Again, for anyone with lingering concerns, yesterday was for laughs. There was no editorial coup, no failed poetical counter-insurrection, and that pen tablet should not be taken seriously. Nor should today’s Site Gag: “Walking House” by Dutch firm N55. Rigged with various eco-trimmings, the house “requires no permanent use of land and thereby challenges ownership of land and suggests that all land should be accessible for all persons.” Er, couldn’t you get the same thing from an RV? Our guess: the designers are paying homage to Archigram’s “Walking City” of 1964. For more laughs, watch the video.

Walking House [Gizmag]

Two Brit-themed Site Gags in as many days! This time the perpetrator is none other than Prince Charles of Wales. Long known for his revanchist taste in architecture, il principe designed the station at left near the southern city of Dorchester. Says the Guardian’s Justin McGuirk, it’s “a dumpy neoclassical Georgian palace… It’s just daft.” Spot on—but firehouses ain’t easy. Remember what happened to Zaha’s?

Prince Charles’s Fire Station [Guardian]

As we’ve previously noted, British architect Will Alsop is a party prince who likes to party with the pretty party people. “Obviously not a man familiar with gyms,” as one interviewer put it—and the same might be said of his shaggy, bacchic buildings. But his latest is too much: The “Chips” housing scheme for Islington, the first images of which were revealed by Architect’s Journal, features newsprint patterning and—wait for it—a giant print roller, in deference to the area’s “industrial heritage.” Cheeky po-mo literalism rides again!

Will Alsop’s ‘Chips’ [AJ]

We like to take our time over here. Self-imposed wait of seventeen hours between announcement and posting, long ponderous talks in which we debate the relative merits of starting with yet another moment of self-reference versus a stab at un-self-consciousness, the pleasure of reading and re-reading our saved drafts, over and over again.

So it’s a good thing the redesigned MoMA website is taking four days to load. We started getting on at about 10:13am and it’s now 10:17. First total blankness, then the window type came in, then an orange bar at the very bottom. Layout is very spare—five boxes, each representing a different aspect of the museum (exhibitions, shop, the collection, plan your visit, join online) and mirrored by the five new categories (visit, explore, learn, support, and shop.) Wait! Breaking! The categories change! What used to be a picture of people hanging out in the gallery underneath that green helicopter is all of a sudden “Find a program,” now “Research Resources,” now “Online Activities.” We’re getting a few glitschy little question-marky symbols up where some of the boxes were changing from images of the collection/exhibition to bright color backgrounds.

And…. now we’re walking ourselves through Online Activities. This is cool. Audio, video, focused exhibition sites. (It occurred to us for a split second as we received last night’s announcement that the entire MoMA.org redesign might have been inspired by the completely amazing Design and the Elastic Mind site, and hope remained eternally sprung until about now, where we’re still waiting for MoMA Multimedia to load — and! Only two minutes and it’s up. Sort of.)

So. A website that takes a long time to load isn’t all that exciting. But an entirely different approach to interacting with a museum’s collection and exhibitions is. We tend not to want to talk about the art while we’re there—something about the pressure of performance anxiety leads to silly observations like “Bruce Nauman is neat!” and “Olafur Eliasson is bright!”—but we do often find ourselves craving a little bit more to look at or think about as we realize just how much of an effort it is to get up to 53rd St. We’re reminded of the MoMA every time we leave our borough through the Atlantic/Pacific St stop—the subway station is, courtesy LVHRD’s parent company thehappycorp, plastered with 58 reproductions in an effort to remind New Yorkers that the museum is just as much theirs—and every time we rue the fact we haven’t yet committed to our MRS degree and still have to support ourselves by this odd thing vaguely known as “work,” we’re sort of intrigued by the idea of being able to interact with art in an online format.

The MoMA isn’t entirely ahead of the game with this one, and there’s a Rauschenberg ouevre’s worth of bugs to work out. But the new website is a straightforward acceptance of our connection-through-isolation, of our increasingly virtual reality, of our, ahem, “mediated experience.” For instance, we’re watching the installation of Hirst’s John: John right this very moment. And now, with our breakfast, we’re going to observe a little LeWitt. Not bad for an internet.

