Watch French street artist JR get his TED Prize wish for a global art project in Inside Out, a fresh-from-the-Tribeca-Film-Festival documentary that debuts tonight at 9 p.m. on HBO. Director Alastair Siddons (Turn it Loose) crisscrosses the globe–from Tunisia to Haiti, North Dakota to Pakistan–as people around the world come together to follow JR’s simple directions to “take a portrait photograph of yourself or someone you know and then paste it in the street, using it to stand up for something you care about.” More than 100,000 people responded to his call by uploading their portraits to the project’s website for JR to print and display around the world. Explains Siddons, “This is a film about an artist giving away his method and the inspiring stories that follow that.” Sample a few in the film’s trailer (below):
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Redesigning Lincoln Center was an epic undertaking that involved a prominent public landmark and a painstaking process that evolved over nearly ten years. Diller Scofidio + Renfro, the design studio behind most of the project, has chronicled their experiences in Lincoln Center Inside Out: An Architectural Account (Damiani). The three principals shared their views on the project and the book at a recent event hosted by New York Public Library and moderated by Barry Bergdoll, chief curator of architecture and design at MoMA. The DS+R trio is just as articulate as they are creative, so here are excerpts from that discussion.

On Lincoln Center’s design:
Diller: The old Lincoln Center was too elitist, solid, and turned its back on the neighborhood and community. We were drawn to the promenade levels where everyone pours out in the middle of events. We wanted to extend that social feeling to the rest of the project. We broke down the edges to enable events in the public spaces. There’s more symmetry now across the public and private spaces.

Scofidio: There were no photos of the old Lincoln Center except the main plaza with the fountain. Someone said that in the 1960s, plazas were designed to be desolate.

On how they approached the project:
Diller: To win the project we showed many ideas, since we tend to think in multiples, with different approaches and solutions. We demonstrated our affection for the place and showed how to take it to the next step. We felt we could do it justice and interpret it for contemporary culture. We wanted to transform Lincoln Center for the logic of our time.

Scofidio: We didn’t go in and say here are the problems we have to correct. We just said we can finish Lincoln Center.
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“David van der Leer represents a new type of commitment to the public realm that makes urban issues accessible to architecture and design professionals and everyday urban citizens alike,” said Stephen Cassell, chairman of the Van Alen’s board of trustees, in a statement issued Tuesday. “Van Alen Institute welcomes his initiative to develop more national and international competitions, studies, and programs relevant to the understanding of contemporary urban life.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

The Bloomberg Administration has been busy pumping up the NYC tech scene and fashion industry, and now it’s focusing on design of all disciplines with NYCxDESIGN, a collaboration among the City Council, Mayor’s Office, City agencies, and a steering committee of 33 design stars ranging from MoMA’s Paola Antonelli to AIGA/NY President Willy Wong. The inaugural twelve-day event, smartly sandwiched between Frieze and ICFF, kicks off on May 10 with happenings that will showcase NYC designers and more, from design-centric institutions and retailers to curators and educators, with the goal of driving economic development.

According to the Center for an Urban Future, NYC is home to more design firms than any other city (L.A. comes in a rather distant second), and the May event will seek to attract even more designers and manufacturers to the city, generate new sales and export opportunities for local designers, and increase design-based tourism. City Council Speaker Christine Quinn is setting her sights even higher. “NYCxDesign will help demonstrate that New York City is the design capital of the world,” she said in a statement. London, Milan, and Paris–consider yourself warned.

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Among the exhibitions to look forward to: the Getty’s own “In Focus: Ed Ruscha” (“a concentrated look at Ruscha’s engagement with L.A.’s vernacular architecture, urban landscape, and car culture”), “The Presence of the Past: Peter Zumthor Reconsiders LACMA,” and “Quincy Jones: Building For Better Living” at the Hammer Museum. Moby is up for it. In the below video about “Pacific Standard Time Presents,” the musician, DJ, photographer, and en”tea“repreneur riffs on LA architecture, in all its “mind-numbingly complicated” glory.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Flummoxed by the concept of social cooking, and fearful that it may involve having to share dessert, we consulted Electrolux and learned that for this category, the judges are looking for ideas that address city dwellers’ “shortage of entertaining space and preparation time, whilst allowing us to live a healthier lifestyle.” This sounds like a job for Jetsons-style food pellets–after all, last year’s first-prize winner was Jan Ankiersztajn‘s Aeroball, a constellation of luminescent, helium-infused balls that floatingly filter and fragrance the air in a room. Noble gases win again. Begin the brainstorming process (where can we get some delicious yet effortless neon?) by watching highlights from last year’s finals, held at the Triennale Design Museum in Milan.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

