How Museum Architects Torture Journalists

I swear this is Brad Cloepfil's revenge for my lukewarm Wall Street Journal review of his new wing for the Seattle Art Museum.

Museum press lunches in New York are getting more and more upscale (ah, the superb red and white wines at the Getty Bacchanalia at Daniel!). It's getting so that I'm starting to feel slightly guilty about the funds I'm diverting from the acquisitions budget. (Not guilty enough to stop going, mind you.)

But the "goody bag" we receive at the end usually consists of an attractive folder of press releases and maybe some museum publications. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Imagine my surprise, then, to receive a Lego-blocks kit at the end of Tuesday's press lunch for the Museum of Arts & Design, to open in September 2008 in Edward Durell Stone's famous (or infamous) lollipop building, now undergoing a Cloepfil-designed renovation and reconfiguration on Columbus Circle in New York.

I was strictly a wooden-blocks kid growing up, but I thought I'd take a few minutes to relax after some work this afternoon by tackling this challenge to construct my own MAD Lego model. Having passed all previous IQ tests with flying colors, I felt undaunted by this 13-step procedure:

Then, after Step 10, I suddenly realized that I was out of my supply of the type of block needed for Step 11. Where did I go wrong?

Let me just say this to any other journalists who may be foolishly tempted to spend time on this diversion: Make sure that you carefully note the difference between these two similarly shaped but differently topped blocks:

(You see, I get bleary-eyed just looking at them.)

Let me also warn you that once you've put the wrong blocks together, it is no easy matter to pry them apart.

So now that I've persevered (as I always do), let me just ask you: Does the model at the top of this post look to you anything at all like the rectangular white structure below?