It’s tough times for the kids. First House & Garden folded, then domino, then Fulcrum, and now… and sorry, we mean holded, us. Still, we’ll confess to having had a few dreams here and there. Regular features for the shelter magazines that remain. We were thinking “Eva and Ian Talk About Architecture in a Print Format,” perhaps a little “Edifissure” column. Unfortunately, looks like it’s gonna be our architectural-themed party-planning company that’ll be pulling in the real funny money, as word comes—via Women’s Wear Daily, via erstwhile Official Edificial Contributor Stephen Zacks—that magazines are just as pigf*cked as we are. Let’s play with some numbers, shall we?

Herewith, the Edificial Index.

2: number of new beauty product-focused columns in Coastal Living.
2: number (at least) of new beauty product-focused advertisers in Coastal Living.

22: percentage Elle Decor ad pages are down.
27: percentage Metropolitan Home ad pages are down.
70: percentage of new House Beautiful advertisers.
190: pages in Metropolitan Home.
253: pages in Elle Decor.

10: number of pennies Architectural Digest publisher says the title “doesn’t do design on.”
50: percentage Architectural Digest ad pages are down.
80: age, in years, Architectural Digest editor Paige Rense will imminently turn.
1: flatly denied item that Rense will be replaced.

8: dollar amount that typical Architectural Digest contributors are paid per word.

350: exhibitors at this year’s Architectural Digest home show.
250: exhibitors at last year’s Architectural Digest home show.

235: monthly cost of a mid-grade Freelancers Union insurance plan.
14: average number of times, per day, that we contemplate opening a bakery.
4: number of offers from our mother to “stay in my spare bedroom.” In Aberdeen.

Memo Pad: Less Shelter [WWD]

Again, we apologize for the rhymed passage at the end of the last post, a disheartening instance of recidivism which will not happen again. Some of us thought a moment of deathless verse might do something to bring up the tone of this blog, but as usual we were shouted down. It was a mistake, and we admit it, even if certain other parties aren’t big enough to admit their own foibles and small-mindedness.

We turn now to the AD 100, billed by the magazine’s editors as “our selection of the top architects and interior designers whose work has been featured in Architectural Digest.” The ever-evolving list is a veritable switchboard of chic, and right now AD is running images online of work by the list’s designers under the heading 100 Great Spaces.

What do we see there? One example, pictured above, is a dining room by the always-surprising Peter Marino. Combining “contemporary and traditional Southeast Asian elements,” the space emanates a radiant calm, albeit underscored by a soupcon of the dangerously exotic. Examined closely, the centerpieces are found to reveal decorative landmines and punji sticks (a type of booby-trapped stake). It is a space altogether hostile to another of AD’s Great Spaces, Tino Zervudachi’s Summer Duck Wood, a comfortable, traditional retreat for anarcho-capitalist scum in rustic Rapidan, VA. The library’s maple paneling and overstuffed chairs lend the environment an old-fashioned jingoism, a testament to the owner’s scorched-earth heritage. This sentiment is echoed, and abbeted, by Annabelle Selldorf’s Colorado home for design-minded couple Katrin Bellinger and Christoph Henkel, a vertical mansion which crouches on the landscape with all the macho heft of 3,000 years of brutal patriarchy—

The full series is an impressive tribute to the possibilities of interior design now, and proves that AD knows how to stay relevant—without going trendy.

100 Great Spaces [Architectural Digest]

A few weeks ago, fed up with the fact that Surface is now six months behind in paying us (sorry, guys, it’s public shaming time) while CITY took a good five months to get around to cutting a check for our last column, annoyed that editors treat paying us like a favor—if we hear the “oh yeah… sorry, it’s such a drag, we’re so slow” one more time, we’re gonna start dragging our feet on, you know, writing and filing words (it’s such a pain we know, yeah, mkaaaay)—and generally outraged at the treatment we and our fellows have received, we asked for a little more bitchslapping to make the uninsured world go around.

And then, of course, Gawker stole our thunder. So, now, we’ll borrow their results, helpfully laid out in a nifty little Rachel Harrison-style pink (to make it pretty!) chart. The takeaway? The Brooklyn Paper is by far the worst offender with Michael Klug’s Whitewall coming in a close second. Given what we’ve heard about Whitewall—that they tried to negotiate a freelancer’s rate down after accepting the story for publication, claiming general poverty and craptasticness—we’re unsurprised that they are more than 350 days (that’s almost a year, just to drive the point home) overdue. Three non-design magazines down the rung and Surface checks in with an average lag of about nine months, which makes our 180-day (that’s after the contractual 90) wait seem like a walk in the Spacecraft 2.