The word slum conjures images of the poorest quality housing, most unsanitary conditions, and dangerous–usually illegal–activities. But in developing countries, the word is free of its original, pejorative connatation and simply refers to lower quality or informal housing. Meanwhile, the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-HABITAT) has developed a kind of slum-defining checklist that includes: inadequate access to safe water, sanitation, and other infrastrucure; poor structural quality of housing; overcrowding; and insecure residential status. Researchers at the Santa Fe Institute have secured funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to undertake a scientific study of a urban slums worldwide. The goal of the project, a collaboration with the nonprofit Slum Dwellers International (SDI), is to uncover some of the underlying principles common to rapid urbanization and the emergence of informal settlements.

“Part of what we will do is analyze data from 7,000 slum settlements around the world,” says Santa Fe Institute professor Luis Bettencourt, a physicist whose research includes studying urban organization and dynamics, in a statement issued recently. SDI has accumulated census-like data on many of the world’s slums, and researchers will combine and compare it across cultures, levels of socioeconomic development, geography, and time to identify common features of slums and test the data for accuracy. Subsequent stages of the project will examine how the SDI data was collected and find ways to make it most useful to scientists, policymakers, and others interested in urban development. Ultimately, the project will help to shape ongoing data-collection practices and generate new datasets. Added Bettencourt, “In this way, the project will help create standards through which informal communities can collect and use data about themselves and develop economic models to sustain these efforts.“

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In Miami? So are Elizabeth Diller, Ricardo Scofidio, and Charles Renfro. The trio will be signing books today at Design Miami from 1-2 p.m. before heading across the street to chat with Ari Wiseman, deputy director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, as part of the Art Salon series at Art Basel Miami Beach.

This is part of a series of elegantly wrapped December posts about desirable goods that we suggest you purchase with the laudable yet vague intent of giving to others and then keep for yourself. Got a “nifty, gifty” idea? Tell the UnBeige elves: unbeige (at) mediabistro.com

Previously on UnBeige:
• Nifty, Gifty: Rodarte’s Out-of-This-World Ornament
• Nifty, Gifty: Crate&Barrel 50th Anniversary Teapot

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Sandy came, she saw, she conquered–and she made a global megastar out of a building project that already had garnered plenty of buzz among New York real estate mavens and architecture buffs: One57, Extell’s 1,000-foot mixed-use tower designed by Christian de Portzamparc. On Monday afternoon, as the storm winds strengthened, the crane at the construction site buckled with a boom that those in the vicinity at first mistook for a thunder clap. Cut to a frightening shot of the crane’s top portion dangling like a limp tree limb and poised to plummet 90 stories below to the Manhattan thoroughfare of West 57th Street.

On TV, the injured crane and the luxe tower-in-progress got almost as much airtime as drenched, windbreaker-clad correspondents and, as coverage wore on and darkness set in, provided rain-pelted reporters with a few moments of respite from the cameras. CNN’s Piers Morgan located a “crane expert” and then pressed him to concur that a total collapse was imminent. Donald Trump chimed in on Twitter. There were no mentions of Portzamparc (or of Tomas Juul-Hansen, who is masterminding One57′s interiors), only of the “several billionaires” that had already purchased condos in the 95-unit building. Meanwhile, the crane is hanging in there. “Our hope is that tomorrow they’ll be able to find a way to pull it in, and then cable it to the building so it’s not going to fall,” said Mayor Michael Bloomberg in a press conference today.

