No, no: we're not half as idle as our most loyal fans would have it. Not by half; while it may have appeared to many that we invented a new holiday (or two) for ourselves in order to squander July, then decamped to points sandy for much of August—only to return in September and fizzle out upon re-entry—the truth is that we've been traveling. With all the rest of the sad, sad, fallen world of starchitecture. Oh, but how that guilt already mounts; we must make a confesstion. It was not us, "per se", but one of ours—a colleague, an ally, a co-worker (in the bland parlance of our day). Squirreling away our dimes and ha'pence, we sent this brave soul into the belly of the beast—as some few wise among you may have cottoned—if by beast we mean the opening festivities of the...wait for it...10th International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale!

Venice Biennale begins for some, ends for others The prosecco bottles are lying forlorn and empty in the undergrowth of the Giardini in Venice, the palazzi are voided of black-clad architects in difficult spectacles. The Venice Biennale preview is over is and it’s now open to the public, meaning that it’s as good as over. Your correspondent arrived in La Serenissima on Friday in a state of moist anticipation. Will Farshid Moussavi be sporting headgear to rival her Dark-Helmet-out-of Spaceballs effort from last year? Will Ricardo and Liz talk to anyone? Will it be any good now that the director has decided cities are more important than buildings? How will the Peggy Guggenheim bouncers deal with being bum-rushed by the desperate, non-guest-list hordes? None of the answers to these questions are revealed below….

Reports and pix continue, after the jump, in the order they were received from the field and piled up in our inbox. Because, fine: We were out of town too, just plain rocking bells, and we're not gonna interrupt that for some damn blog.

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And when the last cocktail blew into the sea, when the last sordid dune-nymph lay sated, when the last unctuous hunk of Berkshire pork was scraped from the grill (and greedily snarfed by the Guttersniper's loyal hound) an end to summer was decreed and a new season, in its tragic turn, commenced. Rejoice! The Gutter is back among you. And soon, if not just today, we'll be better than ever—as if you can imagine such a state of bliss. New voices, new features, new foibles. Fuck, we might even redesign the place. So shake off your logy summertime salt and join us, as we do every year, in hailing September.

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A theft for the likes of which the GPB was made. It's sooooooo brazen. If by brazen, we mean brazenly wonderful. Look and live and learn. For this development in Dubai, SOM has taken a little bit of Childs' Freedom Tower circa 2003 (which, natch, already includes a dash of Guy Nordenson and a whiff of Calatrava) and added, in a fit of meta-irony, a touch of good old Thomas Shine. It's hysterical. And as a display of fuck-you, it's our world you just live in it power, it's brilliant.

· Infinity Tower [TEN Real Estate]

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We do nothing if not condone the boning of assistants, especially if they're nineteen. Which is why we were thrilled to find, via our second half-brother, that Peter Cook has been so totally getting all up in his assistant's grill. Which didn't make his wife, Christie Brinkley, all too, well, enthused.

Peter Cook, 47, caused "substantial and irreparable harm" when he showered aspiring singer Diana Bianchi, 19, with luxurious gifts - including a Nissan Maxima - and then seduced her behind Brinkley's back, the lawyer said.

"It amounts to preying on an innocent, young and naive girl who would otherwise have no attraction to a 50-year-old man," lawyer Joseph Tacopina said. "He offered her money, a job, career advancement. And when he got her comfortable, he made his real intentions known."

· Teen's on Brink of Suing Him [New York Daily News]

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It's almost over. The skinning marring of Frank Gehry's IAC HQ, that is. And good lord is that one hella funky curtain wall. Which isn't always such a bad thing. But let's just say it hasn't grown on us yet.

· Bad Skin Mars Gehry's NYC Debut [The Gutter]
· IAC HQ [WATPA?]
· The 21st Century Refinery of West Chelsea [Curbed]

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A report from the site of Obra's woe:

hey, gutter: i was out at p.s.1 yesterday and i saw jennifer lee from obra running all over with entourage trying to figure out how to save their sagging shells. maybe the sun today will perk them back up. cheers!

