We don't get many chance to listen to the radio during the day, given that we're usually found working during the regular daytime hours, but fortunately we were at the right place at the right time yesterday following an appointment and caught the majority of WBEZ's Worldview program which was all about the ethics of the building boom in China (like if Rem Koolhaas is right to be catching so much heat for designing the new CCTV headquarters). If you're at all interested in thinking about architecture or those buildings you're seeing on the tee-vee nearly every night, we can't recommend this episode of the program enough. Among a handful of great commentators, they talk to Sean Keller from the Illinois Institute of Technology (Chicago's coolest school) and even Tom Mayne, the Pritzker Prize winning starchitect. It's just great.

The Tate is looking to stay on top of things it looks like, as they've just released the first of what's sure to be a whole slew of museum/exhibit tours intended to be viewed on an iPhone or iPod Touch. Instead of going the standard route of renting out small audio players for visitors to rent, the Tate has designed a whole, snazzy interactive tour, downloadable via the free wi-fi in the museum, providing audio and clickable extras as people wander around and take it all in. Right now the Tate only has this available for their soon-to-end Gustav Klimt exhibit, but like we said, we can almost guarantee that they have plenty more in the pipeline, as does every other museum on the planet, we'd guess. Here's a bit:

...the podcast itself has been done very well. It begins with a short introduction, showing a user how to use the device. For each item, a brief image appears and then the screen goes blank while the narration occurs to allow the visitor to focus on the actual work of art, rather than the video screen. Towards the end of each items file, videos, stills or interviews are presented as secondary content to enhance what the user has already learned.

The tour appears to be working for the gallery. Will Gompertz, director of Tate Media, stated that the average visit time increased from 45 minutes to 3 hours since the tour was introduced.

Archinect, one of our favorite daily reads, has come through once again with the goods by offering up a backstage look at the making of Architecture School, the only reality show we've ever eagerly awaited, which premieres tonight on the Sundance Channel. The program, if you somehow hadn't caught wind of it, is a semi-documentary/competition thing following a group of Tulane architecture students who are trying to build replacement housing in New Orleans. The first half of Archinect's excellent feature gives you the whole rundown on the program itself, but quickly follows with the real meat and potatoes: an interview with the show's creators, Stan Bertheaud and "architect-turned-director" Michael Seiditch. If you're as eager for the show as we, it's the perfect buffer between now and when it finally starts airing tonight, and if you hadn't heard of it, consider it your opportunity to catch up with the rest of us.

We've been known to swoon over antique maps (don't even get us started on Martha Stewart's canny cartographic cornering of Maine), but New York-based artist Josh Dorman manages to improve on the bleached hues and buzzing topographic outlines of vintage maps by weaving in swirls of color, bubbling grids, and ink doodles that look ripped from the notebook of Leonardo da Vinci if he had been a bored high school physics student. So successful are Dorman's dreamscapes that an obstinacy of buffalo seem a perfectly logical counterpoint to a Louise Nevelson-style block tower hovering menacingly in the corner.

"Paper that has lived a life and shows its age compels me to paint," writes Dorman on his website. "I am intrigued by systems I do not understand and by information that is no longer relevant." Try to wrap your head around it all at his solo museum exhibition debut on Sunday. On view through January 11, 2009, at L.A's Craft and Folk Art Museum, "Within Four Miles" includes works created over the past decade, like "Sacrament II: Blissdale" (2006, pictured above). The show's title, of course, maps to the past. "Within Four Miles" is inspired by Lewis and Clark's ability to predict accuracy in uncharted lands.

Sure, you know that the Eames House (pictured at right) was originally designed by Charles Eames and Eero Saarinen in 1945, and that it stands rather unassumingly in leafy Pacific Palisades, California (good luck finding a parking spot!), but here are a few things you may not know about good 'ol Case Study House #8, courtesy of the Eames Foundation website and Richard B. Woodward's recent Wall Street Journal 'Masterpiece' column on the utopian dwelling that would have made Mondrian either smile or sob, we still can't decide.

5. Charles and Ray Eames decided to alter the original design while waiting for the off-the-shelf parts ordered from catalogues to arrive. With the wartime shortages, they had a while to wait. The steel didn't arrive until 1948.

4. A special interior guided tour of the house is given once a year on June 20th and is restricted to Eames Foundation Members. (Anyone can make an appointment to visit for a self-guided tour of the exterior.)

