Photo: Robert Humphreys

It's a bird! It's a plane! It's an espresso bar made of abandoned washing machines, and it's among the recycled design masterpieces of Rotterdam-based 2012 Architecten. The Maytag-meets-Starbucks-meets-Sputnik creation will be featured in the third season of e2 design (say "e-squared design"), PBS's Brad Pitt-narrated environmental and green building series. 2012 Architecten is the subject of an e2 episode entitled "Super Use," a lush mini-documentary exploring how the architectural firm's partners elegantly repurpose everything from car tires to windmill blades as building materials. Other topics e2 tackles in its third season, which premieres online on September 1, include the Aga Khan's Al-Azhar Park in Cairo, a 500-year-old dump turned "urban lung"; the efforts of Renzo Piano to integrate the natural world into his design for San Francisco's natural history museum; and the work to rebuild New Orleans' Lower 9th Ward in a way that is environmentally, culturally, and socially sustainable. Hmm...how's the Big Easy fixed for washing machines?

Photo: Elizabeth Dalziel/Getty Images

As Michael Phelps prepares to go for gold medal #146 in another nail-biter at the Water Cube and Bela Karolyi comes down from the blood pressure spikes induced by last night's all-around competition in women's gymnastics, we bring you today's Friday photo to shed light on a type of Olympic spectator who is on pins and needles about, well, pins. John Schmidt (pictured above) came to Beijing from his home in Kentucky prepared to trade, sporting the vintage enamel-studded khaki vest that is the mark of a true collector. And apparently, these games have not disappointed. "Trading has been great," veteran pin trader Dan Baker told CNN of his experience at his thirteenth Olympics. "Everybody who is anybody is here and they all seem to have pins. And they are all beautiful pins."

It may already be August 9th in Beijing, but NBC is saving the pageantry, pyrotechnics, and swirling robed nationalism of the Olympic opening ceremonies, which kicked off this morning at 8:08pm Beijing time, for prime time stateside showing. We'll help you to avoid spoilers (Brunei was a no-show! How did those Ralph Lauren blazers go over?) with today's Friday photo, a shot of U.S. Olympic divers Christina Loukas and Chris Colwill posing with a couple of sword-wielding guards (Manchu bannermen of the Qing Dynasty, advises UnBeige's man in Beijing) encountered on a team trip to the Great Wall. Later, these two guys donned Team China sweatshirts, hit the gym, and gave the U.S. fencing team a good scare.

Photo: Scott Halleran/Getty Images

In a pioneering move akin to a novel spin on a hugely lucrative greatest hits album, artist Damien Hirst has created a body of work specifically to be sold at auction—more specifically, at Sotheby's in London on September 15-16. "It's a very democratic way to sell art and it feels like a natural evolution for contemporary art," says Hirst. In three sales over two days, the "Beautiful Inside My Head Forever" auction will include 223 lots that Sotheby's estimates will bring in approximately £65 million ($128 million at current exchange rates). New versions of all of your Hirstian favorites will be up for sale: butterfly paintings, spin art, skulls, spot paintings, pills, anatomical sculptures, and of course, dead animals preserved in formaldehyde-filled vitrines! One such monumental sculpture is the centerpiece of the show and the subject of this week's Friday Photo.

Photo: Sotheby's

Standing 13 feet tall and nearly 12 feet wide, "The Golden Calf" (2008) suspends an 18-month-old, golden headpiece-wearing calf in a silicone and formaldehyde brew-filled tank plated in 18 karat gold and set atop a Carrara marble plinth. "It indicates the idloatry of man to false idols, man's impatience, brazen imagery, but also, it draws you in because the beast himself is...so incredibly beautiful," says Sotheby's Oliver Barker of the Biblical allusion gone pop. "The scale of the object, the sheer ambition, is so typical of what Damien does, but yet again, he's really suprised us. This is definitely the outstanding highlight of the exhibition." The lot, lucky number 13, is estimated to sell for between £8 million and £12 million (about $16 million-$24 million). Click "continued" for a frontal view.

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Photo: Tina Dupuy

Today's Friday Photo is fresh from the jam-packed Comic-Con, which runs through Sunday at the San Diego Convention Center, and comes to you courtesy of our left coast sister blog, FishbowlLA. Braving the 'Con without a fanciful costume or a Y chromosome, FishbowlLA's Tina Dupuy describes the sprawling event as "a slow slogging sea of sweaty fan boys rubbing up against one another." On the bright side, there is no line for the women's restroom, leaving her ample time to snap this photo of a Lego version of the caped crusader, who stubbornly refused to sign autographs.

