While of course you should always turn to our very own Stephanie Murg to spill the beans on the happenings as Art Basel continues in Miami, like with her couple of great posts from yesterday. But for a terrific secondary source, we highly recommend reading the on-the-ground reporting from Caroline Stanley over at the newly opened Flavorwire. Where else can you get the skinny on the major money art fair, with sightings and reports on people like Benicio Del Toro, Brooklyn Museum director Arnold Lehman, and seeing Julian Schnabel leading a crowd to go see a Grace Jones concert? Plus, if you've ever wanted to see Stuart Parr in a strange, all-white Yves Saint Laurent standing on a couch, clutching a sharp knife, here's your chance. Go forth and learn how the other half of the art world lives.

(Photo: Alexander Williams for Areaware)

OK, so technically it's a gorilla, but we've always wanted to find a good reason to headline a post with that famous David Letterman-in-Cabin Boy quote. Since providing you with the first glimpse of the Design Miami Box Top Shop—stocked with goodies from I.D., Areaware, and Charles & Marie—we've checked in with the store's proprietors to see what's selling swiftly, and the Design Miami must have is shaping up to be the hand-signed and numbered version of David Weeks' Hanno the Gorilla (pictured above). As if the signing and numbering weren't sufficiently special, each Miami Hanno sports an original laser-etched tattoo on its sustainably-harvested beech wood chest. We've advised the Box Top Shopkeepers that to further boost Hanno sales they join hands and perform the Magilla Gorilla theme song every hour, on the hour. Or at least have this hip-hop version by Michael Ungar playing on a flatscreen:

(Photo: Contrasts Gallery)

When it comes to furniture, where there's smoke, there's not necessarily fire, but there is Dutch designer Maarten Baas, who for his famed "Smoke" series of charred furniture took a blow torch (and lots of translucent epoxy resin sealant) to the iconic creations of everyone from Gaudi to the Campana brothers. The fiery fun continues in Baas' newest series, "Transformation," an appealingly oozy range of handcrafted wood furniture on view through Saturday at the Design Miami booth of Pearl Lam's Contrasts Gallery, which has outposts in Shanghai and Beijing and hosted a show of Baas' work last summer. "Transformation" was born from Lam's commissioning of Baas to make products with Chinese producers and, through Contrasts' residency program, investigate traditional Chinese craftsmanship, materials, and imagery. We hear the new work has collectors melting. Other cross-cultural combos at Contrasts include Constantin Boym's table that functions as a readymade still life and Studio Makkink & Bey's stainless steel dining table based on traditional Chinese boxes. Click "continued..." to see both pieces.

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(All Photos: Theo Richardson/Rich, Brilliant, Willing)

Find yourself wandering Design Miami discouraged by the price tags on the likes of Studio Job's Bavaria-inspired marquetry table (at Moss, booth 16)? Feeling inadequate in the midst of collectors writing five-figure checks for meta-art that makes your head spin, like Vik Muniz's photograph of a Cindy Sherman untitled film still (at Sikkema Jenkins, Art Basel booth D13)? Proceed directly to the Box Top Shop, which is chock full of limited-edition design objects that are much, much easier on the wallet than, say, Ai Weiwei's massive wedding cake-cum-light sculpture at Mary Boone (Art Basel booth F7). Box Top is no mere pop-up shop; it's a four-day retail experience. Open through Saturday in Miami's Design District (4141 NE 2nd Ave.), the ephemeral emporium is the collaborative effort of I.D. Magazine, Areaware (our favorite purveyor of extraordinary things), and "quintessential lifestyle navigator" Charles & Marie.

The interior of the 2,300-square-foot shop was designed by Rich, Brilliant, Willing, the Manhattan-based design firm of Theo Richardson, Charles Brill, and Alexander Williams (who also did the ever-so-lovely photography for Areaware's freshly redesigned website). It's a clever celebration of shipping materials, with multi-tasking cardboard boxes and tape serving as display surfaces, storage, and design elements while allowing the entire shop to be assembled in a single day.

