Yesterday we told you about our enduring fondness for Pee-Wee's Playhouse and in particular the show's marvelous set, which was designed by the multi-talented Gary Panter. And so we were pleased to hear this morning from a reader who sent along a scan of Jacob Bernstein's feature on Panter in the latest issue of WWDscoop, a special publication of Women's Wear Daily (that is not online). Among the highlights is a quote from Panter's old chum Robert Storr, dean of the Yale University School of Art and the commissioner of last year's Venice Biennale, who reveals his knowledge of the playhouse as it relates to Panter's studio. "In a way, the playhouse is a phantasmagoria of the messy, rundown thing Gary's got up in the attic," says Storr, referring to the stuff-filled top floor of Panter's house in Brooklyn. "He lives in the mundane version of his own crazy world, and the playhouse is the artful projection of that world into another dimension." Bernstein also talks to Pee-Wee himself, a.k.a. Paul Reubens, already a fan of Panter's when in 1981 he asked the artist to a do poster for him. Says Reubens, "He came down and saw me, and afterward he said, 'I'd love to design the poster, but how about the set, too?'"

Yesterday, after hearing from our friend Kristen Richards over at ArchNewsNow that many of the wire services had the news wrong about when exactly Frank Gehry would be receiving his Venice Biennial lifetime achievement award (it was a mix between this year and next year, and the initial press release was even pretty vague), we finally figured out that it is in fact this year that the starchitect will be honored and we've since updated our original post to reflect as such. But staying on Gehry for a while, we turn to a piece that Kristen was also kind enough to pass along, this one from the Guardian with Jonathan Glancey talking about why the UK is so afraid of having Frank Gehry doing any work in their country, his Serpentine Pavilion being the first project he's been awarded there. It's a pretty funny piece, with Frank speculating why the English don't like him and Glancey helping to egg him on just a bit (along with giving a lot of biographical information on an already very well-known figure -- at least well-known to people like us). Here's a bit:

The odd thing is that the Serpentine Pavilion is Gehry's first English venture. "Probably the last, too," he says. "I don't think England likes me. The critics don't, that's for sure. I reckon I've got a couple of years in me, but I don't count on making a career in England."

The lady of great design wisdom, Alice Rawsthorn, has a terrific piece up about Li Edelkoort, her work as the head of the Design Academy Eindhoven, and her role as one of the primary figures in the explosion of the design-as-art phenomenon. Also of note, she's decided to retire soon, hence one reason to tell her story. And she really has had an incredibly impressive career, responsible for such things as launching Maarten Baas into rockstar designer-esque celebrity and helping the Milan Furniture Fair become one of the preeminent events of the year, in addition, to running a whole academy, of course. Here's a bit about her career:

Now 57, Edelkoort cuts an imposing figure in part-futuristic, part-medieval flowing robes - "a queenly presence," as [Ilse Crawford] describes her. After studying fashion, she became a trend forecaster for the Dutch retail chain De Bijenkorf before founding Trend Union, a Parisian forecasting consultancy that she still runs. Her first stab at teaching was in 1993 when she became a department head at Eindhoven. "Rumors spread about this distinguished and brilliant lady coming from Paris by limo," recalled Job Smeets, co-founder of the Studio Job design group, who was then "a bored student." "She entered the room - the first avant-garde cosmopolitan I'd met. It was an eye opener."

Earlier thie month, The New York Times wrote of the insights now being sifted from the 45 tons worth of Buckminster Fuller's personal archives, given by his family to Stanford University in 1999. Why 45 tons? Noted James Sterngold in the Times, "Because he believed his ideas and life would hold enduring interest, Fuller collected nearly every scrap of paper that ever passed through his hands..." (What? Why are you looking at us like that? We only hang on to the important scraps of paper, the ones we'll surely need to refer to later.)