Let’s bring it on home. Speaking of print, how’s Print doing? I.D. paying you? What about Record? Architectural Digest still cutting mad checks? Any of the Nasties holding back? Tips(at)edificial(dot)com or commentate that justified anger. Let’s get these guys feeling a little less like God, and a little more like Martin.

Pay It Forward (Or at All) [Edificial]
Print’s Ten Worst Late Payment Offenders [Gawker]
Image [Flickr]

Back in the day, we introduced you to the Architectural League’s Urban Omnibus, a mysterious project housed somewhere in (on?) the Gowanus and run by mysterious movie-maker Cassim Shepard and the mysteriously-named Varick Shute (the closest our world is ever gonna get to a Lockhart Steele). Back in their day, which includes today, they published a series of posts, On Criticism, launched by none other than Slow Thinker Andrew Blum. With the fourth response coming from vaunted thinker The Bostwick and rounding out others from prodigy Diana Lind (whose website is the singularly best-designed approach to self-aware self-promotion we’ve seen, ever) and superstar reporter Alec Appelbaum who play the lettuce and mayonnaise (guess who’s what!) parts in the middle of our wordy sandwich, we think it’s time for a little spotcheck. A paraphrase of a breakdown, if you will, with apologies to the fervently fluid prose of those whose ideas we’re so reductively condensing:

Blum: Ponzi scheme. What is criticism?
Lind: Lots of stuff happens besides buildings. I like Jane and Herbert.
Appelbaum: City politics are important. Especially when you have a kid.
Bostwick: Architects are people too! Also smelly. Mostly interesting!

Sing it, brothers and sisters in A-frames. Let’s get deep and down.

And Omnibus? We’re ready. We’ve got our take all planned out, limerick-style.

On criticism [Urban Omnibus]
In Praise of in Praise of Slowness [Edificial]

On the train this morning, we lovingly perused the April issue of Vogue, thrilled with its heft but bereft at its lack of inclusion of the “just had a breakup and might be hitting the Momofuku Milk Bar a little hard” body type in its annual “thin,” “athletic,” and “”curvy”” (yes, that gets double quotes)-celebrating Shape Issue. The magazine’s front-of-book design—blocky red with chunky white type—has taken a little getting used to and every so often we confuse a column with a promotional editorial, but overall, we dig. And dug, until we got to the last Index page (Hunter boots in Jimmy Choo leather-print-embossed rubber y’all!) and were met—past the ad pages—with an upside-down Sea Monster watch. Which was very manly.

Vogue double-packaged the flagship magazine and their Men’s Vogue spinoff (reduced to two issues a year in this whole Global Pigf*ck of Epic Proportions) into one big book this year (that explains the heft), which allowed for a fun run through our thoughtsicles re: design. Essentially, it’s the most one-to-one translation ever. Where Vogue has red headline-backgrounds, Men’s Vogue has black and gray, with the font speculated by some to be Foundry Gridnik. This is nowhere near as much information as we’d like, but it raises an intriguing question in this time of complete gender equality disparity. (Sorry, that was hope.) The difference between Vogue’s and her brother’s layouts is striking, as is seeing how resolutely masculine of a feeling the Men’s Vogue pages have. Is it the type-saturation? The bolded serifs in the middle of the grafs? The way everything feels all scrunched together, almost bursting with virility? (Bear with us, we haven’t yet hit up our daily crack pie.) The stories—profiles of Robert Downey Jr. and Edifave Jeremy Irons—aren’t so different from what could be found on the flipped-and-unreversed side of the package, but the way they’re packaged is. It almost makes it seem like girls like to look at lots of different shiny things and boys like to read long stories. Which we know—for a proven fact—isn’t true. So why perpetuate the myth? Here’s what we want for Christmas. A profile that doesn’t involve weight, printed in Bank Gothic Light.

