Given the Cremaster-esque set for "Bad Romance," it comes as no surprise to find Lady Gaga's initiation of contemporary art collaborations, including last night's Grammy performance furnished with a piano with outstretched arms designed by Terence Koh.  In an unusual twist of cultural forms, Koh's piano calls to mind Pharrell Williams' human-legged chairs, though this may be a case of convergent evolution more than anything else. The next issue of Museo will feature an interview with Koh, conducted by artist Michael Bilsborough.

Candida Höfer's 2007 photograph, Masonic Temple Philadelphia (above), was taken in the Corinthian Room of the Grand Lodge of Free and Accepted Masons of Pennsylvania.  Born of the historicizing impulses that defined much late nineteenth-century architecture, the lodge includes Egyptian (middle), Norman, Gothic, and other such historically styled rooms, all encased in a building with a modified Romanesque façade, the latter of which possibly speaks to the perceived origins of the order. The discrete character of each, set in a sort of architectural conglomerate, suggests an affinity of these builders' buildings with those of the contemporary vernacular and the post-modernists who mined it.  The Pennsylvania lodge's freeform pastiche of styles, including polychromed Greco-Roman-based forms, a familiar trope of the recent past (below: Michael Graves, St. Coletta, Washington, DC, 2006), proposes reconsideration of familiar dialectics: the post-modern condition does not strictly post-date modernism.

Bureau V's architectural drawings are featured in the current issue of PIN-UP, No. 7. Bureau V's Peter Zuspan is Architecture Editor of Museo.

Addendum to the last Muse: this Paracas mantle of Bird Impersonators (200 BC-200 AD) would also make for a good sweater line.