This season, architecture and design groupies will not be lacking for options, or inspiration. New Yorkers have been eyeing the transformation of the Edward Durrell Stone building at 2 Columbus Circle into the Museum of Art and Design with a mixture of enthusiasm and trepidation. MAD’s new 54,000-square-foot home (three times its previous size), covered with 22,000 iridescent terra-cotta plates and slashed with ribbons of glass, opened its doors in September with “Second Lives: Remixing the Ordinary” (through February 15, madmuseum. org), showcasing 51 artists who create art from repurposed objects. The Rhode Island School of Design’s brand-new museum extension, the Chase Center (risdmuseum.edu), also opened in September, in downtown Providence. The five-story, 43,000-square-foot glass and brick box, designed by the Pritzker Prize-winning José Rafael Moneo, will show student work as well as traveling exhibits. Design Cities at London’s Design Museum (through January 4, designmuseum.org) tells the story of contemporary design through seven cities at their creative apexes. Highlighting the centuries-old pouchoir technique (manually coloring prints using stencils), Fashioning the French Modern Interior (September 25–December 20, nysid.edu) features four rare 1920s interior-design portfolios. New York’s Japan Society is giving the craft of bamboo sculpture some credit, commissioning a massive kakoi (enclosure) from master Kawana Tetsunori for New Bamboo: Contemporary Japanese Masters (October 4–January 11, 2009, japansociety.org). In November, San Francisco’s de Young Museum opens the exclusive US tribute to Yves Saint Laurent (November 1–March 1, 2009, famsf.org), celebrating 40 years of the great designer, who died in June. In St. Laurent’s native Paris, Ron Arad (November 19–March 2, 2009, centrepompidou.org) at the Centre Pompidou highlights 25 years of the Israeli architect’s design innovations, from carbon-fiber armchairs to polyurethane bottle racks.

"Design and Fall" originally appeared in the Fall 2008 issue of Culture+Travel. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Culture+Travel's Fall 2008 Table of Contents.