Photo: Roman Signer

Today's Friday photo goes out to those craving air conditioning (or at least ice cream) on this steamy July Friday. It's "Tisch (Table)," a 1994 photo by Swiss artist Roman Signer, best known for his "temporary sculptures" such as this large white table bobbing off to commune with the glaciers in Iceland (click "continued..." to see the table's explosive fate). Signer is one of 18 photographers to have made the recently announced shortlist for the Prix Pictet, a major new global photography prize focused on sustainability and sponsored by Pictet & Cie, in association with the Financial Times. The theme of this year's competition is water, and other shortlisted artists include Chris Jordan, David Maisel, and Edward Burtynsky. The winner of the Prix Pictet, who will receive CHF 100,000 (approximately $99,400), will be announced on October 30 at a dinner at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, where shortlisted images will then be exhibited through November 8.

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Photo: Brian Franczyk / Thea Dickman for Wright

What do you get when you cross Gio Ponti with Piero Fornasetti and a bunch of caterpillars? All we know is that it involves lithographed butterflies—and you can sit on it. Continuing with our collaboration theme, in today's Friday photo, we bring you the butterfly-adorned, lacquered ash armchair designed by Ponti and Fornasetti around 1951 for Fornasetti Milano. The chair was sold last month for $60,000 (a steal compared to that Titanic life preserver we told you about earlier this week) at Wright's sale of "objets d'affection" from Nilufar Gallery, the Milan-based design and textiles mecca founded by Nina Yashar that this year is celebrating its thirtieth anniversary. The sale's stunning exhibition catalogue (designed by Rick Valicenti/Thirst with Wright's James Potsch and Jennifer Mahanay) describes Nilufar as "one of the most singular voices in design today. Channeling the energy of Via della Spiga, the works are fashionable—at once reflective and progressive. Harmonious compositions of color, line, and form meld against a backdrop of modern and contemporary history." Just thinking about it gives us, well, butterflies.

Photo: Kevin Kennefick

One hundred drawings. Nearly an acre of wall space. To be displayed for a quarter of a century. Such is the scale of the installation now in progress at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA) as the museum works with the Williams College Museum of Art to ready "Sol LeWitt: A Wall Drawing Retrospective," set to open on November 16. In today's Friday photo, we provide a peek at the steady progress of artist-installers, apprentices, and student interns as they recreate some of the LeWitt drawings, which represent almost 40 years of work by the artist. Conceived by the Yale University Art Gallery in collaboration with LeWitt before his death last year, the installation will remain on view for 25 years (giving you no excuse to miss it) in a 27,000-square-foot historic mill building at MASS MoCA. "In my case, I used the elements of these simple forms—square, cube, line, and color—to produce logical systems," LeWitt once said. "Most of these systems were finite; that is, they were complete using all possible variations. This kept them simple." Maybe this explains the origins of that old saying: Brevity is the Sol LeWitt.

Photo: UnBeige

New York City is well-stocked for public art this summer, with David Byrne's musical building, Chris Burden's erector set homage to Rockefeller Center, and the imminent waterfalls of Olafur Eliasson. Over at Lever House, they've displaced the courtyard Damien Hirst sculpture "The Virgin Mother" (the subject of innumerable complaints by the easily offended, we hear) and swapped out the naked men for sculptures by Tom Sachs. For his first monumental works in bronze ("ironically painted white to resemble the foam core surface" of the initial models), Sachs chose a trio of cute cartoon characters, among them Sanrio's enduringly popular Hello Kitty. In today's Friday photo, one of the sculptures that doubles as a fountain looks to be tearfully sympathizing with a man as he slowly realizes that 53rd Street and Park Avenue might not be the most lucrative corner for a fruit stand.

In today's Friday photo, we bring you our shot of a Soho sidewalk vendor's creative take on the soaring price of oil. Here he hawks his wares—a table full of plastic guns that shoot soap bubbles—with the help of a handmade, oft-updated sign that gamely refuses the obvious bubble lettering but isn't averse to a smiley face, or five. And really, who wants to wield a wand when you can fire a gun?