So what's for sale? From Areaware comes 22-karat gold, copper, and chrome versions of Harry Allen's iconic Pig Bank, Rollerstop, and Banana Bowl, any of which should fit in one of I.D.'s limited edition of 300 tote bags ($50 each) that feature exclusive graphics by Konstantin Grcic, Tord Boontje, and Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec. Meanwhile, Charles & Marie offers a new series of Yoga Chairs by Lucas Maassen made especially for the shop. Conclude your afternoon of design retail therapy by relaxing in the shop's lounge (furniture by Vitra) and knocking back a Bionade organic soda. Don't forget to tell them that UnBeige sent you.

By the end of this year, we're guessing that Don Fisher is going to be the least popular person in San Francisco. At last we heard, the Presidio Trust was deciding that they should probably break up his proposed plans to build the Contemporary Art Museum of the Presidio (or whatever it's being called now) within the federal park and make it a collection of smaller, less obstructive structures, or alternately, move it somewhere else entirely . Now we learn that the Trust has proposed that Fisher could possibly plan for a much larger building in a slightly different location, leading to the demolision of a preschool, a senior center, an exhibition hall, a bowling alley and all of the tennis courts. So how did this all go over with the public at large? That's a silly question. The San Francisco Chronicle has this op-ed from David Bancroft with an update of all the major complaints, some new, some old. Well worth the read, as this is becoming the most interesting museum-building news story of recent times.

We've long established that, while he likes drawing pretty pictures on wine bottles, Prince Charles hates modern architecture. What these two things have to do with one another, we're not entirely sure. But no matter. Related to the latter, the prince has apparently begun sending his minions out to help spread this anti-modern message, starting with his close friend, "New Urbanism" designer and architect Andres Duany. To correspond with the release of plans for a housing/neighborhood development he worked on, he flew to the UK this week to issue a report on 64 things that British architects and planners have been doing wrong for the last half-century, stopping to broaden his critique by calling out famous starchitects likes Frank Gehry, Richard Rogers, and Zaha Hadid has "increasingly irrelevant." What's the right way of doing things? The Duany way, of course. This, for some reason, did not win him many new allies, as we've found it is very rare to win people over after berating them or their opinions. Heck, John Silber, who probably agrees with Duany on some level, was at least civilized enough to pen a well-thought out book about the subject and not just a rant of "I'm right and you're all wrong!"

It's about that time of year again and like clockwork, the Cooper-Hewitt has just opened the floodgates, asking for nominations for this year's National Design Awards. Staying open for just a short while, until Monday, December 15th, you can hoist up your nominee picks for potential design award greatness, selecting from ten categories. And hey, even though we UnBeige editors might never have created something that changed the face of the world or designed something incredibly important and iconic, please feel free to nominate us for the Lifetime Achievement Award. We think we really deserve it. Here are the other categories, to refresh your memory:

Corporate Achievement; and National Design Awards in Architecture, Interior Design, Landscape, Communication, Interaction Design, Fashion and Product Design.

We have a feeling that Architectural Digest is going to experience the best sales they've ever had when their January issue is published. How can we predict such a thing? Well, because, if you hadn't heard already, the actor-turned-architect, Brad Pitt, graces the cover. He'll be there to a) sell copies of Architectural Digest and b) to talk about his work building houses in New Orleans as part of his Make It Right Foundation, which you might recall our reporting on last year when this all began with him. Here's a bit from the press release:

Six of the originally-planned 150 homes have already been built through the Foundation. Looking to the future, Pitt believes Make It Right is a model for projects around the world. "We've cracked something here...these houses redefine affordable housing...this is a proving ground for a bigger idea that could work globally. This project is not mine anymore. It's so beyond me."

But the day AD talked to Pitt, the day he helped Gloria Guy and her family move back in, crystallized why he put his passions and his celebrity behind the Foundation he created. "You have no idea," he says, "what a high it is for me to see the delight on people's faces when they see how these homes work."

Personally, if we were the editors of the magazine, we would have shown up on the day Pitt was helping someone named Jen moving into their new New Orleans house. Then they could have had a headline like "Brad Says 'Welcome Home, Jen'" and sold three bazillion more copies. Just a thought for next time.