And cheers to you. Anyone else seen the scene? We suppose all will be revealed next Saturday when happy children converge again to take drugs and make babies beneath this lastest version of the requisite drooping domes....

· WarmUp Video (2005) [Current Studio]
· It Obrain't Rocket Science [The Gutter]

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Our raver days being so long gone, the few memories we'd retained having long since idled out to the great white beyond, we haven't yet laid our three eyes on the latest P.S. 1 courtyard installation. More than that, we just plain don't like boroughs. But, lucky for us, an intrepid Reader has suffered through trains, planes, and bubbly poles to bring us a report of this year's architectural shitshow:

Dear gutter:

OBRA's courtyard installation at the PS-1 "Young" Architects Summer Program seems to have more problems than merely being some kind of weird exercise in time travel to cutting edge circa 1993, and being the final confirmation of PS1/MoMA's wobbly voyage toward total irrelevance. As is visible in the attached Zapruder-quality photo [above], visitors to some squishy art show opening last Saturday afternoon were greeted by the sight of the bubbly domes, earlier described by PS-1 curator as, "a giant albino python," drooping perilously toward the ground. Behind a roped-off area, an improvised system of 1x3's, poles, and left-over plywood half-successfully poked the droops back up, resulting in pleasant double-curved forms overhead far more interesting than the original design. The poles themselves had a kind of nasty appeal also otherwise absent in the renderings. Maybe 70,000 dollars just doesn¹t go as far as it used to. Or maybe this is actually a part of the design, some kind of brilliant self-critical tactic? Well, we can dream. The kiddie-pool shit below looked a bit sketchy, too, but damp local children seemed to enjoy, despite the autumnal gloom through the droopy domes. So we guess everyone's a winner. Obras's rhetoric about the piece reads, "Form follows tension..." To which we can only add: Yes. Yes it does.

At least nobody at PS-1 wears trucker hats anymore.

· Gutterland Police Blotter: Obra and Obra Again [The Gutter]

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So a major architect (we'll give him that) claims publicly that he designed a thing he did not design (in this case, of course, his own apartment) and somehow, through the magic of Nina (we're guessing), it turns into an error of "the interview"? Reader supplied absurdity follows:

An interview in the Domains column on May 21 with the architect Daniel Libeskind referred imprecisely to the design of his apartment. While Libeskind contributed to it, the architect was Alexander Gorlin. CORRECTED BY THE NEW YORK TIMES Sun Jun 18 2006

Eschew the passive voice! Own it! Be a mensch!

· Gutterland Police Blotter: Danny Robs His Own Apartment [The Gutter]

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Many of you think of this site as a source of news. You are mistaken. Others, wiser men, think of The Gutter as a jape. You too are wrong. Quite wrong. We are crime-fighters. Have been and always were. To wit: Our investigative reporting on The Great Foot-Rub Caper of '06 has saved—saved—more than one Reader (or office thereof) from an identical fate: allowing a fake client entry to one's atelier for the express purpose of sexing-up one's feet. As a grateful 'sniper (or, uh, employer of 'snipers) reported yesterday:

THANK GOD FOR THE GUTTER! I just received the same call, EXACT same details- although he hooked me saying he had a $750,000 budget for the 1,200sf reno. When I put him on hold to check with my staff about scheduling a meeting this afternoon, they remembered reading about it here...

From what indignity will we save YOU today? (Well, well. We rather like that. A new mission! A new motto! A new day!)

· A Note to Our Readers: Guard Your Feet [The Gutter]

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No one stands astride the baublescape with quite the spread of Dale Chihuly, glassman extraordinary, pirate, staple of inferior desecrators partout. And we're writing this within literal inches of the studio of Josiah McElheny. But do the Clintons buy his work and install it in the White House? Is it enormous (sometimes) and enormously tacky (never) and therefore quite the new-money consumable (um, maybe)? We digress. But our neighbor never tried to sue his fellow artists. In an attempt to copyright the sea.

The Times front-pages the story today.

· Glass Artists Face Off in Court [NYT]

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