3. Assembly of the steel shell took five men a mere 16 hours.

2. Charles and Ray moved in on Christmas Eve of 1949 (here's how we like to imagine their Christmas card).

1. There's a rope swing in the backyard. Swing high enough and you can see Case Study House #9 on the adjacent lot.

London may be overflowing with closed-circuit video cameras, but amateurs taking photos (or "happy snaps," as one member of Parliament likes to call them) around town are increasingly viewed with suspicion and outright hostility. Sam Delaney surveys the paranoia in a recent piece in The Telegraph that begins wih a tale of his Pentax SLR eliciting "suspicious glances" at the coffee shop before he's even taken a single photo. Then there are the examples: police prevented one Brit from enjoying and photographing a magical holiday combination of Christmas lights and an EastEnders actress (there to host the festivities). Another was followed into a drugstore for taking photos of "sensitive buildings" while visiting relatives. It's all in the name of heightened security during times of terrorism, except when it's about preventing child pornography.

"The growing concern about paedophiles coupled with concerns about terrorism is a heady cocktail that makes police officers edgy," says Labour MP Austin Mitchell—a keen photographer who was once stopped from taking pictures on a beach on the grounds that there were children present. "I didn't see any children and none were in my pictures," he says.

There is self-promotion in all the usual forms, like passing along links to your newly polished portfolio or going to some event to meet new clients or rub elbows with industry icons. Then there are people like Matt Maxwell who decided the usual routes weren't nearly enough. His solution for getting his name out there? Singing songs about design, including the one below about trying to get into Communication Arts. So while Matt might struggle with, say, his general vocal range and overall abilities as a singer, his devious plan must be working, as he was just recently featured on the magazine's website and, hey, look, now we're talking about him. Here's the song:

Several more design-focused tunes can be found on his site.

Staying in the UK for just a minute more, we read the Guardian's Stephen Bayley as he took a walk through Frank Gehry's Serpentine Gallery and asked readers to consider the starchitect's flaws as they admired all the mystical weirdness that is all things Gehry, but now we can see how our own critics have reacted to the temporary structure, as the New York Times' Pilar Viladas took her own walk around the Serpentine recently and reported back with this short review. In contrast to Bayley, Vildas gushes all over the building, saying it's definitely strange, "an explosion in an architecture factory," but beautiful because of it ("...classic Gehry: muscular but friendly"). But in all fairness, Bayley had several hundred words to wander around in and muse about the larger Gehry picture, whereas Viladas works within just a couple of short paragraphs, so you get what you get. And really, who can't use a new set of eyes and the information that follows when talking about a new bit of Gehry's mind.

With all this talk about Ai Weiwei being angry at the Beijing Olympics and NBC completely ignoring the names of who built all of these stadiums, writer Scott Burnham comes at the "Bird's Nest" National Stadium from a wholly unique angle in his piece explaining his thoughts that the inspiration for the stadium came to Herzog & de Meuron and Weiwei by way of the very Chinese migrant workers who helped build the flashy new Beijing that surrounds it. His rationale comes from witnessing the methods used by said workers for construction completely unsafe safety precautions in yet-to-be windowed hi-rise buildings: simple pieces of wood nailed one on top of the other in a woven pattern in order to help avoid falling out. Once Burnham calls it out and includes a few photographs, it's nearly impossible not to see how similar it looks to the National Stadium. And surely the team at Herzog & de Meuron must have seen plenty of this on their trips to China, and Weiwei must have been constantly surrounded by it during the last few years of Beijing's massive rebuilding. It's an interesting piece, going back to the point of inspiration and attempting to give proper credit where credit is due.

As an aside, why not look back to early June when we were talking about what the Bird's Nest is made of and how exactly it was built.

Following up on a story from the other day about Gap laying off their entire design team in the UK, now that things have been going so well under lead designer Patrick Robinson's watch, Design Week has spoken to the company and has found out that while most of their staff will indeed be let go, they are keeping some staff in London who will continue to oversee all the design elements used in the company's European stores. Just no more fashion division based across the pond. Here's a bit:

The global chain will axe its European fashion design team from September, and is moving its advertising team to its US headquarters. It will, however, retain an in-house design team working on store design, visual merchandising and in-store events.

'It makes sense, if our clothes are being designed in the US, to create advertising there also, so we will be transitioning from an advertising-led team in London to a smaller design team,' says a Gap spokeswoman.

"Water, water, every where, / Nor any drop to drink." Turns out that Coleridge's ol' sea salt was right all along (the United Nations estimates that 5.5 billion people will lack adequate access to fresh water in the next 20 years), and a competition announced today by AIGA asks design students to communicate the global water crisis to a 21st-century audience. So put down that Evian bottle and listen up: this is the inaugural Aspen Design Challenge, a new annual international design competition developed by AIGA and global nonprofit design network INDEX to engage the millennial generation in solving global problems. And what better problem to start with than water scarcity? Issued as part of the Aspen Design Summit, Designing Water's Future is a collaboration between Circle of Blue and COLLINS:, the New York City-based design firm founded by the never-watered-down Brian Collins.

