious things about doing what we do is that we spend a lot of time around incredibly insane luxury. We have lurked in multi-million-dollar houses, taken hard-hat tours of multi-zillion-dollar developments, and been the happy recipients of tote bags advertising everything from the New Museum to, today, Dellis Cay. We’ve always stepped back a bit from it, realized that we’re there simply to observe and not to participate, accepted that we’re welcomed not for our charms (alone) but rather our momentary affiliation. We’ve tried to remain as removed as we can while forming those relationships so necessary to getting the writing-about-architecture done, and we’ve always tried to keep at least one eyebrow raised. This isn’t to say that we come in all judgey and jazz. Just that we try to be, you know, aware.

Which is why we have been continually intrigued by the now-solid relationship between Storefront for Art & Architecture, the counter-culture downtown pizza-slice of a gallery and obvious Edificial Top-Five-to-Seven, and the Dellis Cay development. To be fair, Dellis Cay—a private island being developed by the equally mysterious Dr. Cem Kinay (who we could well imagine having a PhD in Awesome) is off the charts insane full of good architecture. Or, it will be, once the buildings by Zaha Hadid, David Chipperfield, Piero Lissoni, Kengo Kuma, Carl Ettensperger, and today’s star Shigeru Ban, are built.

Scrunchies eventually—unfortunately, tragically, misguidedly—go out of style. So, too, do pegged acid-washed jeans, too-short jeans, too-mom jeans, too-black jeans, too-long jeans, and too-too jeans. But there’s hope for all you that went to the dark and high-waisted side. Courtesy Edifave Transracial (run by esteemed traveler David Kaufman) comes the news that you can turn your old jeans—you’re gonna need to find three pairs of Wranglers—into a classy stool, simply by sending them over to the Japanese (of course!) company NOyes. (Oxymoron check, check check.) We encourage you to wallow in the brilliance that is the video. And then, to say goodbye.

Big in Japan: Recycled Jeans Furniture [Transracial]

Wednesday we freak you out with product design that makes you wanna close your eyes and pretend it’s not happening. Sorry: this is no dream. For years, the capering morons in the film industry (pace, Jeffrey Katzenberg) have been telling us that 3D is the way of the future. Hopefully they’re wrong—but somebody in the tech world has heard the call.

A group of British designers would like to introduce you to Minoru, above, whose name means “reality” in Japanese. Reality being a concept with which the Japanese have a rather casual relationship, it’s no surprise that this “reality” device brings you the latest in bizarre simulacra: Minoru will carry your 3D image across the web, projecting it in YouTube videos, Instant Messenger, or Skype, where it can be viewed either with 3D glasses or using the newly available 3D-enabled screens. Minoru is definitely kind of cute, but he sorta creeps us out, looking at us quizzically as if to say, “Why aren’t playing with me?” Click through for more reasons to retreat into radical Ludditism.

3D Webcam [Technology Review]

Tuesday is Koolhaas Day! Rumblings of the Prada Transformer’s arrival have been going around since Shia LeBeouf first graced our movie screens, but today, those murmurs got louder. Always slated to open sometimes in spring, word arrives that the mutable structure—four possible buildings in one!—will be opening April 25 in Seoul with an exhibition of La Miuccia’s skirts—an extension of the same Waist Down show that took up the Soho store’s windows for a few weeks back in the heady and post-fire days of early ‘06. June 26 will bring the launch of a movie series chosen by Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu in collaboration with Elvis Mitchell. Later, Beyond Control, a show described as “an inspiring magma of works,” and then “further activities!”

Which we can only guess at, from the images after the jump.

In the beginning, there was the encyclopedia, and the encyclopedia was with knowledge, and the encyclopedia was knowledge. The same was in the beginning with knowledge. All things were made by knowledge; and without knowledge was not any thing that was made. In knowledge was life. And the life was the light of men. And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.

There was an encyclopedia sent from knowledge, whose name was Wiki. The same came for a witness, to bear witness to the Wiki, that all men through it might believe. It was not knowledge, but was sent to bear witness of that knowledge.

That was the true knowledge, which lights every man that comes into the world. He was in the world and the world knew him not. He came to his own, and his own received him not. But as many as received him, to them gave he the power to become the sons of knowledge, even to them that believe unto his name.

And the word was made flesh, and dwelled among us (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten knowledge, full of grace and truth.)

We speak, of course, of Thom Mayne.

And of Morphopedia, the newly launched “online encyclopedia of Morphosis.”

With great thanks to sister-from-another-mister UnBeige, behold a sketch of Happy Chic designer Jonathan Adler’s “Malibu Dreamhouse,” created in honor of Barbie’s upcoming (set your Kens for Monday!) fiftieth birthday. We stopped our collection at Skating Barbie (figures), but this doesn’t mean we can’t get thrilled at this particular moment of sheer excess. We’d guess Adler’s doing this with more than a modicum of tongue-in-cheek, and it’s the kind of thrilling crossover moment that makes us regret a little less that, so many years ago and despite near-constant voting, Architect Barbie just didn’t quite make it into production.

