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.

Speaking of designing exhibits about design, here is a great short video by Walker Art Center about their current exhibition, Graphic Design: Now In Production. It features curator Ellen Lupton from the Cooper-Hewitt, design director Andrew Blauvelt from the Walker … and lots of installation imagery of the exhibit itself. Just in time, too: the show closes on January 22.

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.

Artist Chris Burden’s “Metropolis II,” a gigantic kinetic racetrack sculpture and homage to bad traffic, opens to the public on January 14th at LACMA in LA.

Via My Modern Met, Design You Trust, LA Times.

Speaking of virtual museums, “Road Inc.” is a new iPad app from Pyrolia in France. One reviewer has apparently said “Road Inc. is the closest thing you’ll find to a dynamic museum exhibition [in an iPad, I assume] and some of the best proof that there is life beyond coffee table books.” I’ve heard similar claims before, so I wasn’t optimistic. But this time, there may be cause for optimism.

I paid $4.99, downloaded it, and went through a few cars. (As their blurb says: “The first digital object dedicated to the automobile, Road Inc. comes with 50 iconic models to unveil.”) It comes with a Ferrari “exhibit” preloaded. The rest require individual waits for downloads, but they don’t take long, and otherwise that first download would take most of the day.

This frankly gorgeous app is utterly packed with interesting content of all kinds, from original studio photography to historic schematics to essays. And it’s full of little touches. Three of my favorites: you can choose what order you use to walk through this “museum”: sorted by type (racer, supercar, etc.), price (from 7,000 to yikes, 55,000,000), or (ha!) speed (from 15.6 to 254 mph). When you download a new car, you get to whisk off a little virtual tarpaulin to unveil it. And, at least for the ones I’ve done so far, you can listen to what the car sounds like when it accelerates. That all might not be the same as the real thing, but $4.99 is a little more in my price range than, let’s say, $2,100,000 (for a Pagani Zonda). More on “Road Inc.” after I have visited the whole “museum” but my initial visit made me smile.

Via Notcot.

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.

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.

I don’t really need any more proof that the Dutch can out-design us all. But if I did, I could refer to Engaging Spaces: Exhibition Design Explored, a new monograph by Amsterdam “exhibition architects” Kossman.dejong. The book is big, and so are the ideas in it. Highly recommended.

Published by the rather indispensable Frame.

Spotted recently at My Modern Met: Artist Lise Bjorne Linnert’s powerful installation “Desconocida Unknown Ukjenthas” uses more than 5,500 unique hand-embroidered (yes, embroidered) names on pink gallery surfaces to represent female victims of violence.