Over at Metropolis, as one of the many brilliant essays that make up their “What is Good Design?” issue, columnist Bruce Sterling breaks our day-after-tomorrow-ness down into a series of references to 99-cent iPhone apps, Alessi’s Bettina set, and Obama-friendly wifi. It’s a full essay, one of those densely-packed full-of-imagery stories that sort of exhausts our linguistic sensorium without making us long for the days of white boxes filled with brown-ish ones. Rather, it makes us think that the multi-packed multi-story worlds of the Gibsonian Tokyo-Marts might be, if not fun, at least more than survivable. Read it, along with Hockenberry’s Within the Context of No Context riff, and Official Edificial Top-Five-to-Seven criticizer Karrie Jacobs’ ode to the Kindle, and you’ll be good to go. To the future, and beyond.

Product Panic: 2009 [Metropolis]
Within the Product of No Product [Metropolis]
Rekindling the Book [Metropolis]

David Barringer, winner of last year’s Winterhouse Writing Awards, and all-around brilliant person we’d be jealous of if only we weren’t so green with envy, has written a spectacular take-down of the realities of freelancing. We have to just quote, as even to paraphrase is pathetic:

It’s a paradox, the home expanding its functional independence as the world expands its functional interdependence. The more globalization enables temporary collaboration of individuals across the globe, the more individuals are forced to become permanently self-reliant. I work collaboratively, but I survive on my own. I am paid for the task and no more. No benefits, healthcare, insurance, overtime, investments. I’ll be repaying my own school loans as I’m taking out new loans for my kids, and I’ll be paying for my Boomer parents’ aging lifestyles even as I can’t afford to invest in my own retirement.

Given that we’re currently embroiled with more than one magazine which treats payment as a post-game favor—get it together, Surface—we thought we’d turn it over to you, our cadre of similarly like-minded individuals.

Who pays? Who doesn’t? What’s the time-frame like, and what do you do when it reaches obscene proportions? We know of one freelancer who sends an x’s and o’s-filled reminder on Day 91, and we know of another who just asks what’s up. What works better? Phone calls or emails? Legal threats or bare-assed pleading? What’s the farthest you’ve gone, and have you ever just given up? Who are you willing to keep writing for because of the status or support, and who have you had to cut loose?

Comments or tips(at)edificial(dot)com. Anonymity is, as always, assured.

Generation Squeezed [AIGA Voice]

It’s a funny time to start buying up shelter magazines, but try telling that to Sandow Media. In a move that King Pyrrhus might have admired, the publishers of luxury deluxe LUXE are expanding their stable of lifestyle/architecture glossies with the acquisition of Western Interiors and Design. The circulation figures—250,000 and rich rich rich—ain’t half bad, but we have to wonder about the mag’s fundamentals: WID had to rustle up an unspecified figure from their investors in January for, ahem, “continued growth” in this “difficult economic environment.” Sandow Media is headed up by cunning young entrepreneur Adam Sandow, whose aim is to spawn a legion of regional luxury publications. He’s Florida-based, so, you know, they’re feeling pretty cocksure down there about fancy new houses.

Hum dee-dee. Oh! Why, hello there. Nice to see you again. Say—did you hear the news?

Despite the plunge in real-estate values, most Americans remain very proud of their homes. So interest in home decorating and interior stories is fairly strong, even with the slumping economy and the closure of Domino magazine.

Thank you, David Ward of PR Week, for giving us hope in these excremental times. But aren’t there any, you know, trends, such as design writers like ourselves can look out for? Coming right up:

…home decor media is shifting away from aspirational coverage toward cost-effective projects.

Design editors and writers, be on the lookout for the following pitches: flacks will “highlight the eco-friendly features of [their] client’s products”; they will deploy “high-quality images with every pitch”; and they will assault us with samples so that we can see how easy it is to be green with the splendiferous econo-trinkets they’re hawking. But can we really bemoan the PR-ization of recessionary design if it’s necessary to promote quality products that suit the times? Yes, but let’s do it nicely.

Home Design Coverage Still on Solid Ground [PR Week]

There are as many differences between your two editors as there are grains of sand in one of those “write your name on a grain of sand!” things. And one of these differences is the predilection of one to read certain things on the internet and others in analog form, and the predilection of the other to do the exact opposite. And so, this morning, as we discussed the various traffic for the day, the stories we would plant and the others we would invent, we brought ourselves around to talking about Key, the New York Times real estate magazine launched with great glory a few years ago. One of us had planned to write about the writing—to get into the stories, to see what was shaking out in the language of the crash—while the other had planned to write about the format—this formerly stand-alone publication’s new home as an in-book supplement to the regular New York Times Magazine.