Yesterday the Times published a letter written in response to Sterngold's piece. It came from Peter Loge of Washington, who writes that at the age of ten, he sent Fuller "a design for a solar house that, if I recall correctly, would have exploded had anyone been foolish enough to build it. Fuller responded with a very nice note complimenting my 'thoughtful design'" and an inscribed copy of The Dymaxion World of Buckminster Fuller. "That correspondence kept alive an interest in physics and energy for many years," wrote Loge. "And [it] continues to remind me ideas are worth having and sharing because you never know what might happen to them when you do." Not only are ideas worth having and sharing, they're also worth keeping—forever, Fuller likely would have added. Something tells us that Loge's childhood drawing is now in a cool, dry place in Palo Alto.

People who bandy about the term "media training" should clip and laminate the full salmon-hued page that the New York Observer recently devoted to a sit-down with real estate mogul and art collector Aby Rosen, whose RFR Holding company owns such properties as Lever House and the Seagram Building. In the face of some tough questions by the Observer's indefatigable reporter Max Abelson, Rosen exhibited a Zen-like calm, offering matter-of-fact musings on even such potentially incendiary topics as Tom Wolfe's ad hominem argument against his project at 980 Madison ("It had a nasty undertone that I didn't care much for.") and the decor of his children's bedrooms ("Sure, there are Basquiats. The kids chose them."). His greatest regret? "I should have been more aggressive when I pursued the Chrysler Building."

We asked Abelson about the interview, which took place at the sales center of RFR's high-end condo development at 350 West Broadway, where Rosen commissioned a George Condo portrait ("Smiling Woman with Pearls" (2008), pictured at right) for the lobby. Abelson describes his subject as "much more amiable than many of the real estate developers I've interviewed—a lot of them can be buttoned-down and un-arty, but he obviously enjoys his life."

In the published interview, Rosen seems to demur from directly answering the question as to when art becomes "just a sales gimmick," but Abelson gives us a snippet that didn't make it into print. "One thing [Rosen] said is that a Warhol or Basquiat can't successfully promote a product if the product isn't also inherently good. I thought that was interesting," says Abelson. "Personally, I would rather see a beautiful painting in a museum than in the lobby of a luxury condo, but then again I'd rather a condo building be made beautifully (and decorated with beautiful art) than be drab and boring." As for the condos' Condo, Abelson describes it as "huge, bright, [and] sort of Picasso-like."

Some sad news from late yesterday. The architect Walter A. Netsch Jr. passed away over the weekend. You'll likely recall his work if you've ever been to Chicago and have seen the University of Illinois' campus, on which many of his buildings stand. He also designed and built the U.S. Air Force Academy's chapel outside of Colorado Springs, Colorado. For us, personally, visiting there as a fairly young kid, it was the first time this writer was ever in awe of a building and probably the first experience he'd ever had in vaguely understanding what architecture was. But Netsch wasn't just the architect behind this handful of buildings. He had a long and storied career and if you're at all interested in Chicago architectural history (or maybe even if you aren't), his lengthy obituary is well worth the read.

Starchitect Rafael Viñoly excels at designing performance spaces (e.g., Jazz at Lincoln Center, the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts), but we had no idea that he brings a musician's eye to his work. According to Robert Hilferty's piece in today's New York Sun, when not overseeing his firm's 250 employees (scattered among offices in New York, London, Los Angeles, and soon, Dubai), Viñoly can be found playing the piano, collecting pianos (around ten at last count), and listening to others play, preferably in Carnegie Hall. But ix-nay on the obby-hay! "I never thought this was a hobby," he told the Sun. "It's not an entertainment. It's a rare combination of pleasure and suffering." For Viñoly, the "piano pavilion" that he built on his property in Water Mill, New York, is "better than a swimming pool, better than a tennis court." Meanwhile, at the age of 63, he has recently started taking piano lessons again with the hope of polishing up his Mozart.

