There’s a great description Le Frak City, the housing complex in Corona, Queens, in Gary Shteyngart’s book Super Sad True Love Story.  Lenny Abramov, the novel’s hero, compares the balconied, brick buildings to “soot-covered accordions,” and bemoans their “ugly gigantism."  It’s striking because Le Frak City isn’t even a housing project; it was developed in 1962 as a haven for working- and middle-class New Yorkers.  But there’s something about exurban housing complexes like this, that pack hundreds of units into enormous, freestanding volumes, that always gives them a whiff of sadness. Via Verdi, the new Bronx housing development for low-income workers that Michael Kimmelman, the new New York Times architecture critic, reviews in his first piece, has this same aspect.  And yet Kimmelman doesn’t make note of it.

Kimmelman, who had been an art critic at the paper, states pretty clearly that he’s interested in the "cultural and civic aspect of architecture” more than its indelible, physical qualities.  He applauds green design elements like cross-ventilation and ceiling fans.  And he applauds “healthy” design elements, like windowed staircases that lure people away from elevators, and a roof garden where residents can grow their own vegetables.  But he doesn’t give us a sense of what the architecture is; he doesn’t even tell us what the building is clad with.  And he takes the unsophisticated point of view that “… for Via Verde the question was what a housing development on its own could do to shape and change behavior."  This is just as condescending as the rendering on the splash page of the Via Verde website, that shows black residents growing tomatoes and cradling a basket of onions.  Kimmelman is writing about a city building that we’d all like to know more about, and he describes the history of the project well.  But he is not writing about architecture.

Christmas came early to Chelsea when two galleries, Mary Boone and Jack Shainman, put Nick Cave’s Soundsuits on display.  Cave, as his website explains, is a “trans-artist” who crafts costumes for dancers.  I didn’t know anything about him, and after seeing the suits guessed that he came from a dance background.  The costumes are majestic as displayed on mannequins in both galleries, evoking both shamanic effigies and life-size Muppets.  But they really come to life in the videos at Jack Shainman.  They’re joyous and crazy-colored, in dramatic, eccentric profiles that disguise the bodies of the dancers.  In the videos, the dancers have the freedom of animated figures.

Cave trained as a dancer at Alvin Ailey, went on to study fine arts, and now chairs the fashion department at the Art Institute in Chicago.  That fashion connection makes sense when one observes how immaculately crafted the garments are.  Some suits are covered from hood to foot with a shimmering sea of white buttons, each one set in place and stitched with scientific precision.  Other suits are covered in twigs laid in carefully staggered lengths to throw dramatic, shifting shadows.  Even a suit covered entirely in old toys and board games is assembled with an unerring sense of composition.  Each of the suits is strange and also absolutely correct.

I’m no animal lover.  But when attending an event at the Harvard Club recently I looked up at the legendary elephant head mounted in the Hall, an animal shot by Teddy Roosevelt, and wondered, “Why?"  It’s been frozen, cruelly, in a noble pose, with its head lifted upwards and its trunk unfurled.  Another guest explained that the head had been preserved with arsenic, but after pieces began crumbling down into people’s drinks it was removed, refurbished and reinstalled.  What is it all for?

Taxidermy has become the decor of choice for downtown, heritage-themed haunts like Freemans and Home Sweet Home.  But stuffing a small bird or feline to stick on the shelf seems entirely different than slicing off an elephant head and and hanging it on the wall.  And preserving animal skins in earlier times, when it was difficult to travel to zoos and museums and circulate photographs, was a different, nobler project.  At Deyrolle, the famed taxidermy shop in Paris, a fire in 2008 destroyed some of the most significant pieces and threatened the centuries-old business.  It was a tragedy.  But, when looking at photographs of the charred animals and birds, captured in arresting, life-like poses, it smacks of divine retribution.  There’s little about taxidermy that makes sense.

There’s an informative piece on the history of IKEA in last week’s New Yorker.  I love their noisy, labyrinthine stores.  I appreciate their mission to bring good design to the masses.  I’ve specified their cabinets for interior remodels.  And I’m dazzled by their skill at knocking-off iconic pieces.  (Is It IKEA or Is It Mid-Century Modern?)  But there’s something in the piece that makes me pause.  IKEA has changed the definition of furniture.

“Furniture” used to be big, important things we bought once in a lifetime and passed on to others.  Now “furniture” is flat-packed, somewhat important things we switch out every few years.  Though IKEA has taken steps to green itself, like discontinuing incandescent bulbs, they’re essentially manufacturing million of temporary beds, sofas, and tables, shipping them to all ends of the earth, and distributing them in immense, new shops built in places one needs to drive to.  The new IKEA-inspired attituded about home decor is perfectly in step with shifting notions of home and family.  But it leaves no room for craft.  What if each of us had a dining table that was a singular, substantial piece, something we saved for, selected carefully, and cared for?  It might make a more beautiful home.