Here's how it works: Students and faculty from around the world develop ideas and submit proposals by December 2008. Then, in February of 2009, an international jury of design and environmental leaders will select contest finalists. The lucky finalists will have the opportuniy to fine tune their ideas at the Aspen Environment Forum and [cue big finish] those solutions will be discussed at the World Economic Forum, the United Nations Climate Change Conference, and the World Business Summit on Climate Change. Thirsty to compete? The online entry system launches October 1, but in the meantime, get all of the details on joining the challenge here.

While Beijing Olympic organizers haven't been able to stem the flow of unofficial souvenirs, they're succeeding in stamping out unwanted logos—and Naomi Klein has nothing to do with it. This "brand protection" crusade is a logo blackout of non-Olympic sponsors. The secret weapon? Lots and lots of little rectangles of tape, painstakingly affixed (and re-affixed) to cover visible trademarks on everything from non-Lenovo computers and non-Samsung phones to fire extinguishers, soap dispensers, and urinals. We pity the Pepsi fans who have managed to infiltrate China's capital. In his story on the logo hiding for the weekend edition of the Wall Street Journal, Jason Dean goes to the tape:

Naturally, curious minds tend to wonder what's under the tape. A few investigative journalists, bristling at all this control, have even removed pieces of tape.

Soon after a piece of tape is removed, however, a new one quickly appears—thanks to Chinese workers charged with tape replacement. "We assign workers in [the Main Press Center] to check and replace tape that has been peeled off to make sure the tape still works every day," says a Chinese official in charge of that work at the MPC. The official, who would give only his surname, Yang, wouldn't say how many people are involved in that work.

We don't usual post many design competitions, largely because there are approximately seven thousand of them going on at any given time. But we like to give the local things a plug when we can, particularly when they're cool and recommended by a friend of UnBeige. Such is the case with The Society of Typographic Arts, which has just announced that they're now accepting entries for Archive '08, a contest that covers all things design coming out of Chicago and a wide-range of surrounding areas. We dig the Chicago connection, of course, but we also like that the winners get their work included in the fantastic Chicago Design Archive, which is so very easy to get lost in (as in losing a whole day once you start looking at it, not a major design flaw). So visit the competition's site if you're keen to enter and here are some details on who will be picking the best of the best:

This year's selection committee is comprised of Nils Bunde of Brainforest, Michelle Hayward of Bluedog Design, Kim Lovely of K.E.L. Design/Osmosis, Betsy Martens of VSA Partners, Carol Naughton of Naughton + Associates, Lance Rutter of Legendre+Rutter and chairman of the Chicago international Poster Biennial, and Don Strandell of Typographics Runamok.

Selections will be announced at the Archive08 gala on the evening of November 5, 2008. Anyone interested in design is invited to attend. All winning entries will go into the Chicago Design Archive, a permanent collection of more than 800 of the most innovative, creative design pieces from the last 80 years.

If you have a few bucks laying around and are looking to get yourself into a place with some history, Frank Lloyd Wright's Palmer House, one of the very last residences the architect built, is for sale in Ann Arbor, Michigan for $1.5 million, which seems strangely affordable, given the history, the design, and the 1.5 acres that come with it, but we live in the big city, so this is probably a pretty steep rate for Ann Arbor. Plus there are all those rules and regulations that you can't change a thing without consulting Wright's estate first, so that's a factor. Regardless, if you're on the look out for a new summer home, the Detroit Free Press has a batch of info and photos (and includes one of the most ridiculous, wonderfully pointlessly comments ever posted: "Mr. Wright was not a very nice person..."). The local Ann Arbor News also has some nice information about the Palmer, including this tour:

Funny bit of news coming from our neighbors to the north, as Canada's main starchitect (not counting Frank Gehry, of course, because everyone always seems to think he was born and raised in L.A. anyway), Arthur Erickson, has been called out by The Architectural Institute of British Columbia (AIBC) to stop calling himself an architect. Why isn't he an architect anymore, despite having served as one for decades? Because Erickson decided he didn't want to belong to the AIBC anymore and resigned in 2005. And without being registered, he can't legally work as an architect (got that?). While it does make sense, safety-wise, it seems like you might be able to cut the guy some slack. Still, he's a crafty fella and he's refusing to rejoin, instead choosing to buck the system as best he can:

"To suggest that Arthur Erickson is deliberately misrepresenting himself as an architect is like suggesting that Einstein was not a physicist in his later years. Arthur Erickson has been an architect for 50 years and he cannot help it if people continue to call him one, regardless of the AIBC's opinion on the matter," says a statement they sent to The Globe and Mail.

However, Chris Erickson said he and his sister, [Emily Erickson], who are directors of the Arthur Erickson Corporation, have also moved to eliminate any inferences that Mr. Erickson is working as an architect.

On the Arthur Erickson website, he's now called an "internationally celebrated designer."