New York architects Diller, Scofidio + Renfro are on their way to becoming international superstars, having just trumped Foster + Partners, Snøhetta, and other formidable adversaries to win the Aberdeen City Garden Project design competition for a new park and cultural center in Scotland. 

It’s a major jump across the pond for DS+R: While they’ve got extensive projects going on in the States, this is their first major European commission, not to mention a triumph over starchitect Norman Foster.

"The runner-up concept by Foster + Partners was outstanding, elegant and thoughtful, but did not, in the end, persuade the Jury that it could match the promise of connectivity, excitement and spatial diversity of the winning scheme," said competition organizer Malcolm Reading, Bustler reported. The winning design also took into account cost and viability — and offered the tantalizing possibility of being for Aberdeen what the High Line, DS+R's beloved elevated park in Manhattan, did for Chelsea.

‘This is a design that can act as the catalyst to regenerate the whole of Aberdeen’s city center with significant economic impacts for the entire city," said jury member and urban planning writer Charles Landry. "Truly inspiring, it can put Aberdeen onto the global radar screen. Without this type of transformational change, Aberdeen will struggle to meet the challenges it will inevitably face in the future.” 

It’s a fabled and oft-pursued “Bilbao Effect,” or in this case, High Line effect, that we strongly caution against. Recent failures to create this coveted tourist-draw include Oscar Niemeyer’s shuttered cultural center in Spain, and Rafael Viñoly’s critically pummeled “Golden Banana” in Colchester, England. Charles Renfro said it himself: "Everybody thinks that they can put a Bilbao up, y’know, a copy. I don't see how these cities could think that just having an elevated train line makes for a success — the kind of success we've seen with the High Line."

Their plans, drawn up in collaboration with Scottish architects Keppie Design and Philadelphia-based landscape architects Olin, take their inspiration from a game of cat’s cradle, evident in the “Granite Web,” as it’s now being referred. It’s both a cultural center and an outdoor space, with elevated, criss-crossing walkways passing over vast expanses of greenery. The plaza below will be used for exhibitions, events, and performances, or just a good lie in the grass in the middle of the afternoon. 

When the dishes arrive, it's clear that Café des Spores is unlike any other eatery in St.-Gilles the boho Brussels neighborhood that already boasts plenty of distinctive places to dine. From the shiitake farci, to Sparassis-crépus-and-Comté-cheese...

Distil, 722 N. Milwaukee St., is a popular place to find a wide choice of bourbon - a distinctly American whiskey. Distil offers more than 100 brands, including a 2-ounce pour that costs well over $300. Distil, 722 N. Milwaukee St., is a popular place...

It's been a busy January. The dry weather has let vineyard managers get ahead on their work - while praying for rain. But there's also a surprising amount of energy in the wine world right now, a desire to get back on track after three tough years...

Many brands delved through their back catalogues from the 1940s and 50s for inspiration while Parmigiani, a newcomer among high-end watch brands , said a desire for old-style glamour meant its quietly elegant designs were proving more popular than ever...

In womenswear, the council will sponsor runway shows from Henry Holland, Louise Gray and Mary Katrantzou. Given Holland’s brilliant branding and Katrantzou’s success, one might think they’d be able to stand on their own two feet, but the BFC’s continued...

An interview with Zach Rotholz on Chairigami, his affordable, portable and recyclable furniture invention. Moving out of your college dorm at the end of the semester would be a lot easier if you knew you could just chuck all the furniture out the window...

If you can't wait the few days left until the January 27 debut of Robert Lepage's new production of the Wagner's epic "Götterdämmerung" at New York's Metropolitan Opera (the conclusion of the so-called "Ring Cycle"), you may want to hurry on over to the institution's attached art venue, the Gallery Met. A suite of new images by ultra-hot contemporary painter Dana Schutz is now on view, the work having been specifically created for the event to celebrate the hallowed work of opera. The works include black-and-white ink drawings as well as six large colorful monotypes, all in Schutz's characteristic fractured nouveau Cubist style. The show is Gallery Met director Dodie Kazanjian's fourth contemporary art homage on Wagner, after shows from Peter Doig, Julie Mehretu, and Elizabeth Peyton.