Animator extraordinaire Bill Plympton's newest films—the feature Idiots and Angels and the short Hot Dog—are now on the film festival circuit (this week, Hot Dog hits Belgium, Germany, and the Bahamas; find a full screening schedule here). Featuring the music of Tom Waits, Moby, and Pink Martini, Idiots and Angels is "much darker and more mysterious film than his previous comedies," according to Plympton. The dark comedy about a man's battle for his soul sounds a bit like the process of creating it. "I'd say it took about 25,000 drawings for Idiots and Angels," Plympton told The New York Times' John Anderson recently. "I do about 100 drawings a day, which is about 10 an hour, and if I can do that times 250 or 300 days, that's a feature film."

It is, he said, a "zen thing."

"You're so focused. You don't do e-mails or phone calls. I get up at 6, don't shave or shower, just start drawing. It's like a ride. I hear that novelists do this too. They're so focused for a year or whatever that afterwards they just collapse for two or three weeks. Sleep. Or drink."

Self-taught artist Phil Hansen is all about the process. He has used a tricycle to paint a giant portrait of Lance Armstrong and parted with a quart of his own blood to depict the grinning visage of North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il on a canvas of 6,000 plywood-backed Band-Aids. Last summer, he painstakingly rendered the likeness of Jimi Hendrix in matchsticks, before lighting the piece on fire in a nod to Hendrix's fondness for guitar burning. And so when the Grammys came calling, Hansen was ready. Using tools such as microphones and guitar picks as paintbrushes, he created the official artwork for February's 51st annual Grammy Awards program book, telecast tickets, and promotional poster. And in keeping with Hansen's focus on process, he also created this time-lapse video to document the making of the twelve-foot-tall 3-D poster (pictured at left):

Click "continued..." for a video of the making of "A Moment," a 2007 work for which Hansen posted his phone number online and asked people to call and tell him a moment that changed their lives. Over the course of 136 consecutive hours, he wrote the responses on a giant circular canvas. Click to see the sum of those pivotal moments.

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Promoting green buildings begins at home, and so the American Institute of Architects (AIA) is offering its advice to President-Elect Barack Obama on how to turn the White House green. "During the campaign, Barack Obama voiced plans to invest in infrastructure, advance energy efficiency and sustainable buildings, and to develop a 21st century transportation system," said AIA CEO Christine McEntee in a recent press release. "These are all longstanding AIA goals, and we look forward to working with the new administration as they tackle these important challenges." Among the AIA's proposals? To create a high-level advisor on green buildings who would coordinate executive branch activities and promote these issues to the public, to develop a White House Office of Urban Policy (which Obama proposed during the campaign), and to focus on making the White House an international model of energy efficiency. OK, we admit that these ideas trump our suggestion that the Obama team draw all energy for the White House from a basement full of Gilligan's Island-style pedal-powered generators.

If you read our humble little blog here with any regularity, you might recall our special love affair with Kentucky's Creation Museum, a multi-million dollar hotbed of insanity. So it was with happiness that we read this story about the Cincinnati Zoo deciding to team up with the Creation Museum for a ticketing promotion, only to have the Zoo scramble to get out of the deal after being pummeled for two days with negative press, a massive campaign against them online, and talk of multiple boycotts from different groups. Why? Well, usually science-based organizations and science-hating groups don't mix so well:

"They seem like diametrically opposed institutions," said Dr. James Leach, a Cincinnati radiologist who e-mailed zoo officials about his concerns. "The Cincinnati Zoo is one of this city's treasures. The Creation Museum is an international laughingstock."

And to show that maybe the Cincinnati Zoo marketing department needs a bit of an overhaul, here's a bit we particularly enjoyed:

Zoo officials said they considered the promotion -- dubbed "Two Great Attractions, One Great Deal" -- a marketing deal no different than other cross-promotions they do with institutions like the Newport Aquarium or the Cincinnati Reds.

