The Centre Pompidou in Paris is being, um, protected by 80,000 condoms. Irish artist Bryan McCormack‘s Preservation is Life lines the iconic staircase on the facade. Brilliant.

Via Feel Desain.

Reading Forms, a tumblr by Yotam Hadar, collects images of well-designed exhibits about graphic design. A must-see. (Above, an installation shot from the Yale 2006 Graphic Design MFA Thesis Exhibition.) Cheers, Yotam!

Via a tweet by the well-informed Ellen Lupton.

Dezeen reports on a memorial in Norway, dedicated to 91 suspected witches burned at the stake there during the seventeenth century, designed by noted architect Peter Zumthor with artist Louise Bourgeois. In the main seaside structure, a catwalk leads to a suspended interior volume, where 91 naked light bulbs hover behind 91 tiny windows along an interpretive corridor. Shocking, perilous and brilliant. The Salem Witch Trials Memorial of course springs to mind.

A witty, beautiful project by Manuel Fonseca Gallego in Spain. (Fonseca Gallego runs the gamut: here is a similarly unique take on a circulation element, but in a cave rather than on a cliff.)

Via Archdaily.

Through March 12, the Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane, Australia is hosting a miraculous installation by artist Yayoi Kusama. Called “The Obliteration Room,” it is part of an exhibition called “Look Now, See Forever.” It’s simply a white room of white things to start, but the whiteness is, well, obliterated by thousands of colorful stickers handed out to young visitors over time. Another testament to the strange magnetic attraction between museum visitors and stickers. See more images over at Colossal.

This reminds me of that panzer-made-from-removable-balloons installation from a few years back, except in reverse. Brilliant!

Another one I wish I’d done: Italian architect Werner Tscholl has created yet another lookout / observation deck / museum high in the mountains (here is the last one). This one, called Granat and overlooking the town of Moos, Italy, has two parts linked by a wooden bridge: one is a precipitous cage that glows at night, the other a gravity-defying, windowless exhibit gallery. Spectacular.

From Designboom.

A new book from the same source as New Exhibition Design 01 & 02, but now looking back, is now available for pre-order. Just pre-ordered mine. Due in January. (If you don’t have the first two, get them while you’re at it. Quite indispensable recent surveys.)

UPDATE, 30 Dec 2011: Just heard that the release date has been pushed back to March. Sigh.

Located at, looking over, and themed around a single mountain pass in the Alps, this insanely cantilevered one-room space is a hallway, a hyper-specific history exhibit, and a lookout, all at the same time. Bravo!

Via Architizer and many others.

PLOT has some good images of the new Military History Museum in Dresden (Germany). Daniel Libeskind was the architect (as you might expect from the images), and exhibits were done by two firms: HG Merz and Holzer Kobler.

I am told a Norwegian scent artist named Sissel Tolaas created an essence that is the “smell of death” for the museum. I’ll, er, just leave that one and move on. Here is an English version of the text over on PLOT, in case you click your way there (courtesy of Google Translate, all trademark odd turns of phrase theirs alone):

With over 10,000 square feet of space, all designed by HG Merz and Holzer Kobler architectures include new permanent exhibition in the Military History Museum Dresden probably the largest of its kind – not only in Germany. It aims on dialogue classical and unusual perspectives. The two museum designers tap into memorable imagery a new, cross-company access to the complex topic.

“It is clear from the beginning, what will be the basic idea of ​​the museum, the Military Group should only be limited to give much pleasure. Change of perspective”, feels and Stefan Schirmer (Schirmer, Stefan: So the war. In: THE TIME No. 41, 06.10.2011, p. 21). First of all, however, is clear that the issue goes into their design both a symbiotic relationship with the classical old building and the wedge-shaped building by Daniel Libeskind: Sun shows the chronology of the building – structured as a timeline – the story of the German military. The space showcases meandering present selected historical objects in shop windows. The course topics in the new building on the other hand wants to touch the emotions of the visitors. Therefore, the exhibition dealt with individual aspects of different epochs and phenomena of the military, which affect the sustainable society. Walk-in installations, the thematic content is translated effectively into associative images. But not only media stations produce memorable images: The olfaktoriche perception is sharpened: the Norwegian scent artist Sissel Tolass an essence that is the smell of death and the visitors while opening a flap developed the beating.

The naturally-acting blend of exhibition space objects creates a unique museum architecture and presentation of the history of the military as part of our culture. Link as an additional image plane of contemporary media art and space exhibits.

Retired fashion great Valentino has launched a new “virtual museum” of couture with “10,000 square meters” of fashion galleries that you can download (Mac/PC) for free. After a few days of seeing promising screen grabs everywhere, I dutifully downloaded. If you’re a fan, it seems encyclopedic enough, and there is a lot of content to get into here. As a digital visitor experience, the “Valentino Garavani Virtual Museum” has some room for improvement, particularly the execution of the first-person 3D navigation. That alone got me wondering about the whole idea of a “virtual” (i.e. faux-spatial) museum in digital form. More on that later.

Via Architizer, Hyperallergic, and others.