Last holiday season, we received a puzzling treat from our friends at Pentagram: Decipher, a small olive green book of 14 cryptograms. Designed by Pentagram partner Harry Pearce and Jason Ching, the book contains a series of codes -- here a page of numbered polygons, there a thicket of seemingly nonsensical text -- each with a cryptic clue (e.g., "Just in the nick of time."). Thwarted as we were to convey the book's contents in a blog post, we were thrilled to hear from Michael Bierut that after five months of work, Decipher is now available online "for hours of play at home." We'll get you started with the below Penta/cryptogram. The clue is "Midday nap," and we've posted the solution after the jump.

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Since its 2005 opening, design gallery Sebastian + Barquet has been one of our favorite Chelsea stops, and we confess to dragging numerous people there last year to admire the rivets on Marc Newson's Lockheed Lounge. Up through May 24th at S+B's West 24th Street gallery is "Formes and Couleurs," featuring works by Charlotte Perriand, Jean Prouve, and Pierre Jeanneret. Meanwhile, Artkrush's recent interview with S+B founder and art dealer Ramis Barquet reveals some of the gallery's backstory. When asked how he came to select Mexican architect Enrique Norten to design the S+B gallery, Barquet's answer is a testament to the power of a stellar (and promptly delivered) concept book:

I was considering a few important architects, and there he was. I had never met Norten, but I was aware of his work and knew that he had offices in New York. I arranged to meet him at my storage space in Chelsea and spoke to him about my ideas. A few days later, I received a spectacular concept book with digital images of his designs for the gallery and showroom, and I loved it.

As the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton, New York continues the giddy countdown to the completion of its new Herzog & de Meuron-designed home in Water Mill, it's keeping its hands busy. Opening this Sunday at the Parrish is "Paper Transformed: Origami," an exhibition that brings together nearly 100 works by leading contemporary origami artists and demonstrates just how far origami has come from that rather disappointing "drinking cup" we constructed (and rather pathetically, actually used) in elementary school. The exhibition was organized by San Diego's Mingei International Museum.

Visitors can not only marvel at large- and small-scale origami constructions but also try making their own using unique folding patterns creating for the exhibition by origami expert Florence Temko. On hand to dazzle at Saturday's members-only opening reception will be Robert Lang, a physicist turned origami master whose repertoire includes some of the most complex origami designs ever created. We're going to throw on our best Issey Miyake frock, hop on the Jitney, and pepper Dr. Lang with some questions about Huzita axioms!

An angular blend of black currant, verbena, and grapefruit, according to Chandler Burr, who offers a round-up of modernist fragrances in the new Design Issue of T: The New York Times Style Magazine. Lever House finds its olfactory match in Yuzu Rouge, made by a company named for the postal code of the world fragrance hub of Grasse, France (06130). Burr deconstructs the juice:

The building is 24 stories of blue-green glass and stainless-steel curtain wall; the perfume is equally sleek and deceptively simple. The raw materials -- black currant, verbena, grapefruit -- structure themselves with crystalline clarity, free of any perceptible supporting skeleton. Like most of its kind, it is somewhat fleeting, diffusing madly for 15 minutes, then becoming a mesmerizing murmur of fresh lemongrass and tea.

Burr goes on to describe Gucci's "Rush" as having a "marvelously, explicitly unnatural [scent], as if one were smelling a coat made of the most expensive Lycra." Mmm, space-age polymers! As for a comparable building, he points to the Bank of America Tower, the $1 billion skyscraper project now underway in Midtown Manhattan. "This box is angled, complex, multifaceted," writes Burr. "Its clear glass skin is washed in a milky, pearly whiteness, keeping it both warm and cool." Can the first LEED-certified fragrance be far off?

What do you get when you combine a couple of MIT grads, robot-controlled instruments, and an unlimited supply of Absolut vodka? A giant kinetic sculpture that composes music based on input from website visitors. Known as the Absolut Quartet, the musical machine is the creation of engineer-designers Dan Paluska and Jeff Lieberman and is part of Absolut Machines, a global technology project sponsored by the spirits company that asks, "In an Absolut world, would machines be creative?"

Paluska explained his creation to us when we stopped in to see the Absolut Quartet in New York City, where it has just opened for public viewing at a ground-level space on Orchard Street. "Essentially, you go to this website, sign up in the queue, and then play a little melody," he said, sidling up to a laptop and tapping out a few notes on a virtual piano keyboard that appeared on the screen. "The machine will take that melody and use it in a composition." Walking over to the sculpture itself, which would fit inside a spacious walk-in closet, Paluska pointed to the speaker that plays user-created melodies for the machine to interpret and explained the set-up: nine percussion elements mounted at the front, a 32-key marimba activated by rubber balls shot from a robotic cannon, and a row of spinning wine glasses played by robotic fingers. As for the fourth member of the quartet, that's the human player of the virtual piano.