Spoiler alert! One semi-abstract image captures the climactic leap of the opera's heroine Brünnhilde into a funeral pyre in the final moments of "Götterdämmerung." "Brünnhilde is a fascinating character, very powerful but conflicted. She takes the whole world down, as well as herself,” Schutz explains in the exhibition's press release. "There's so much in the Ring: Rhinemaidens, a dragon, incest — even the world in flames!"

To see images from Dana Schutz's "Götterdämmerung" at Gallery Met, click on the slide show.

Sleek and stylish furnishings abound at imm Cologne, but we're more interested in the innovative, odd, and freakish side of the spectrum. That's why our attention went to the fair's [D3] design competition, a veritable forum for new and emerging talents, clever constructs, and sheer experimentation. This year's award went to young Dutch designer Jólan van der Wiel, creator of the "Gravity Stool." Its legs are formed from molten plastic mixed with iron filings, extruded using a fixture of three magnets van der Wiel invented during his final year at Amsterdam's Gerrit Rietveld Academie. Three legs emerge from the goo like Han Solo from the carbonite in random “organic shapes that are so typical of nature itself,” according to Wiel. And we fully agree, because they kind of remind us of spelunking. "Cave of Forgotten Furniture,"anyone?

To see the dramatic process, click Gravity Stool: the movie, below. 

SALE: Cars at Gooding and Co.

DATE: January 20 and 21 at 11 a.m.

LOCATION: Scottsdale, Arizona

ABOUT: This week is all about cars in Scottsdale. Gooding and Co. is holding the first of its three annual car auctions in Arizona over the weekend, and has dozens of classics in mint-condition on offer. Of the 166 cars headed to the auction block over two days this weekend, the highest-estimated are a 1959 Ferarri 250 GT LWB California Spider — a rare late-production version of the classic with coachwork by Scaglietti — which is estimated to fetch $3.4-3.8 million. Also likely to fetch a pretty penny is a 1955 Mercedes-Benz 300 SL Alloy Gulllwing. The sixth of only 29 aluminum-bodied Gullwing's built, the rare, recently refurbished model could bring $2.5-3 million.

For those with more eccentric tastes, the first lot of the day will be a 1916 Ford Model T delivery truck, which is being sold without reserve and carries a $40,000-60,00 estimate. The sides of the vehicle read "Harley-Davidson: Manufacturer of Motorcycles."

If you happen to be in Scottsdale looking for a steal, a 1953 Simplex Model M 125 Servi-Cylce is being sold without reserve, and estimate is only $5,000-10,000. The post-war lightweight motorcycle, with a 125 CC 2-stroke 1-cylinder engine has been dubbed by Gooding's cataglogue "a charming piece of Americana."

Two years ago, Ronald Coles Investment Gallery, an Australian art seller that claimed an annual turnover of $20 million, shut up shop. Coles himself was declared bankrupt and disappeared. Now, after a massive police investigation, he's finally been arrested and charged with 87 offences relating to his investment art fraud scheme. Experts have been persuaded to opine that the affair is “Australia's largest-ever art scandal" and "threatens to destroy trust in the local industry for years.”

Coles — once a Bentley driver, with the licence plate "BUYART" — has been lying very low, and with good reason. Clients who'd trusted his matey style of doing business were outraged to discover that the art they thought they owned was either a forgery or was co-owned with four or five other people.

At least 43 clients have come forward over the last two years. One who'd invested $1 million in four paintings by famed, dead Australian artists Norman Lindsay, Arthur Streeton, and Eugene von Guerard told the Sydney Sun Herald newspaper: "One of the items, by Lindsay, has since appeared on the internet after being sold by another dealer. It means Ron sold it to someone else — and never told me."

Coles also showed contemporary art by landscape painter Ken Knight. Knight — who sold works for around $3,500 — was amazed to discover that amongst the 400-plus paintings found in the gallery during the police raid in 2009 were works by him with Arthur Streeton's signature on them. With a little aging varnish on top, they were now priced at half a million dollars.

