As Suzanne LaBarre reported last month, many local governments are taking a chance on LEDs to improve the energy efficiency of their cities’ infrastructure. But they’ve already run into problems with high up-front costs and foot-dragging utilities (to say nothing of the steep road LEDs’ more experimental cousins, organic light-emitting diodes, still face).

The New York Times’s Bits blog notes this morning that as far as the technology has come in recent years, there are major hurdles ahead for light output. (Oh, and lots of the down-market versions are simply garbage.) To help standardize LED performance, the U.S. Department of Energy has introduced the Lighting Facts metric, an assessment of light quality, color, and energy use that comes in a nutritional-label-style package. It should warn specifiers off some of the junkier products. Even so, it’s hard to shake the feeling that while LEDs might be a good choice for Times Square, they’re still a ways off from lighting your office.

Move over, Het Strijkijzer. There’s a new darling of the high-rise set. Tokyo’s Mode Gakuen Cocoon Tower has just been named the skyscraper of the year by Emporis, a German-based Web site that compiles data on very tall buildings. The Gherkin-esque tower, designed by Kenzo Tange Associates, bested Seoul’s Boutique Monaco (Mass Studies; void-pocked mixed-use block) and the Shanghai World Financial Center (Kohn Pedersen Fox; giant bottle-cap opener) to join such past winners as Calatrava’s Turning Torso, Norman Foster’s Hearst Building, and the aforementioned Het Strijkijzer, a Flatiron look-alike in The Hague. The 668-foot-tall Cocoon is one of a pair of skyscrapers that Tange designed for Mode Gakuen, a trade school in Tokyo’s Shinjuku ward.

Given the rosy outlook for global architecture and real estate, we can safely predict that next year’s winner will be a two-story Home Depot on the New Jersey Turnpike.

Since Gary Hustwit’s upcoming industrial-design documentary, Objectified, is all about products and the people who make them, here is a helpful (though incomplete) cheat sheet to what you’ll find in the just-released trailer: Naota Fukasawa’s hand, the wall-mounted CD player he designed for Muji, a Panton chair, an Apple laptop, a Mercedes-Benz (wild guess—it looks like the Stuttgart museum to me ) convertible, a Leica camera, a Braun radio, an Oxo peeler, Jasper Morrison’s Air chair being manufactured, a mess of cell phones, Muji and IKEA stores, Smart Design’s Flip Mino pocket video camera, and an ad for an Sanyo’s waterless Aqua washing machine. Oh, right, and Karim Rashid, too. God knows he needs the publicity.

See what else you can spot!

Cassandras predicting doom for design whimsy in the face of the global financial mess may prove to be as mistaken as those premature eulogists of irony. Exhibit A: Kurrency, a conceptual line of chandeliers from Stuart Karten Design. The Los Angeles firm with the DWR-looking logo suggests that instead of stowing your dollars under your mattress or with your teetering-on-the-edge-of-insolvency bank (you’ve seen It’s a Wonderful Life, right?), you should keep them in plain sight, hanging by the hundreds from its new light fixture.

Kurrency, which looks like an inverted wedding cake, comes in a variety of denominations and currencies, from euros to pesos. For even more impact, financial buzzwords such as Greed, Safety Net, and Stratification (huh?) are projected below. Karten is quoted in the press release as saying, “In today’s economy, there is perhaps nothing so beautiful as cold hard cash.”

Sure, it might sound crass, it’s the best argument I’ve heard in a while for the intrinsic value of design. More photos after the jump. Read more…

An 88-foot-tall neon sculpture that sits atop Roanoke’s Mill Mountain gives Virginia’s fourth-largest metropolis its nickname, the Star City of the South. As of last month, there’s another piece of architecture that would lay claim to the glow of the sobriquet. Randall Stout, a Los Angeles–based architect and onetime Gehry protégé, recently completed the Taubman Museum of Art, an 81,000-square-foot building that is more than a little indebted to Libeskinian angularity and Gehry-esque flow. It’s not Stout’s first museum (he also designed an extension of the Hunter Museum of American Art, in Chattanooga), but, formally at least, it’s a fairly radical addition to an architecturally staid city in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

There are a few sustainable elements—low-E glass, a good amount of natural daylight, some local materials—but, alas, no LEED certification. Among the inaugural exhibitions are Rethinking Landscape, which surveys contemporary landscape photography, and In the Cataclysmic Calm, a show (no, it’s not a volume of contemporary free verse) on the making of the building itself. More photos after the jump. Read more…

Given the state of the magazine industry today, it’s not surprising that self-published, small-run zines have started to look a lot more appealing. But nostalgia aside, the golden age of the Xeroxed meme wasn’t just an isolated cultural moment, as Mimi Zeiger proves with her upcoming exhibition, A Few Zines: Dispatches from the Edge of Architectural Production, at New York’s Studio-X. She traces the influence of underground publications through complete runs of a few influential 1990s zines along with a smattering of newer work. As part of the show, Zeiger—a writer, an editor, and an all-around mensch—is publishing a new issue of her beloved loud paper and assembling a panel on January 8 that includes Andrew Wagner (Dodge City Journal, American Craft), Felix Burrichter (Pin-Up), Stephen Duncombe (Notes from Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture), and many others.

A Few Zines runs from January 8 to February 29, 2009, at Studio-X (180 Varick Street, Suite 1610, New York; 212-989-2398).

Alexander Calder’s monumental outdoor sculptures might have been his bread and butter—woe betide the corporate headquarters or museum without a sylphlike mobile guarding its entrance—but they were hardly his only meal ticket. From early goofy wire portraits of Jimmy Durante and Calvin Coolidge (some of which are now on display at the Whitney Museum) to custom-painted jets, the range of Calder’s work was nothing if not expansive. Next month, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York, will present the first exhibition exclusively dedicated to his 1,800 pieces of jewelry.

Like his spindly, ungainly sculptures, his oversize jewelry can take some getting used to. Presumably, the art patrons, socialites, and celebrities who wore Calder’s work could also afford an assistant to keep stray brass tendrils out of their vichyssoise. More photos after the jump. Read more…

Sure, U.S. retail sales might have just dropped by a record 2.4 percent in October, with clothiers among the hardest hit, but things are still groovy, right? That’s the message, anyway, of this season’s window display at Barneys New York, where the theme is “Peace and Love: Have a Hippie Holiday.” Read more…

In honor of the Best President-elect Ever and his big night, the New Museum has just announced that it is adding a new painting of Michelle Obama to its fantastic exhibition Live Forever: Elizabeth Peyton. Showing the future First Lady and her daughter Sasha listening to Barack speak at this summer’s Democratic National Convention, the work will be hung today in the museum’s fourth-floor gallery. Read more…

It’s a perfect metaphor for the teetering global real-estate market: Capital Gate, the glassy tower at the center of Abu Dhabi’s $2.2 billion Capital Centre development, has just been submitted to the Guinness Book of World Records as the “world’s most inclined building,” according to the press release. (I prefer “leaningest.”)

Read more…