"'You want to play Mozart?'" he said, quoting his teacher. "'This is like walking naked on Fifth Avenue, so you have to be in good shape. Because you can't hide anything.'" He's also learning Chopin's G minor Ballade; Beethoven's Piano Sonata in A Major, Op. 101; Six Little Piano Pieces by Schoenberg, and Schumann's "Kreisleriana," which he says is "one of the most difficult pieces on the face of the earth."

When not editing Monocle, stylish globetrotter Tyler Brûlé is back to penning the "Fast Lane" column in the Financial Times weekend edition. In this week's column, Brûlé writes of his self-imposed exile in "pleasure purgatory," an out-of-body, deadline-free state brought on by "sheer exhaustion combined with the countdown to a much-needed holiday" (we hear you, minus the imminent holiday part). And reading of Brûlé's travels—from London to Stockholm to Munich, lubricated by Sancerre and sunny weather—succeeds in approximating the floating effect he describes. After touching down in Stockholm:

...I was speeding through the archipelago in a taxi boat en route to my house. The sky was cloudless, the outside temperature had crept up to 26°C and Bosse, the taxi boat skipper, told me that the Baltic just might be swimmable. Moments later, the island pulled into view and as we pulled up to the jetty I was greeted by an already tanned Mats and our friends Martin and Caroline. Pulling on shorts and a polo shirt I parked myself on a lounger and settled in with Ryszard Kapuscinski's Shah of Shahs.

Oyez, oyez, oyez! On our list of People We Wouldn't Expect to See as Speakers at Videogame Conferences, retired Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O'Connor is right up there, but we should know better than to underestimate a ranch-raised Texan whose childhood pets included a bobcat ("Bob") and a couple of javelinas. Yesterday in New York City O'Connor gave the closing keynote address at the fifth annual Games for Change Festival, which focuses on how to use digital games for social change.

After two days of discussion about things such as ARGs (Alternative Reality Games), XNA Game Studio, and SimCity as a tool for teaching urban planning, O'Connor took the stage at Parsons, The New School for Design's Tishman Auditorium. "If someone told me when I retired from court that I'd be talking at a conference about digital gaming, I'd think they'd had one drink too many," WIRED quotes O'Connor as telling the conference crowd of academics and gaming professionals. She then announced Our Courts, a soon-to-be-released civics learning game that she has been working on with University of Wisconsin professor James Paul Gee. Notes WIRED:

The game "lets students engage in real issues and real problems," O'Connor said. It will allow them to "step into the shoes of a judge, a legislator, an executive -- teach them how to think through and analyze problems, take action and voice opinions to their elected representatives."

An early exercise in the game will likely deal with educating students about their First Amendment rights, using examples like Tinker v. Des Moines and the "Bong Hits For Jesus" case.

Graphic artist Alton Kelley, best known for the trippy concert posters and album covers he designed with creative partner Stanley "Mouse" Miller for bands such as the Grateful Dead, died on Sunday at the age of 67 (although The Washington Post insists he was 68). "Kelley had the unique ability to translate the music being played into amazing images that capture the spirit of who we were and what the music was all about," noted the Grateful Dead's Mickey Hart in a statement released this week.

With influences ranging from the Zig-Zag rolling papers logo to The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, Kelley and Mouse created such memorable rock imagery as the Dead's skull and roses motif (and oodles of album covers, posters, book covers, and stickers) and iconic posters for concerts at San Francisco's Avalon Ballroom and Fillmore Auditorium. For more on Kelley, we point you to San Francisco Chronicle music critic Joel Selvin's well-composed obit, in which he points out Kelley's fondness for painting pinstripes on motorcycle gas tanks and habit of getting kicked out of the public library when on inspiration-seeking trips there with Mouse.

"Stanley and I had no idea what we were doing," Mr. Kelley told The Chronicle last year. "But we went ahead and looked at American Indian stuff, Chinese stuff, Art Nouveau, Art Deco, Modern, Bauhaus, whatever. We were stunned by what we found and what we were able to do. We had free rein to just go graphically crazy. Where before that, all advertising was pretty much just typeset with a photograph of something."