And David Boyd, prominent member of the Boyd artistic dynasty, found fakes in his name too, telling a TV investigation in 2009: “I mean, he's a dishonest wretch and a cheat, that's all. What do you say to a cheat if you're invited to say anything? I don't think I'd say anything to him at all. I think I would probably walk past with my nose in the air.” Sadly it's just too late for him to experience that pleasure. Boyd died a couple of weeks before Cole was arrested.

Bagdhdad native Zaha Hadid has landed on the shortlist to construct a new $1 billion building for the Iraqi Parliament in the city of her birth, and is now busy at work on its design.  

Does that mean we can expect a new deconstructivist Iraq? Since 2010, Hadid has already been designing a new headquarters for the 37-story, estimated $500 million Central Bank of Iraq — but it's still too early to say. The shortlist also includes English firm Assemblage with Americans Buro Happold and Davis Langdon, Iraqi firm Al-Khan in collaboration with Canada’s Adamson, and the United Arab Emirates' Dewan Architects & Engineers, as reported by BD Online. Reportedly Iraq’s Ministry of Construction and Housing is keeping the rest of the shortlist close to the vest. 

The spokesman at Zaha Hadid Architects who confirmed that they're working on the project was unable, at this point, to provide further details on the design. Proposals are due to a technical committee in the first week of July, and afterwards will be presented to an international jury to make a final decision. The building site is the abandoned Al Muthana Airport where Saddam Hussein had planned to build a supermosque. Construction there was halted during the 2003 U.S. invasion, but some parts of its foundation remain standing, including 150-foot-tall pillars of reinforced concrete. Architects have the option of demolishing them or incorporating them into their designs. 

The ramifications of winning this project are far-reaching. Whomever the ministry selects to design the parliament building will play a major role in the nation's postwar rebuilding program, as they'll also be tapped for other government buildings, a new hotel, and public parks along the Tigris River, as well as a master plan for the surrounding city. The ministry will select a winner toward the end of 2012. 

Ever busy, Hadid is currently finishing up Michigan State University's Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, the opening of which has recently been moved from spring 2012 to fall. 

Men aged 18 to 34 aren’t a monolithic group, and neither is the television programming intended to capture their demographic. Although one wonders if that’s merely an accident, witnessing the pandering nature of so much action, comedy, and whatever-“Tosh.0”-is programming. Just today Vulture provides a troublesome but entirely unsurprising supercut of rape jokes from this season’s sitcoms. Writer Margaret Lyons nicely explains the problem with these gags, beyond their obvious political incorrectness, saying the “jokes are by and large just shorthand for outrageousness, a go-to vocabulary to create a patina of audacity without actually saying anything important, or even funny.” They are, in other words, a leading example of deeply lazy sitcom writing.

Lazy writing isn’t all that’s wrong with television that panders to men, of course. “Family Guy,” for instance — a classic that brought a whole new level of comic timing to TV and takes genuine risks, surprising as often as it “shocks” — routinely plays violence against women for laughs. (To cite even a short list of these offenses would be too wearying, but we will advise you to skip the episode, “Screams of Silence: The Story of Brenda Q,” in which Quagmire’s sister comes to visit with her abusive boyfriend in tow.)

The writing on “Archer,” the animated Bond sendup that resumed its second third season on FX last night, is never lazy. And although the show’s probably not above lobbing out a rape joke (we don’t remember any from before, but as Vulture has shown, rape jokes are weirdly unmemorable, right?), it focuses on its characters and degrading them specifically, rather than using them as mouthpieces for overly broad humor. So on last night’s episode you had Pam, the spy agency’s horny, chunky administrator, glimpsing a picture of Burt Reynolds (who guest-starred as himself) and saying, “I swear to god you could drown a toddler in my panties right now!” Or Ray, the gay agent who was paralyzed last season, left dangling on a van’s slow-moving wheelchair lift in the middle of a firefight. Gags like this have the tang of the politically incorrect, but it’s hard to imagine anyone being offended by them. And more importantly, they’re pretty funny.

