“The brave new seamless surface of the future is officially an antique,” writes Oliver Wainwright of Formica’s 100th birthday. Designs with names like Skylark, Mayflower, and Softglow abounded in the laminate boom that shaped mid-century interior design.

In honor of the inaugural “Orwell Day” on Jan. 21—the 63-year anniversary of the author’s death—Penguin is releasing a David Pearson–designed edition of George Orwell’s dystopian tale 1984 with the book’s title, fittingly, censored out.

Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas has been confirmed as the next curator of the Venice Architecture Biennale. He says he aims to “give a new look” to architecture’s basic elements “to see if we can discover something new about architecture.”

“Before Ada Louise Huxtable, architecture was not a part of the public dialogue,” said critic Paul Goldberger of Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable, who died Monday at age 91.

Speculative design studio Metahaven, featured in our touring exhibition Graphic Design: Now in Production, opens a new show at MoMA PS1 on Jan. 20. Organized by former Walker curator Peter Eleey, it includes new work about a new cloud-hosting enterprise in Iceland.

With its new site, Nothing Major, Pitchfork is taking on visual culture: “We love the bedroom GIF-makers, the resurgent craftsmen, the by-hand-typographers, vintage album cover aficionados, upstart brands as well as unsung classics, and amazing underdog projects…”

Unbeige gives building-of-the-year honors to Swiss architecture firm (and Walker expansion designers) Herzog & de Meuron for the Parrish Art Museum: It’s “a stealth beauty, an extruded artist’s studio that appears as a bleached, barn-like structure.”

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.