It is with complete and utter disbelief that we relay this news broken by our sister blog, Fishbowl NY: 106-year-old House & Garden will cease to exist come December.

While we’re not terribly surprised about the surfeit of shelter mags crowding out some of the competition, we thought H&G was one of the most forward-thinking. Earlier this year, H&G took on a massive website redesign that not only made it look real pretty, they made some super-smart choices like adding Grace Bonney, Karrie Jacobs and Treehugger as bloggers, as well as bringing Jay McInerney‘s wine column online.

Although maybe this really isn’t the end…H&G has already been axed once in 1993, and was brought back to life in 1996.

A statement from Condé Nast follows.

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It is with much sadness that we mark the end of an era in architectural criticism. There will exist, as proof of this era, a trifecta of articles–a manifesto, if you will–heretoforth dubbed the “New Abrasiveness.” So contagious, so revolutionary, so written by a design writer astuter than we. He bashed Boston. He fucked Gehry. And this time around for Philip Nobel, it’s personal.

In this month’s Metropolis, Nobel builds a treehouse, exposing himself and his not-quite-right angles for criticism by Winterhouse award-winner Thomas de Monchaux, a nameless architect who was “appalled,” and others. The reviews, you could say, were not good:

Soon a crowd came by for a cookout. Everyone kept referring to my unique architectural response to space and place as a “lifeguard stand” (has nothing else ever been made out of white-painted 4x4s?), and some, several beers in, went so far as to swing on the delicate yet boldly cantilevered trellis, a gracious statement about infinity and the pitfalls of building with wet wood that in no way can be mistaken for monkey bars (except for the fact that I used grip-width dowels and spaced them just the right distance apart). Keen-eyed Karrie Jacobs, my beloved column colleague, came, observed, and had no comment.

Farewell, o abrasive Nobel. We’ll play in your treehouse any day.

The Other Means Reading Series brings together three writers for reading events that benefit a mutually-agreed-upon cause. Tonight’s edition has a design-for-good feel to it: It features Martin Pedersen, Karrie Jacobs and Philip Nobel reading various works of fiction and non-fiction related to design, and benefits the Hester Street Collective, a design-build org that works in low income NYC neighborhoods. Nobel tells us that he’ll be reading an excerpt of a biography of the architect/polymath Jacob Karl he’s currently working on. If you ask him nicely, maybe he’ll read his criticism manifesto for you, too. Last Exit Bar, 8pm.

We heard that SVA would be starting a design criticism program about six months ago and now we’ve got the official word: “The Master of Fine Arts in Design Criticism will prepare graduates for careers as design critics, journalists, curators, educators and design managers, by providing the intellectual tools for researching, analyzing, evaluating and chronicling all aspects of design.”

The program will be launched in Fall of 2008 and will be chaired by UnBeige fave Alice Twemlow, with a pretty exciting thesis plan: An annual public conference dedicated to design criticism (could it be the first ever, too?), to be inaugurated in the spring of 2009.

And would you look at this faculty? Kurt Andersen, Paola Antonelli, Michael Bierut, Ralph Caplan, Peter Hall, Jessica Helfand, Steven Heller, Karrie Jacobs, Julie Lasky, Cathy Leff, and Phil Patton. We’d say those MFA candidates are definitely getting the best in the business.