Picture this: You’re driving down the highway when in the rearview you spy a soapbox derby car built by college students barreling along at a traffic-friendly speed. The car is smothered in photovoltaics and looks more than a little extraterrestrial.

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1% Water, a new exhibition at Z33 gallery in Hasselt, Belgium is using art and design to take a critical look at water usage (and possible remedies) throughout the world. While 70 percent of the Earth’s surface is covered by this most abundant fluid, only the titular one percent is available for use. But as this exhibit and the 2008 Next Generation® Design Competition demonstrate—this resource’s threat could be diminished with some out of the box design thinking.

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According to a story in last Sunday’s New York Times, working long hours can be bad for you—even if you secretly kind of enjoy it. As a result, some companies are trying to discourage the practice.

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Rem Koolhaas and Hans Ulrich Obrist on June 13, 2008 at the Van Alen Institute. Photo by Patrick Hannaway, Courtesy of Van Alen Institute.

Switzerland’s Hans Ulrich Obrist may well be the curators’ curator. In the past fifteen years, he has organized over 150 global exhibitions, collaborating with countless figureheads such as Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, Danish installation artist Olafur Eliasson, and the late, great Philip Johnson. Obrist has spent much of his career assembling forums and asking questions to a global audience and with Formulas for Now: Hans Ulrich Obrist’s New York Interviews, he asks architects, artists, mathematicians, scientists, and taxi drivers his most sweeping question yet: “What is your formula for now?

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Having already cornered the market in films about typefaces, director Gary Hustwit has just announced that his next project will be a more hands-on affair. Objectified, a documentary on industrial design, “is about the manufactured objects we surround ourselves with, and the people who make them,” the film’s Web site says.

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A lot of architects fancy themselves to be writers too, but according to Christian de Portzamparc and Philippe Sollers, architecture itself shares something fundamental with writing.

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What better place to watch a documentary on Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron’s Beijing National Stadium—the so-called Bird’s Nest—than in the Hamptons, a stone’s throw from the site of their next big project, the new Parrish Art Museum? Next Tuesday’s New York premiere of Bird’s Nest—Herzog & de Meuron in China, by Christoph Schaub and Michael Schindhelm, will give Southampton audiences a preview of the 91,000-seat venue, set to open for the summer Olympics next month.

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A model for the expansion of Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum CS. Image courtesy of Concern.

I travelled to the Netherlands a few weeks ago and spent several days in Amsterdam. It happened to be a perfect time to stop by the Stedelijk Museum CS, located in the city’s museum quarter district. The Stedelijk is overseeing a major renovation of its existing building (designed in the 1890’s by architect A.W. Weissman) as well as an expansion that will double existing public and display space when it opens in December of 2009. I attended a special reception where the museum announced that Amsterdam’s Gilian Schrofer will design several interior spaces for the new building. The event correlated with the opening of “Models of Concern,” an exhibition featuring Schrofer’s work with Concern design.

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