And so, being ever-cooperative, we’ll touch on both. But first and foremost, the real story. Which is, we believe, the stories. Jonathan Mahler writes an elegy for the city and its Bloomberg-aided development that is, with sentences like “New York is again a city of abandoned lots, half-finished buildings and free-floating anxiety,” worthy of a soundtrack by his namesake. Introducing an element of humanism into that now-epic debate as to whether this recession is good or bad for design and architecture, Mahler says that “the current downturn, like the previous downturns, is not something to celebrate; the city and its residents will suffer.”

Andrew Rice spends six (internet) pages trolling around the Hamptons in search of someone’s buying—rather than closetedly-frantically selling—a property and personalizes the faces of abstracted tragedy, a “the way we live now” approach repeated in Susan Dominus’ profile of super-broker Dolly Lenz, who says, in between less-frequent Four Seasons lunches, that the game is “just not as fun.” Jim Lewis introduces In Sook Kim’s photos, one above, controlled images that are part Rear Window and part Playtime, and a series of sidebars goes from WTF with a lap around Manhattan’s private pools to down-to-earth with a look at the city’s only trailer park, and from obscene to funny (even if New York’s Jessica Pressler infamously did it better—and funnier—four years ago).

The last note is the deepest.

We’d been told, economic difficulties of our current economic crisis—given this economic climate, you know—aside, that the current issue of Metropolis, just arrived on our doorstep and imminently coming to an internet near you, would rock.

We weren’t skeptical, but we weren’t expecting to have our socks as knocked off as they were, by a group of ten essays answering our—and their—titular question. Julie Taraska argues that it’s sustainable; Kristi Cameron that it’s accessible. Jennifer Kabat says that good is functional; Canadian Paul Makovsky that it’s well made and affordable. Suzanna LaBarre wants design to be ergonomic, and Donald Norman drops the lightning bolt of good design being emotionally resonant. Official Edificial Top-Five-to-Seven Martin C. Pedersen says that it’s enduring. Ken Shulman wants us to know that good is socially beneficial, and softballer extraordinaire Mason Currey brings it back to—gasp!—beauty.

This is sort of like the 2003 time they did the Fiction Issue. A little out of left field, a lot awesome. We love it when this magazine (which, full disclosure, we write for every few bismuth half-lives) stretches to fill the capacity we always knew it had, when stories become essays and John Hockenberry and Bruce Sterling and Karrie Jacobs fly. For all the talk about the good that’s going to come out of the recession, this month’s issue is a moment that reminds us that all we really have to do is think as hard as we can, and write as well as we can.

Ideas are free. This round, we’re buying.

So there we were last night, reading the always-spectacular Elle, drooling over Holly Millea’s words and the Neuromancer-ness of genetics-based anti-aging research, when we found ourselves launched into the stratosphere of investigative journalism that was a profile of easy-rationalist designer Derek Lam, written by the brilliant Daphne Merkin (sister of J. Ezra Merkin, recently discussed vis a vis the whole Madoff Pigf*cuk). The point—as we are not our sister—is that, hidden deep within the multi-thousand-word text that focused on the tightness of sleeves and Lam’s particular creative ethos, was a spare and slight mention of his forthcoming boutique, designed by SANAA. What is remarkable is that there seemed to be no explanation of who the firm is or what they do needed. They were described, simply, as “Japanese architectural firm Sanaa.” Which implies, to our keen sensitivies, that they are now and officially a household name.

Welcome, Ryue and Kazuyo. You’re one-namers now.

The Rationalist [Elle]

It’s official. Back in our behind-the-scenes proto-soft-launch (which happened right before we went into soft-launch) phase, we discovered that the work-life couple comprised of Julie Lasky, now-former (foreshadowing!) editor-in-chief of I.D. and Ernest Beck, prolific writer-editor-thinker, would be taking over Design Observer’s new offshoot, Change Observer. And on Friday, we said goodbye to Julie. In person, at an event-type thing. Which involved hummus. Notables helping to say goodbye included awesome-doing criticizer Karrie Jacobs, real book (about baseball, and Rubens’ secret spy career, so far) writer Mark Lamster, Lasky’s colleagues Monica Khemsurov and managing editor Jill Singer (who, we hear, is going to be covering Julie’s job until…?), Official Edificial Top-Five-to-Seven artist Mary Ellen Carroll, and at least one excruciatingly adorable child. We know there were more, but we had to run to Deitch’s LIC outpost to look at Vanessa Beecroft-sanctioned naked ladies. (Also: Kanye West just wasn’t gonna stalk himself.)