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• Madcap madras meets spaceman chic in an elegant Parisian garden? Only Thom Browne could pull off that improbable combination and garnish it with giant silver Slinkys (“spring has spring”), from which his glimmering models emerged in a rainbow of exploded prepster motifs (watch a video of the presentation here). Providing a spectacular close to the spring 2013 menswear shows marked the start of a busy July for Browne, who heads to the White House Friday to join the other 2012 National Design Award recipients for a luncheon hosted by First Lady Michelle Obama. Here’s hoping that Browne dons a sample from his latest collection for the festivities (might we suggest look #18, at right?).

• In other National Design Awards news, the Cooper-Hewitt has selected this year’s Design Patron: Red Burns, an arts professor and chief collaborations officer for the interactive telecommunications program at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. She is being recognized for her role as founder of ITP and for her innovations and achievements in the field of communication technology, the museum announced yesterday. During the 1970s, as head of NYU’s Alternate Media Center, she designed and directed a series of telecommunications projects, including two-way television for and by senior citizens, telecommunications applications to serve the developmentally disabled, and one of the first Teletext field trials in the United States (at WETA in Washington, D.C.).
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How would you transform a public space in your city to make it more comfortable? The BMW Guggenheim Lab, freshly installed in Berlin (the second stop on the project’s six-year global tour), wants to know. The joint initiative of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and the BMW Group has partnered with the “reasonable people who give a damn” at GOOD to launch a worldwide, online call for forward-thinking, imaginative, and downright wacky (OK, “unconventional”) ideas to improve urban comfort. So put on your most aerodynamic, stylish, and sustainable thinking cap, grab a fresh Moleskine, and get to proposing—in three to five sentences—changes to public spaces in your corner of the world. Factors to consider: the community, environment, architecture, landscaping, and any other aspects that would affect the experience of the space. GOOD and BMW Guggenheim Lab curator Maria Nicanor will select their favorite ideas to be featured on the GOOD and BMW Guggenheim Lab websites (although we plan to hold out for a deal on a 3 Series Convertible). Submissions, which can include an image of a sketch or model that corresponds to the idea and shows how your idea would be implemented, will be accepted through Tuesday, July 17.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

• Got Polaroids? The Foundation for the Exhibition of Photography, in connection with MIT and London-based publisher Thames & Hudson, is at work on a major project on Polaroid photography. Slated to open at MIT in late 2015 and then travel internationally, the show will cover Polaroid-related art, science, and technology. “This is a call for submissions,” William A. Ewing, who is curating the art aspects of the project with Barbara Hitchcock, told The Art Newspaper recently. “It demands the best of the best material. This is not a community project, we want the stuff that can hold its own against the art of the period—and it was a long period, from 1950 to 1990.” Deborah Douglas and Gary Van Zante are in charge of the project’s science and technology aspects.

• Five finalists have been selected for the Urban Land Institute‘s Urban Open Space Award, a competition that recognizes “an outstanding example of a well-used public open space that has spurred regeneration and the transformation of its surrounding community.” Two NYC projects—the High Line and Pier 25 at Tribeca Section in Hudson River Park—made the final five, along with Railroad Park (Birmingham, Alabama), RiverWalk Urban Waterfront Calgary, Alberta), and Tanner Springs Park (Portland, Oregon). The winner, to be announced in October, will receive a $10,000 cash prize, and if we know this group, they’ll blow it all on bulbs and shrubs.

• Author and graphic novelist Neil Gaiman delivered the commencement address and picked up an honorary doctorate at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. Among his advice for the graduates: make mistakes. “If you’re making mistakes, it means you’re out there doing something,” said Gaiman last Thursday. “And the mistakes in themselves can be useful. I once misspelled Caroline, in a letter, transposing the ‘a’ and the ‘o,’ and I thought, ‘Coraline looks like a real name…’” Watch the full speech (his first-ever university commencement address) here.

• Event designer extraordinaire David Stark has taken to the web in his search for a star intern. He has partnered with Apartment Therapy on its “Design is not Taught” contest. In addition to a three-month internship with David Stark Design and Production, the winner will have the opportunity chance to work with Stark one-on-one to edit and curate his or her portfolio. The intern’s final project? To single-handedly design Apartment Therapy’s holiday party. Click here for details.
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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.