Major League Baseball enthusiasts in Arlington, Texas, have long baked under the sweltering summer sun when attending Texas Rangers games at Globe Life Park, a 30-year-old stadium that, despite its relatively young age, lacks modern climate-control technology. A highly anticipated upgrade came through Globe Life Field, a new $1.1 billion air-conditioned stadium with a retractable roof that was co-designed by VLK Architects and HKS, a firm well-known for masterminding other major league sports facilities across the country.

Unfortunately, however, commentators did not take kindly to aerial footage of Globe Life Field shared on Twitter earlier this week. People roasted its uninspired design, likening it to a “municipal airport cropduster repair hangar,” the “steakhouse where you pick the cow you want to eat,” and an “abandoned Sam’s Club.” The architecture critic Paul Goldberger, a nonpareil authority on stadium design and author of Ballpark: Baseball in the American City, called it “truly unspeakable. Baseball should not be played inside a barn, airplane hangar, or mall.”

The 40,300-seat stadium was originally slated to open in March, but was delayed due to the coronavirus pandemic. Though the regular Major League Baseball season is anticipated to pick back up in late July, that opening date may be postponed even further as Texas has recently experienced an influx of Covid-19 cases.

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Reut Ringel launched her jewelry brand, Reut, just as COVID-19 took hold. But her digital storefront hosted on Squarespace enabled her to showcase her artful, unconventional work, marked by outsize, irregular Baroque pearls. Each orb is enhanced with black gold, made using a patent-pending process the 27-year-old developed by evolving techniques used in aerospace and automobile manufacturing. Surface caught up with the New York designer to discuss the challenge of developing her signature material, the potential for innovation in fine jewelry, and the importance of having a digital presence as a small, emerging brand.

Surface Summer School, our summer partnership with UPenn’s Stuart Weitzman School of Design in which students design a mobile Covid-19 testing unit, launched earlier this month. Headed by Miller Professor and Chair of Architecture Winka Dubbeldam, the program has been bolstered by a digital lecture series that features prominent design-world figures such as Yves Behar, Thom Mayne, and Marion Weiss. Tune in this evening for a talk by Marc Miller, assistant professor of Penn State University’s Stuckeman School of Architecture.

Starting today, Arthur Jafa’s epic radical video piece Love is the Message, The Message is Death (2016) will be streaming for 48 hours on the websites of 14 global art museums, including the Hirshhorn, LACMA, and Julia Stoschek Collection. The seven-minute montage, which sparked debate about race relations when it debuted, depicts violence against African Americans as well as triumphs of Black culture using original and found footage. Clips of police videos, news broadcasts, and historical excerpts, like Martin Luther King Jr. waving from the back of a car, are scored by Ultralight Beam, a gospel-tinged hip-hop track by Kanye West.

Interspersed throughout are clips of the sun. “The sun is the appropriate scale at which to consider what’s going on,” says Jafa. “It’s fundamentally an assertion that Black people’s lives should be seen on a cosmological level. I want you to look up at these things that are happening to Black people, not down—the way you would stare at the sun.”

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The MIT Media Lab opened the doors to its I. M. Pei–designed Wiesner Building in 1985, and in its first decade was at the vanguard of the technology that enabled the digital revolution and enhanced human expression: innovative research ranging from cognition and learning to electronic music, holography, and more. Now, this same building welcomes product designers, nanotechnologists, data-visualization experts, and industry researchers who work side-by-side to invent and reinvent how humans experience technology.

Surface Says: The value of the ideas coming out of the Media Lab is immeasurable. Their contributions to the worlds of tech and design are crucial pieces of these industries’ evolutions.

Aerial photography paints modern architecture in an entirely new light.

NASA is crowdsourcing ideas to design the first-ever compact lunar toilet.

This quiz by Herman Miller may help improve your home office ergonomics.

Cadillac prepares to unveil the Lyriq SUV, its first-ever electric vehicle.