The only thing we love more than vacation is architectural sketches. Combine the two? Excuse us while we hyperventilate. To coincide with a RIBA exhibit of Corbu’s vacation house at London’s Barbican gallery, Blueprint magazine asked 14 British architects and studios to sketch up their dream homes. The entries are awesome—graph paper, moleskins, vellum; pencils, pens, highlighters—and the descriptions are occasionally hilarious. (Look for the “rigorous cube of limestone on a bridge with no parapet.”) If you’re like us, you live for these kinds of sketch-fests (holla back, Witold!). Click through, and enjoy.

New York magazine’s annual “Best of New York 2009” issue is on newsstands now—and what’s on the magazine is KAWS. As observed by High Snobriety, The Brooklyn-based lapsed graffiti artist and current gallery darling has done a couple of magazine covers in recent years; it could also be added that this one is not his most innovative. But! It does put us in mind of some of New York’s illustrated covers of yore: If you’re keen to blow an hour and a half in nostalgic reverie, try perusing the 1970’s back issues catalog at Google Books. The editors chose KAWS’ design from a field of fine submissions, a number of which they’ve posted; we’re especially keen on this idea from Mother Design. They chose KAWS’ on account of it being “optimistic”; it might not be a coincidence, however, that he’s also kinda the hottest commodity among the competitors.

On the Cover [New York]

Earlier this morning, we revealed images of Sir Nick’s $95-million 30%-water-refreshing Bronx treatment plant. Well, we revealed them in that we reported that weirdly-ahead-given-the-time-difference Building Design had revealed them (accompanied by a tiny stub of text our intrepid one extrapolated from to produce his brilliant observational brilliance.)

And we were happy to let sleeping treatments lie. Until, wandering as is our wont, we stumbled on over into the Architect’s Newspaper’s Second Life where, bleary-eyed and overwhelmed, we fell into their piece on the plant, published just today. And it’s … longer. And reported. And requires far less extrapolation and far more…. golf?

Mosholu Golf Course in the Bronx is one of a dozen run by the city’s Department of Parks and Recreation. Its compact layout is typical of New York’s urban courses—nine holes, tree-lined fairways, the odd sand bunker—save for one highly unusual obstacle: the $2.1 billion drinking water treatment facility under construction on what used to be the driving range.

Also Ken Smith—who’s surely on namedrop par with Grimshaw—did the landscaping, which is pretty huge, and similarly un-BD-ified.

So what happened here? Most of Grimshaw’s biggest work right now—the Fulton Street Transit Hub, the street furniture, the Queens Museum—is in New York. So why risk pissing off a local paper? Either a few PR heads might spin, or someone from BD’s been slipping Sir Nick an aquarium (or five).

Fore! [Architect’s Newspaper]
Grimshaw’s Deluxe Waterworks [Edificial]
Grimshaw Filters New York Water [Building Design]

At the end of last week, we exhorted—via gentle encouragement—that those among our readers who feel bereft should pick up their bootstraps and pull up their socks via a quick visit to William Stout Architectural Books. It appears that we wield tremendous power, as Allison Arieff listened.

And wrote, in the New York Times, a love letter to, in order: William Stout the man, William Stout the store, books, architecture, sketchbooks, dogs, Balzac, color photography, Saarinen, William Stout the publisher, Le Corbusier, William Bushnell Stout, flying machines, prefab housing, retirement accounts, ink, paper, pages, widows, archives, bookmaking, Alice in Wonderland, airstreams, fluid electrolyte and acid base disorders, her sister, bookshelves, and the simple yet glorious act of turning the page.

Forgive us for taking a break from the square glasses, but we loved Arieff’s post, mostly for how its structure exactly mirrored the experience of wandering through a bookstore. As a wise person once told us, “the book you want is always next to the book you think you want.”

Or, as Arieff puts it:

I love the tangents an afternoon spent searching the Internet can generate: a search for this leads to a blog on that which might lead to a book I’d not heard of or a film I want to see. But I realize as well that it’s contributing to a sort of collective ADD that makes ambling through aisles of a place like Stout Books feel that much more special, requiring an altogether different commitment of time, care and attention.