“Archer” is by most measures a classy program, with terrific voice acting, beautiful animation, and a developing story arc (cf. Ray’s paralysis). And while the show is very much about jokes concerning the drowning of babies in vaginal fluids and centers around a lovably selfish, even savage, alpha male, it does a better job of most likeminded fare in (self-consciously) giving its female characters what a grad instructor might call “agency,” and driving home the alpha male’s motivating insecurities. It’s as much a satire of bad TV for men as it is spy movies — a pretty neat trick for a cartoon that has to wring laughs from a line like, “I’m sorry, I can’t hear you over the sound of my giant, throbbing erection.” 

This weekend marks the fifteenth anniversary of Art Palm Beach, one the most influential fairs for painting, sculpture, photography, mixed media, and design in South Florida. In addition to a strong showing by exhibitors such as Waterhouse & Dodd (of London and New York) and the Aperture Foundation (of New York), the fair this year also includes an ambitious series of discussion panels. Today, highlights include a screening of “Full Circle: Before They Were Famous,” Brian Beryl’s documentary on William John Kennedy, one of the earliest photographers to capture the work of Robert Indiana and Andy Warhol. ArtPalmBeach 2012 Visionary Award recipient Jun Kaneko also gives a talk about his reknowned ceramic art work, as well as his work designing set and costumes for the Omaha Opera.

But of course, the big attraction is the art, from Lluís Barba's cartoon spin on Diego Rivera at Basharat Gallert, to Giuseppe Mastromatteo's tribute to hot mutant love, "Couple Ear," at Emmanuel Fremin Gallery and the whimsical fun of radical crochet artist Olek at Robert Fontaine Gallery. Enjoy!

To see images of highlights from the 2012 edition of Art Palm Beach, click on the slide show.

Our most-talked-about stories in Art, Design & Style, and Performing Arts, January 16-20, 2011:

ART

– Market reporter Shane Ferro made the case for art-as-an-investment-vehicle — for the one percent.

– Ben Davis returned with another edition of his “Art Lover” column, offering relationship advice to the art world.

– In Egypt, a tomb of an ancient diva was discovered in the Valley of Kings.

– New York's Marlborough gallery opened “Blind Cut,” a celebration of the fictional and the fabulous in art. We offered pictures of some of the choice works in the show.

– Former Young British Artist Gary Hume talked to our UK correspondent Coline Milliard about his new paintings on canvas at White Cube.

DESIGN & STYLE

– Red-soled fashion designer Christian Louboutin is directing four erotic tableaux for Paris’s Crazy Horse cabaret, in collaboration with David Lynch and Swizz Beatz.

– Alexander Forbes picked some of the coolest things on view at Germany’s imm Cologne design fair.

– We offered some highlights from arty fashion photography duo Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin's new limited-edition Taschen book “Pretty Much Everything.”

– Designer Miuccia Prada decried the upcoming show that paired her work with that of Elsa Schiaparelli at the Met’s Costume Institute.

– Architect Richard Meier is planning a new Aztec-flavored skyscraper in Mexico City.

PERFORMING ARTS

– America’s greatest living documentarian Frederick Wiseman has a new feature about burlesque. Our own Graham Fuller talked to him.

– The Carnegie Hall crowd got hot under the collar about Lola Astanova, the glamorous 26-year-old Uzbek classical pianist.

– Culture intervened in the strained relations between Iran and the United States, as Asghar Farhadi’s “A Separation” took a Golden Globe.

– Providence indie noise powerhouse Black Pus created its own homage to the Occupy movement (of a sort) with its “Police Song” video.

– MoMA and Germany’s Berlinale film festival announced a partnership, spotlighting the works of radical filmmakers working between 1921 and 1936.

Art L.A. Contemporary opened last night with an energetic crowd. With some 65 galleries present, the fair is relatively small, although the quality of the works on offer was very high. About the worst one can say of this fair is that there were few really challenging pieces: galleries are playing it safe. Still, at least six things stood out.

To see the highlights of the Art L.A. Contemporary, click the accompanying slide show.