I'd love to go for a walk among the treetops -- literally -- on the Kew tree top walkway. What a brilliant idea.

Yet another project from the Beijing sandbox: Architect Steven Holl is building a small version of the city I've envisioned twice my fiction: a forest of highrises connected by aerial throughways.

It seems that I have found in the Paris bureau of the New York Times a fellow religious tourist. Just watch the stunning photo montage accompanying her article "Worshiping Paris". Her article reveals another connection between myself and Paris: Keith Haring's foundation gave copies of a triptych he created after being diagnosed with AIDS to the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine in New York, Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, and the city of Paris, which placed its triptych in St.-Eustache.

Perhaps next time she'll also discuss the draw of the organs and bells in a bit more detail. It's interesting that despite their overall absence from her article, their sounds are one of the most noticeable and memorable aspects of the video.

It may not be so bad to be packaged up by Garfield and exiled to Abu Dhabi any more. With Louvre and Guggenheim posts going up and a CSU-educated computer-savvy princess managing the economy, the place is shaping up.

In the vein of great architects like van der Rohe and Le Corbusier, Michael Graves is putting out his own distinctive furnishings -- such as inexpensive clothes drying racks available exclusively at Target. His logo looks just like his buildings. I don't like his buildings, but I'm pleased with my new drying rack and tie/belt hanger. No more undershirts hanging from every extrusion in my room. And no more wasting energy and quarters on the dryer. But now I have to figure out when in the washing cycle to manually pour in the fabric softener...

In Cali, a house made of straw will spare you air conditioning in the summer and heating in the winter, allow you to have European deep-set windows and doors, and it won't kill you during the Big One.

I really enjoy exploring Zeeland through Google satellite maps, but the sight of this housing development actually makes me ill. No geographic image has evoked such a visceral reaction in me before. The thing looks like some sort of pox. It's clearly somebody's idea of a good time, residents and architects included. Perhaps on the ground it has its virtues. But all the identical roofs suggest identical houses. Just horrid.

In better image news, I've found the first online specimen for my safety card collection.

architectural social commentary

Dutch architects Willem Jan Neutelings and Michiel Riedijk manage social critique through their Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision while simultaneously preserving what they criticize in ghostly images. But they also subject those who visit and, more importantly, those who work in the building daily to what sounds like a rather harsh interpretation they've placed on media. The building, compared by this journalist to the Beinecke Library at Yale, looks gorgeous, but how will the inhabitants feel about it in ten years? Have the architects managed to balance usability with a flexible social critique?

Save the Sagrada Familia!

A high-speed tunnel connecting Barcelona and Madrid? Great. Running it 5 feet from the Sagrada Familia despite the protests of everyone from Gaudi's successor on the project to MIT professors? Royally bad idea.