And with that, we’re off for the day. Anna Arkadyevna is in that post-game spiral of figuring what to do vis a vis Vronsky and Aleksey Aleksandrovich Karenin with nary a link in sight, and it is a thrill.

Shelf Life [New York Times]

While we’ve passed into the period of half-mourning the demise of greatest-home-magazine-of-all-time Domino, we hardly thought we were ready to jump back into the game. These processes take time, after all: time to heal, to think, to gradually and slowly let the light back in, to allow sun and laughter to begin to touch those darkest recesses of sadness and regret. We need, to put it simply, time to recover. Unfortunately for our histrionic melodrama, Reader’s Digest Association knows of no such path.

And, fine, we do love a rebound.

With a launch coming soon and details even sooner, Advertising Age’s Nat Ives reports that Reader’s Digest is adding to the incredibly-diminished worldwide stable of shelter titles with a magazine called—ready for it?—Fresh Home. Apparently, it’ll be the young, hip, fresh, totally awesome decorating title for people who aren’t so into Cottage Living Country Patio or Living Country Patio Cottage, for people who are more likely to shop at West Elm than the Bombay Company, for young upstarts who’d like to know just what to do with the combination of many ribbons of sequined silver and an old chassee. The people who…. fuck, we’re back into bargaining, read and loved Domino.

Lest every freelancer’s heart rate rise with the news of yet another editor to convince about why this kelly green canvas window treatment is in fact utterly superior to this one and also here’s a cool designer everyone knows about has never heard of, the downside: they’re gonna be going ahead and, um, “repurposing” content from a sister Australian version.

But wait! What about the internet! Fresh web content for Fresh Home Magazine! Right? Right?? Sorry. Thanks.

Reader’s Digest Defies Housing Market With Shelter Magazine [Advertising Age]

Did anybody else get this? We didn’t, unless we accidentally tossed it out with the rest of the good-for-nothing slush that comes pouring unsolicited through the letterbox. Insufferably elegant interior design maven Heather Clawson of Habitually Chic posted this image of a letter enclosed in her copy of the final edition of shuttered shelter mag domino. It reads (enlarge the image to read it yourself), “With Compliments. Thank you for your support over the last four years. Please enjoy the final issue of domino magazine, attached here. Laura Miller & Katie Levine.” Did everybody get that in their valedictory March mag? or did Heather get it ‘cause she’s a big shot? In either case, it’s a nice touch, and we only wish we could write a letter back to the magazine: “Dear domino. Thank you for being.” Well, there you are. We just did write them.

While Eva floor-surfs and Ian ponders best-date-buildings (help him out, wouldja?), we bring you a very special report from a very special correspondent, Stephen Zacks:

It turns out that China can be facetious about itself. It can also give itself the good-ole Harvard Project on the City treatment, taking anecdotal snapshots of urban phenomena and converting them into theories. Witness the collection of goofy pirated products that the editor of Urban China, Jiang Jun calls “copylefted,”; or the images of the abandoned Special Economic Zone on Hainan Island that the rapid emergence of Shenzen quickly rendered obsolete. It can also do the Gursky thing to itself, taking aerial photographs that make everything look less dingy and more preternaturally ordered than in real life.

Urban China is the only magazine on urbanism in China, and the Informal Cities, installed in the free lobby gallery at the New Museum in collaboration with boyish curatorial associate Benjamin Godsill, is its gloss on the foibles of Chinese development. You can flip through copies of the magazine on rough plywood tables with rolling-box benches as well as click through its amazing archive of photos on the computers. Failing design magazines of all stripes might be interested to note that the magazine is almost entirely funded by a major urban planning firm in the country—a very profitable profession there, according to Jun—which uses it as an indirect arm of publicity, sort of like Colors or Fabrica to Benetton.

Note also that the other recently-opened exhibits prove that the new building is adaptable enough to go from a show of ravishing paintings by Elizabeth Peyton to the kind of ad hoc art happenings that made the New Museum famous. The current exhibitions include a provocatively dystopian vision of Israel by Michael Blum in which Israelis have become refugees temporarily sheltered in a Dutch museum, a living room installation in which former U.S. soldiers and Iraqi citizens sit on couches and answer questions about the war and what’s happening in Iraq today, and two floors converted into screening rooms with benches and pillows for film projections. The New Museum is not like other museums.

Be sure to check out Jiang Jun giving China the Rem Koolhaas in his talk on Saturday at 3. We also like High Places.