..."When we partner with the Reds, we don't get these kinds of e-mails," [zoo spokesman Chad Yelton] said. "It's pretty clear this is more of a distraction."

Oh, Chad, how sweetly innocent you are.

While Dubai struggles to keep from falling apart, as does nearly every major construction project everywhere else in the world, the firm Gensler is attempting to weather the storm and just broke ground on their Shanghai Tower, a massive giant of a skyscraper that is set to be the tallest building in China. Fortunately, the government is backing the building and have claimed that the financing has long been in place, so all that needs to be done is for everything to stay on task and get built as its supposed to (and on-budget, sure, but when was the last time that happened with a project this big?). We think it looks swell, but keep in mind that ground was broken on Santiago Calatrava's Chicago Spire too and look where we are now with that big fella. Here's a bit:

Located in the Lujiazui section of Pudong, the Shanghai Tower will sit adjacent to the 1,214-foot-tall Jinmao Tower (1998), designed by Adrian Smith during his tenure at SOM, and the just-completed 1,614-foot-tall Shanghai World Financial Center, by William Pedersen of KPF. Shanghai Tower -- which will house offices, stores, and a hotel -- is the last major part of a master plan for Pudong. The plan, conceived in the 1990s, envisioned three super-tall buildings, each taller than the next, rising next to each other.

And for more info, we highly recommend checking out Gensler's press release about the building.

Some follow-up to two recent stories. First, we heard that things are going sour in a hurry in Dubai, marking an end to their much-discussed building boom, with project cancellations and layoffs hitting nearly every development company's plans. Since then, more news has crept out about the situation in the desert kingdom, particularly this very detailed, interesting report from the Telegraph about the possible implosion of the entire architectural market there, the bailout the government has planned, and of recent meetings being held between developers and builders who are hoping to figure out a way to keep it all together. It's a fascinating look at what has the potential to become an example of the quickest rise and the most sudden fall of any urban planning in history. Here's a bit:

Property prices have slumped, demand has dried up and, for the first time, the emirate is being forced to consider calling a halt to its expansion. Some analysts are claiming that Dubai could implode, weighed down under a pile of debt and, given that it has relatively small oil reserves, no obvious way of paying for it. One said: "This has been the most spectacular spending mission on Earth. But it's a mirage. If complex debt structures have brought the financial world to its knees, Dubai is the world's biggest toxic time bomb."

Second, we quickly check in on the situation at Robert Mondavi and Julia Child's Copia wine museum in Santa Rosa, California, which unexpectedly closed its doors last Friday. Since then, the museum has prepared to file for bankruptcy and has picked up some credit in order to pay some necessary bills. What's most surprising is, despite having lost millions every year it was running, they've remained hopeful that they can reopen once all of this mess is taken care of. Hmm.

At left, a look from Thakoon Panichgul's spring 2008 ready-to-wear collection, shown at New York Fashion Week in September of 2007. At right, a look from Panichgul's limited-edition collection for Target, which debuts later this month.

We rue the day we passed up a deeply discounted (yet still rather pricey) Thakoon coat while on a trip to Seattle but are somewhat comforted by the announcement that designer Thakoon Panichgul's bargain-priced ($16.99 to $44.99) collection for Target hits stores nationwide on December 28. Part of Target's ongoing GO International program of limited-edition collections by young designers (Richard Chai, for example), the women's apparel and swimwear will be available through January. What to expect from Thai-born, Omaha-raised, and Boston University- and Parsons-educated Panichgul? Designs evocative (or just plain identical) to those of his spring 2008 ready-to-wear collection. Plenty of color and graphic prints, including a blue and white shibori print (pictured above, shown on the runway in September 2007 and now in a version for Target), a large floral pattern in yellow and green, and a signature diagonal stripe that pops up throughout the collection. (Pictured at right is the "Floral Camo" cotton canvas coat. Say that five times fast.) Given Michelle Obama's fondess for Thakoon, Panichgul is likely to be the first fashion designer to have his work simultaneously show up on the First Lady and in Target stores. Click "continued..." to see six more soon-to-be-purchasable looks from the collection.

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