Just get it working, m’kay?

Dude. Dude. Seriously. Remember, like, a few weeks back, when the Times published that series of Lego designs based on New York landmarks, and one of them was supposed to be the worst building in town, and everybody figured out it had to be the Verizon building? Dude, this is… this is so much… so much funnier. A tipster (that’s tips[at]edificial[dot]com, y’all) pointed us to this, The Brick Testament, a complete rendering of the Good Book in Lego figures. It’s worth having a look for the buildings alone: Above is Solomon dedicating the temple, which is rendered with a sense of detail and historical accuracy that even Biblical Archaeology Review would have to call impressive. We’ll just… we’ll just leave you with the Site Gag, for now, and bring you some more images on “Thursday is Cute Day”… It’s just so… oh, Solomon’s Palace is… and the pyramids! Oh, god! Oh…

Urbanists, despair. To the left is what could be the new public transit reality for New York under a plan for service cutbacks to try to plug a $1.4 billion MTA budget gap. There is hope, however. The reductions will only be effected “if Albany decision-makers fail to approve a new source of funding by the MTA’s March 25th deadline,” says Michael O’Laughlin of the advocacy group Campaign for New York’s Future. But if the funds don’t come through, you better familiarize yourself with that image (click to enlarge): What you’re looking at is the Manhattan transit map as it might be after March, just a sampling of the 193 proposed cuts to subway and bus service in the five boroughs. Better think about picking up some Russian novels. It could be a long trip.

Rotterdam, a city not known for its timidity, has decided that this bridge proposal from Bureau SLA is so perilously wacky that it has to be kept out of sight: the judges in the Rijnhaven Bridge competition have taken it right out of the running and won’t consider it alongside the other submissions. The bridge allows for passing boats with its signature scissor lifting mechanism, which its engineers claim is both a feasible and a cost-effective solution. Rotterdam city fathers, however are having none of it. Which may be alright, in the long run: With the street cred that’s now Bureau SLA’s, they can set up a salon des refusés and become the architectural Manets of Holland.

A Bridge Too Wild for an Architecture Competition [Fast Company]
Too Daring for Rotterdam? [WAN]

Last night’s game was a bad one for architecture. The Super Bowl champion Pittsburgh Steelers, natives of the plausible but uninspiring Heinz Field (HOK Sport), took the Lombardi Trophy from the Cinderella-story Arizona Cardinals, whose University of Phoenix Stadium (Eisenman/HOK) is arguably the most sophisticated sports venue of our time. To make matters worse, Toyota ran this commercial shortly after half-time which for reasons best known to the car maker and its ad agency subjects a truck to a bruising trial-by-fire while driving up a sharp and twisting incline. But why, oh why did they have to choose Vladimir Tatlin’s 1919 Monument to the Third International on which to do it? Didi would be spitting bullets of revolutionary movement-energy. A real Toyota Challenge might at least have done Tatlin justice by raking the tower at an angle, as he did his.

Tony Ashai, “charismatic and roguishly handsome,” is a Master of the Universe in far-off Dubai, his work “coveted by multimillionaires, sheiks and Middle East princes.” Jesus Tapdancing Christ. It’s like Steve Wynn and Leon Krier had a baby, and that baby went batsh*t insane.

The Architect of Dreams [Daily Breeze]

In honor of the death yesterday of popular painter Andrew Wyeth, here’s a tribute from a latter day master of schlock, a true heir to the great American tradition of nostalgic pandering. The artist known only as Shag updates Wyeth’s famous “Christina’s World”, replacing the weathered farmhouse with a spruced-up Neutra-esque gem. (Or is that Edmiston and Gauthier’s Burst 003 from the MoMA prefab show?)

Andrew Wyeth, Famed and Infamous Artist, Dies at 91 [New York Times]

This Unidentified Fu**ed-up Object is from Russia. It’s also from Russia! magazine (by way of photographer Sanwaree Sethi), which rounded up cuddly kittens Joey Arak and Lockhart Steele of Curbed— editor and founder, respectively— to knock around a few outstanding atrocities recently constructed in and around Moscow. Dialogue on confronting the pic at left: