• The busy bees at Mansilla + Tuñón have posted their first attempts at detailing the CICCM facade. 

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• Many of London’s signature skyscrapers have been delayed or put on hold with the economic downturn and credit crisis.  Some expect the construction sector will suffer a further fall of 9% in 2009, the biggest drop in 3 decades.  spiegel online 

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• bdonline has posted a video of David Chipperfield Architects’ dramatic remodelling of the Neues Museum in Berlin. 

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• “Vides” (Voids) a retrospective of 51 years of exhibitions without exhibits by nine different artists has opened at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris.  In almost a dozen rooms the National Museum of Modern Art  has assembled exhibitions that showed absolutely nothing, leaving empty the space for which they were designed. via The Independent 

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• Russel Davies reviews Cosmic Catch an electronic toy that uses RFID sensors to detect who has the ball and directs who the ball should be thrown to next.  

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• Dieter Rams’ 10 Commandments of good design. “An honestly-designed product must not claim features it does not have – being more innovative, more efficient, of higher value. It must not influence or manipulate buyers and users.” 

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• Monocle talks to the CEO of  Lego, Jørgen Vig Knudstorp, about the future of the toy. 

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• Alvaro Siza talks to bdonline on the eve of receiving the RIBA Gold Medal. 

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• You can apply here to occupy the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square as part of Antony Gormley’s One & Other project.  A different person will occupy the plinth for one hour, 24 hours a day, for 100 days to create a portrait of the 21st century UK.  Read more at The Guardian. 

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• Twitter. I am there, if you are into that kind of thing. 

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• Tabbloid takes RSS feeds that you specify and turns them into PDF files that are then emailed to you on a daily or weekly basis. A quick test revealed a nicely set out document that works best with longer format, text heavy entries. It is sponsored by HP so, I guess they are looking for a way to leverage the ubiquity of RSS to serve the needs of a business based on ink consumption. 

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• POST is a new architecture journal out of Melbourne. “POST aims to represent multiple attitudes towards architecture from inhabitant through to practitioner; architect, developer, builder, artist, interior designer, writer etc.” PDFs of the first two issues are available for download. 

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• Toyota is looking to build an ultralight hybrid with a bioplastic body made from seaweed within 15 years.  Wired 

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• Desks with swinging footrests and adjustable stools that allow children to sit or stand depending on their mood are being trialled in Minnesota schools. NYT 

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• Francis Bacon returns to Madrid.  IHT Prado 

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• Edgar Müller’s astonishing 3D pavement art. Guardian Slideshow. 

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• Meet Ulrich Gerhartz, master piano-tuner and probably the single most important figure in the entire piano world. The Guardian. 

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• Members of the the architecture profession have said they are experiencing a “bloodbath” as the latest victims of the recession. The Independent. 

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• Alice Rawsthorn on the enduring appeal of the Concorde.  IHT 

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• The paths of boats collecting ocean floor terrain data have turned up on Google Earth, leading the internets to speculate that these traces are in fact the ruins of Atlantis.  

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• French artist and videographer David Lasnier paints using the Brushes app on his iPod Touch. via Wired 

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• Nicolai Ouroussoff reviews the first phase of Diller Scofidio & Renfro’s overhaul of the Lincloln Centre.  NYT 

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• Australian novelist Thomas Keneally considers the questions, doubts and fears raised by the Victorian bushfires.  Guardian. 

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• Astronomy.net are building an ‘Astronomy Engine’ which trawls for usable images of the night sky and adds accurate data on the constellations visible in the image. They have been using the Flickr API to add metadata to the photos in the Astronomy pool. For Example here we see the NGC 957, and NGC 869, NGC 884 Double clusters  

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