The ‘Schiaparelli and Prada’ exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art opens this week, with a compelling approach to exhibit design and curation. Especially interesting: the use of custom-shot video in juxtaposition with the objects on display. The videos put two fashion designers from very different eras into “conversation” with each other, though a real talk never happened.

Via New York Magazine.

Gravity Free, the “Only Multidisciplinary Design Conference In The World,” takes place next Tuesday and Wednesday in Chicago. The lineup is great, and I have the, um, challenge of moderating the panel sessions. Wish me luck, and see you there!

This week, Core77 posted a fly-through video of Renzo Piano’s new design for the Whitney in the meatpacking district, which is planned to open in 2015 at the south end of the High Line. It will be a “200,000-square foot museum that includes 13,000-square-feet for outdoor exhibitions as well as an 18,000-square-foot temporary gallery,” and will contain “the largest column-free museum gallery in New York City.” I have a feeling I will be spending a lot of time there.

Via Core77.

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.

Powerful: Iranian artist Farhad Moshiri’s ‘Life is Beautiful’ at the Venice Biennale last year featured hundreds of knives stabbing the walls at the Pinault Foundation’s Palazzo Grassi to spell out the title in script.

Via Swiss Miss and Wallpaper.

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.

Hello World!, a video installation by Christopher Baker. Via Designboom, who wrote:

chicago-based visual artist christopher baker’s video installation ‘hello world! or: how i learned to stop listening and love the noise’ is now on display at the duke of york square screening room at london’s saatchi gallery. the artist’s massive video-graphical work consisting of 5,000 video diaries projected upon a wall within the gallery space. the personal video collection of ‘hello world’ was compiled through the use of online self-produced video archive resources such as youtube. … in the gallery space the observer may interact with the soundscape in two distinct ways: he/she may focus in upon an individual voice or get lost in the rumble of the thousands of video diaries on display. in this way, the at-once singular and overwhelming quality to baker’s work is consistent with human sentiment towards the internet and democratic, modern media.

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.

Roof Top LIghts, a new horizontally-hung lightbox idea by Lightboys, puts lightbox images of things you would see above you, above you. Very, very smart.

Via Collabcubed, for one.