City Walks Architecture: New York is featured in this month’s ID which is pretty awesome in and of itself. But then when you look at the company I’m in there on the page…well!

There’s Nothing Funny About Design: Essays that are sometimes about design but always laugh-out-loud hilarious by design’s greatest contemporary wit, David Barringer.

20th Century Classic Cars: 100 Years of Automobile Ads: An amazing 500 pages of the most beautiful car ads you’ve ever seen, written by the man who knows them best, automotive design expert Phil Patton.

Master of Shadows: The Secret Diplomatic Career of the Painter Peter Paul Rubens: Mark Lamster‘s incredible story of the painter’s other career as a secret agent for the Spanish government. Recently rated both highbrow and brilliant by New York Magazine.

Design Your Life: The Pleasures and Perils of Everyday Things: I’ve spouted about my love for this book before. Ellen and Julia Lupton train their critical eyes (and for Ellen, her paintbrush) on our domestic detritus.

Thanks to my awesome editors at ID for including me. Now go out and buy all these books!

Say goodbye to off-the-shelf cartoon-character metalscapes anchored in skinned knee-ready blacktop. In the latest issue of I.D. I got to explore a renaissance in intelligent playground design thanks to some of the country’s most playful architects, designers and landscape architects. From the “loose parts” designed by David Rockwell that encourage interactive, construction-oriented play, to a simple grid of tires and sand for math games by Project H Design, to the arroyos by Nancy Power that teach kids about the scarcity of water in Southern California, to Lee H. Skolnick’s astrophysics-educating Rocket Park Mini Golf (part of my Queens walking tour!) these are not your standard jungle gyms. Check out the incredible slideshow of playgrounds as well as some incredibly insightful thoughts about play and education from designers, in “Recess Rethought.”

If I had this information about ten years sooner, I would never, ever have considered that little foray into advertising.

Yep, I think maybe the best day of my career so far was when two pairs of Ecco Biom running shoes—in beetroot and sustainable white yak leather. Yes, yak. Yes, yak—arrived on my doorstep along with an assignment: Run.

Run as far and as fast as you possibly can in a month’s time. Follow the training program developed by Danish triathlete Torbjørn Sindball. Wear these shoes, listen to your feet. And write about it for ID.

Now I’m no Ironman (you’ve tagged along with me on my 25K trail run last summer, and I ran the LA half-marathon in December), but in the last year I’ve gotten more serious about running than I ever have before. And there was something so different about doing this activity I loved and knew was good for me, and truly paying attention to how it felt, how I felt, for my job. And then being rewarded—financially, yes, but physically, too—in the end. And did I mention yet that these pretty pink shoes are absolutely adorable?

You can read all about how I ran, I ran so far away, in “Less Cushion for the Pushin’” over at ID. Coincidentally—don’t you love how every article I link to has a little editorial appendix nowadays—ID has a brand-new editor, one Jesse Ashlock, who was previously my editor at VMAN and has a pretty incredible story about getting in a brutal bike accident but leaving the ER because it was too expensive. Congrats, Jesse (and I hope all your scars ended up looking cool)!

Last summer, mojito made with freshly-plucked-and-muddled mint in hand, I took this photo from the steps of the courtyard of PS.1, the Queens outpost of MoMA. Each summer as part of the Young Architects Program, a firm transforms the gravel courtyard into a party pavilion, and this year’s piece, Public Farm 1 by Work AC, was not only the coolest installation I’d ever seen in the space, but, to me, also the most exciting. With my two editors from ID next to me, we swirled our mojitos and started talking about the prevalence of gardening in design culture, and they mentioned they’d need an article on that very topic for their upcoming nature issue. Talk about being in the right place at the right time! When I got home to LA I started avidly researching one of my most favorite stories I’ve written in a long time, which was recently published in the March/April issue.

To my delight, some of the most interesting urban agriculture projects are happening right here in LA. I got to spend a day at Farmlab, the incredible project founded by artist Lauren Bon near Chinatown. After our tour of their radical urban agriculture structures, gardener Jaime Lopez Wolters took me on a bike ride tour through the former Not a Cornfield, now LA’s newest state park. If you go there now, you can see the wildflowers blooming.

I also visited Farmlab’s seed library, which is probably the single coolest room I’ve ever been in. Every single plant they grow is hung upside down here until it dries so they can properly capture the seeds. They also have an annual seed giveaway, which was happening in December. If you haven’t been to Farmlab yet, I encourage you: Go.

Another highlight on my garden tour was SYNTHe, a rooftop garden built by SCI-Arc students atop the Flat Building in downtown LA. I was so enthralled with the setting I was determined to do an event there so this is where we recently held this month’s de LaB as part of LA Art Weekend. We started with a tour of the garden by architect Alexis Rochas (more on him in another article that was recently published!) and as he talked about the kinds of produce they were growing six stories above LA, to our delight we saw the chef traipsing around the rooftop garden with a bucket, gathering goods for the meal that followed. Then we headed downstairs to Blue Velvet for a fantastic brunch of short ribs, pistachio falafel and lavender panna cotta, where we all attempted to identify which herbs and vegetables came from the roof.

So there you have it! From cocktails grown in a Queens courtyard, to dessert with origins on an LA rooftop, with plenty about Fritz Haeg, Mike Meire, Studio Job, Urban Farming, and Vertical Farms sprinkled in along the way, I present to you the fruits of my labor: “Bloom Towns” [PDF].

