Completed late and over budget, the Stedelijk’s new “ridiculous looking” bathtub-shaped addition by Benthem Crouwel represents “civic icon-envy,” writes Michael Kimmelman, who says it’s a desperate response to the Guggenheim Bilbao.

It’s a new age of printing, as Amanda Ghassaei demonstrates: she’s devised a way of converting digital audio files into 3D printable 33 rpm records. She’s printed out singles by Nirvana, the Pixies, and others.

PANTONE 17-5641—aka Emerald—is 2013’s color of the year, according to the company billed as “the global authority on color.” The jewel-like hue symbolizes healing, growth, and rejuvenation—and it “translates easily to both fashion and home interiors.”

Thanks to funding from the Getty and the NEA, the Southern California Institute of Architecture’s Media Archive is now online, featuring 1,000+ hours of architecture/design lectures and events with Frank Gehry, Charles Eames, Zaha Hadid, and others.

Oscar Niemeyer, the Brazilian architect behind iconic buildings from Rio’s Sambadrome to the UN secretariat in New York, has died at age 104. The “Picasso of concrete” is best known for his designs for Brasília, the planned city that is his native country’s capital.

“Are video games art? They sure are, but they are also design, and a design approach is what we chose for this new foray into this universe,” writes architecture/design curator Paola Antonelli on MoMA’s acquisition of 14 games, including Pac-Man and Tetris.

“[O]ur design schools now have undoubtedly produced the design culture we share today,” writes Rob Giampietro, a principal at New York’s Project Projects, in his essay—now published online—from our catalogue for Graphic Design: Now in Production.

The Hirshhorn’s Bubble, a $15.5 million temporary inflatable structure by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, “seems like little more than an inflated take on the event-as-art endeavor with a pronounced D.C. flavor,” writes Kriston Capps, an editor at Architect magazine.