Jonathan Adler Designs Barbie Dreamhouse [UnBeige]

We were going to wait until tomorrow to fully delve into the newness that will be the new MoMA website—“MoMA.org Now Integrates Social Media Tools and Enables Users to Personalize and Share Their Museum Experiences,” apparently—which will allow people to, you know, go look at art and then talk about it in an online format, lest anyone ever want to simply go to a museum with a friend and catch up about the Kippenberger (GENIUS. GO.) over a tarte flambee. But the fluorescents finally caught up with us, and we realized why we kept coming back to our announcement. Which email read:

“MoMA Launches Resigned Website March 6.”

That’s right. Not redesigned. Resigned. Either the interns are asleep or, we’re more likely to hope, somebody over there just wasn’t completely, well, on board.

Wednesday is traditional WTF Day here at Edificial HQ’s Fotoshoppe department, and today, it’s a double WTF: first, it’s a fotoshoppe with only one foto, and second, it’s a talking, feeling virtual assistant named Laura! The Times article on Sunday about the friendly fiberoptic female was fairly freaky. Long story short, you’ll finally have the Star Trek-ish experience of speaking your computer desires into the air and having a cheerful girlish voice respond in kind, giving you the weather, ordering you an horchata, and maybe telling you how spiffy you look.

Laura’s [is able] to make sophisticated decisions about the people in front of her, judging things like their attire, whether they seem impatient, their importance and their preferred times for appointments.

“Open the pod bay doors, HAL…” Hey, Laura sweetheart, do us a favor? Tell us why our computer is acting insane this afternoon. If it weren’t, we might have been able to bomb around the internet and find some more pictures of your lovely face.

Microsoft Mapping Course to a Jetsons-Style Future [New York Times]

Just this morning, a friend received a missive from an organization calling themselves HiringArchitects.com (essentially a MyLinkedFace for the architecture world, in case they didn’t get the memo), and sent it along. (Gold star to you, Sir!) As we are loath to reproduce the entire text for fear of putting you, our legions of readers, to sleep, suffice to say that it’s a lot of corporate biz-y mind-grapes-squeezing jargon about “innovative” and “powerful” and “redesigned,” with the remarkable exception of this sentence:

We have also developed a very inexpensive solution for helping you put your hands on qualified Architectural candidates in 24 hours or less.

If only we’d known. We’ve been trying to put our hands on King Joshua Prince-Ramus for years.

So dig it. Like, we were pretty freaked out by that Evan Ratliff piece in The New Yorker all about the coming robot army that’s gonna take over the world. We weren’t much comforted by author P.W. Singer’s appearance on “The Daily Show” to promote his new book, Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century. But now Yanko has got us terrified. Above is the Delta Unit, designed by Chris Rogers for Inspectorbots. This one’s not armed, thank god. (Not yet, anyway.) It’s equipped with a ball turret camera on top and it’s supposed to suss out potentially dangerous locations before human reinforcements arrive.

So it’s a creepy robot spy. But what’s frightening us is this: Why does it look so… so good? Rogers, an engineering professor at Tufts, has done a lot of work in robotics, but this is by far the most seductive object yet to emerge from the burgeoning robo-security industry. If they keep this up, our next girlfriend could be Seven of Nine. (Hope, hope, hope, hope.)

Magic blue italics, tell them what to do!

One of the highlights of the many seconds we’ve spent in the trenches of various “creative” industries is seeing just how random the creative act actually is. Much as architects like to talk about how their buildings have been influenced by the flapping of a bees’ wings on a Scharoun balcony, or by the particular fray of a particular ray of sunlight that falls between March 2nd and 3rd on that one Antarctic iceberg, the reality, more often than not, is that it just looks pretty baller.

And graphic design is no exception. Pepsi’s new logo, currently blanketing our visual world and embedded within various xoxo’s and oooooooh’s on bright shiny billboards, is one that we like. For its simplicity, its clarity, the way it’s recognizably Pepsi but in a new (and fresh! and whiz-bang!) way. We didn’t, on the other hand, know that we liked it for its gravitational field, its symmetrical energy, its roots equally in the Moebius Strip as in Pythagoras. The Arnell Group’s Design Strategy for, as they named it, BREATHTAKING, has been making the internet rounds, and we’re thrilled to have had the chance to see it. Fast Company calls it “one of the most ridiculous things ever perpetrated by somebody calling himself a designer.” We call it GENIUS!

(That they got paid.)

Pepsi Logo Design Brief: Branding Lunacy to the Max [Fast Company via Unbeige]

The latest in mental prosthesis: MIT is putting the internet where it always wanted to be—all over the place. The Institute’s Media Lab has developed a device to project web data (flight boarding times, sports statistics, architecture tabloids) from an internet-accessible cell phone onto any surface with just the wave of a hand. TED conferees got a chance to gawk at the “Sixth Sense” gadget, pioneered by the lab’s Fluid Interfaces group. Here’s how it works: You want to know the time? Describe a circle with your fingers, and allakhazam! the device worn around your neck (or, as likely, in your pocket protector) picks up the motion and an image of a clock appears instantly on your wrist. See it in streaming video after the jump, or wait a couple years and watch it on your girlfriend’s back. (It’s like Minority Report, only with fewer murders and more dorks.)

TED: MIT Students Turn Internet Into a Sixth Human Sense [Wired]