A brief side note: A few months ago I reported here that my wonderful editor-in-chief Julie Lasky was leaving ID to launch Change Observer with her lovely husband Ernest Beck. Just today I got the news that my equally-wonderful editors—as well as my mojito-drinking, jamon-tasting New York compatriots last summer who where there when this story all began—Jill Singer and Monica Khemsurov are also leaving the magazine. I’ll miss their awesome edits of my stories, but wish all of them the very best in whatever they’re up to!

It’s always a great experience when the people behind a company you admire are just as open, smart and enchanting as the products they sell. That’s how I felt when meeting the people behind Artecnica, who opened their first showroom here in LA on October 10. Founders Enrico Bressan and Tahmineh Javanbakht have wrangled the top designers in the world to collaborate on “design with conscience,” pairing them with artisans and manufacturers from third world countries. I went knowing that I’d get to speak with Tahmineh about their new space, but I was blessed with an “extra bonus,” as he might say, when I also got to interview the adorable Tord Boontje about his new product line, Witches’ Kitchen. It was a great party where I was thrilled to see all my favorite people who are engaged in similar do-gooder pursuits. Of course. On ID’s site, there’s a longer interview with Tahmineh, or you can see the video bigger and more beautiful here.

A lot of people have emailed me asking how I make these videos. I have a Flip Ultra I bought in January and I love, love, love it (although there are some newer models now you may want to try). There’s a QuickTime plug-in you have to install on Macs, but otherwise the Flip’s files work great in iMovie, where I do all my editing. The trick to making it look good online is in exporting the file properly for whatever site you’re uploading to, so make sure you hunt around for tutorials and experiment to find out the right settings for you. Now if I could only work on suppressing my own giggles while I’m shooting…

As you may remember, some time ago I traveled to a faraway land to eat beef donuts, blow glass, relive some childhood textile fantasies and take a lovely unexpected holiday in Scotland on the way home. I also attended an exceptional wedding, which you can now read all about in the May issue of ID.

What began as a summer speaker series held at the studio of celebrated Finnish architect Alvar Aalto evolved into a collaboration among an all-star cast of designers—Dai Fujiwara from Issey Miyake, the Bouroullec brothers, Hella Jongerius, Louise Campbell, Ilkka Suppanen, Miguel Fluxá and Jaime Hayón of Camper—which they decided should take the symbolic form of a wedding. But then it became more than symbolic, when Ulla-Maaria Mutanen and Jyri Engeström, a Finnish couple who now live in San Francisco with their baby Eliel, were tipped that there was a wedding in need of a bride and groom by their friend Laura Sarvilinna. Laura, along with Päivi Jantunen, are exceptional publicists for Helsinki’s finest designers (as well as my very gracious hostesses during my visit).

You can read the entire article including some gorgeous photos of the very lucky couple, and then be sure to check out the wedding’s website for more information about the couple and the designers, appropriately named It’s a Beautiful Day.

Oh, and Bridezillas, eat your heart out: Ulla-Maaria told me she never once picked up a wedding magazine.

You think I’m joking, but in the March/April issue of ID, my editors actually paid me to go to the restroom at a gas station. As part of their feature “What it feels like…” writers were dispatched to the far corners of design and reported on their experiences. I headed to the restroom at Helios House, the “little better” gas station by BP. I love ID’s toilet humor; right next to me on the page is another bathroom report from Ernest Beck, who perched on NY’s first automatic public commode.

Each year, ID picks the 40 best of something in the design world and dubs it the ID 40. For this year’s issue, which is on newsstands now, they picked 40 awesome creative workspaces, and I think they assigned me the very best one.

I got to spend an afternoon over at Ball-Nogues, the Echo Park studio of the adorable duo Benjamin Ball and Gaston Nogues. Actually, studio is really not the right word; it’s still very much the dusty three-car garage it was before they moved in. Well, actually, right before they moved in it was an underground death metal club. I am so not kidding. To claim the space for themselves, Benjamin and Gaston painted the garage fluorescent orange and hired a neighborhood kid named Ziggy to tag it with magic mushrooms (and perhaps on magic mushrooms). From this tiny orange shed on this quiet residential street emerges their world-famous larger-than-life installations, like Liquid Sky, which draped over MoMA’s PS1 museum in Brooklyn last summer, and Maximilian’s Schell, the shimmering vortex at Materials & Applications here in LA that got tons of press last year. Now you can check out the article online due to the wonders of Texterity.

Which is funny because I also got to write about Materials & Applications in this issue of ID. M&A is a little front yard in Silver Lake where directors Jenna Didier and Oliver Hess curate these massive temporary site-specific wonders, and currently, it’s home to Density Fields by Oyler Wu Collaborative. Dwayne Oyler and Jenny Wu created this somewhat menacing structure out of aluminum tubing and flagpole rope that reaches out towards the street like it’s about to take out someone on the other side of Silver Lake Boulevard. You gotta see this thing in person to truly appreciate it, something I highly recommend doing before it gets disassembled to make way for the next installation in March. Here’s the Density Fields piece, as a PDF.

There is one workspace online I’d love to send your way: The studio of my friend Marian Bantjes, who works in a house on Bowen Island, just west of Vancouver, British Columbia. And once you read it, you’ll understand how she has both the inspiration and the inclination to do all that gorgeously-obsessive work.