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Kate and Andy Spade may have quietly exited their roles as creative director and CEO of the company that they (and then majority owner Neiman Marcus) sold to Liz Claiborne for $124 million in 2006, but their distinctive sense of whimsy and fondness for punchy brights lives on. We recently spotted this bold, spring-y display in the windows of the Kate Spade store on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, with a backdrop of giant paint chips that feature hues with names like "blueberry pie," "pink champagne," and "emerald city."

On display are the label's "coal bags," printed with a degraded color version of the "Noel" mark, which was developed in 1999 as a companion to the original "Kate Spade New York" logo. According to the company, designer Michael Ian Kaye created the Noel mark in the spirit of a monogram or Japanese hanko (signature seal). It was inspired by the work of Paul Rand and such symbols as the Kodak "K," the Dixie Cup flower, and Chanel's double C's. Look closely and you'll see how the shapes define the negative space of the letters "K" and "S," but from a distance, it reads like an Alexander Girard fabric. Why the moniker "Noel"? It's Kate Spade's middle name.

We confess that we completely forgot Jeff Koons' birthday (it was January 21), but we're planning to make it up to him with the perfect belated gift: a femtosecond laser that can be used to change the color of virtually any metal he chooses! That's right--thanks to a newly discovered laser processing technique (again with the lasers!), Koons can zap up some gold aluminum, black gold, purple silver, and yes, blue steel.

The breakthrough, which was recently published in the journal Applied Physics Letters, is the work of University of Rochester optics professor Chunlei Guo and his assistant, Anatoliy Vorobeyv. How does it work? Well, in a nutshell, the ultra-fast, ultra-intense femtosecond (that's one billionth of one millionth of a second) laser restructures the surface of the metal, changing its optical properties and therefore, its color.

The metal-coloring research follows up on Guo's discovery of "black metal" in late 2006, when his team was able to create pitch black metal surfaces that absorbed virtually all light. "Now we finally can make a metal reflect almost any color we wish," says Guo. "When we first found the process that produced a gold color, we couldn't believe it. We worked in the lab until midnight trying to figure out what other colors we could make." In addition to creating metals that appear one color from all angles, Guo and Vorobyev have tweaked their technique to produce metals that exhibit different colors depending on one's point of view.

What's the best way to retain employees? Derby-car racing! (Of course, it helps to be an industrial design firm.) It was this employee retention tactic that nabbed Columbus, Ohio-based Priority Designs a cameo in yesterday's Wall Street Journal. While other firms profiled talked of holding scavenger hunts, "re-birthday parties" on the anniversary of each employee's hiring, and concerts by a visiting guitarist, Priority won the cool contest with its company-wide participation in derby-car races sponsored by the Industrial Designers Society of America.

Four years after entering its first contest, Priority now dominates the annual event, having nabbed first, second, and third-place finishes. Paul Kolada, the firm's principal and owner, says that such competitions have become a showcase for the firm (this year's winning car, "Slingshot," is currently featured on the firm's homepage). What's the secret to their success? Total dedication. They installed a racetrack in the office, and employees stay late into the night tweaking car designs. According to the WSJ, constructing a car may cost as much as $10,000, including engineers' lost billable time. But the morale boost? Priceless.

Lucia Dinh uncovered a delightful trend of which designers of all disciplines should take note: book structures. There's these pictures of the "Beauty and the Book" exhibit at the Israel Museum, and the inspiring "Boozers and the Book" by Vestal Design.

Everywhere we look, everyone seems to be doing their best of lists, their nostalgic looks back to the halfway marker of the decade we still haven't got a name for. So we thought we'd do our own highlights.

Below, some of the awards we'd like to give to the people, places, designs, and all-around awesome that's made our year kinda kicky. In no order other than importance:

The BFF Award:
Michael Bierut, for appearing in these pages a brazilian times and being cool with it every time.

The You Wrote Some Shit About Me But We Can Be Friends Because I'm Just That Cool Award:
Michael Arad, for sticking out an incredibly difficult project, and still partying like a rockstar every time we saw him.

The Yeah I'll Curate That And It'll Kick Ass And By The Way I Rule Award:
Paola Antonelli, for going out on a SAFE limb that wasn't actually that safe. And wearing vinyl to the opening.

The Building On A Mass Grave And Throwing A Party There Doesn't Bother Me One Bit Award:
Larry Silverstein, for giving the Architect's Newspaper the 47th floor of 7 World Trade Center (sorry, 250 Greenwich) for their second anniversary party, so every person to do with architecture could have a lovely picture window view. Of death.

The Why Didn't We Think Of That Story? Oh Wait, Maybe Because It's Not A Story Award:
Robin Progrebin of the New York Times, for introducing us to the architects of this crazy neighborhood called the Lower East Side.

The Made Us Puke Even Though We--Shockingly--Weren't Drunk Award:
Peter Eisenman, for the 89.5 degree-angle Wexner Center.

Volume 2 TK. Nominations welcome.