What’s Happening: The lauded set designer brings four decades of kinetic sculptures, monumental stadium shows, and early sketches to a blockbuster exhibition and experimental publication with the Cooper Hewitt, illustrating how she deftly shapes personal narratives that inspire us to reimagine how we connect with each other and our surroundings.

The Download: When Es Devlin was 13 years old, she painted her bedroom to look like the cover of Kate Bush’s album The Kick Inside. “People who entered it might feel like I did when I listened to the music,” she writes in An Atlas of Es Devlin, the monograph accompanying her massive retrospective of the same name at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. “Perhaps I was trying to play the room like an instrument.”

Blurring boundaries between architecture and performance has guided Devlin through four decades of work, scaled from both miniature paintings to Olympic Closing Ceremony sets. An Atlas maps Devlin’s journey, including student sketchbooks and paintings, where one finds glimmers of motifs that form complete worlds later on in her experimental theater and opera set designs, sculptural installations, and stage-building for pop royalty. Drawings from 1986 place a female figure inside various boxes, a juxtaposition that informed the illuminated boxes she’d craft for Lady Gaga’s Monster Ball and Beyoncé’s Formation tours. The book also offers choice insights about these collaborations: when Gaga saw the white light-proof box Devlin proposed, she said “that’s great, now puke on it.”

Much of Devlin’s work addresses architectural forms—steel seats within Oscar Niemeyer’s Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Niterói in Rio de Janeiro for Louis Vuitton—and makes room for rethinks of classical theatre. But the body and vox populi are never distant. It was her who envisioned Miley Cyrus springing from her own tongue, like Zeus’s head, for the Bangerz tour. She conceived the idea of Adele’s audience walking into her rising from sleep for her 2016 tour. An Atlas is a history of these projects, and also a prompt: it begins with a thorough acknowledgment of her collaboration, from celebrities to studio assistants—a practice more artists should develop. It ends with a call to environmental action, envisioning ways to engage with the natural world that seek to provoke love instead of hopelessness.

In Their Own Words: “The process is still trying to achieve what I feel when I’m in a stadium of 100,000 people, or a theater, or a concert—where I often feel part of a temporary community, a sort of rehearsal society—but trying to take that energy out into the planet, where elements of it can be precisely crafted to what I feel is most urgent to say,” Devlin says in the book.

Surface Says: If Beyoncé does throw her next ball in The Sphere, here’s hoping Devlin takes up residency with her.

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Since 1868, the iconic café on Monaco’s Place du Casino has defined the spirit of the French brasserie: classic dishes executed with effortless precision, open-air seating with views you’ll want to linger upon, and sumptuous surroundings. The refresh of its neighboring landmarks, helmed by Alexander Giraldi and Alain-Charles Perrot, began in 2014 with the renovation of Hôtel de Paris Monte-Carlo, new casino facilities, shifts in the paths and landscapes of Jardins des Boulingrins and the Place du Casino itself—and the creation of the high-end shopping destination One Monte-Carlo.

This fall, the café reopens in a two-floor reinvention by David Collins Studio, with a ground-floor bistro illuminated by the historic stained-glass windows, and a second-floor restaurant offering refined fare and a 2,150-square-foot terrace with never-better views of the Place and its fashionable populations. Director Eric Gorjux, chef Victor Marion, and sommelier Noël Bajor have devised menus for both spaces that speak in new ways of French tradition.

In the center of the downstairs bistro, with its checkered marble floors and terrazzo mosaics, a monumental chandelier illuminates the new zinc counter—just the spot to quaff a Jardin Exotique (gin infused with Combava lemon leaves, bergamot, basil, and mandarin syrup) and snack on seafood from the famed banc de l’écailler. But upstairs is where the real action is: whether seated on the terrace or in the intimate dining area’s mix of warm palettes and parquet, guests can explore the café’s gastronomic legacy, from eggs mayonnaise with caviar and French onion soup to the flambé Crêpe Suzette, which was invented here in 1896 as a treat for the Prince of Wales.

Marguerita Mergentime died young (in 1941, of leukemia at age 47) but her legacy is aging gracefully. Her Americana wall hanging, shown at the 1939 World’s Fair in San Francisco, printed texts on textiles in a linguistic assemblage carried on in the work of Barbara Kruger, On Kawara, and Pippa Garner, while her tablescapes offered bold patterns, clearly defined, to soften the hard edges of Modernism and harder times of the Depression. Form Portfolios, the firm working with historic designers and their estates to revive their work, has partnered with Mergentime’s granddaughter and Food52 on a holiday collection of textiles—napkins, tablecloths, a tree skirt—that reintroduces Mergentime to new generations and whet the appetite for deeper dives into her life and work.

Our weekly scoop on industry players moving onwards and upwards.

OpenAI announced the sudden removal of Sam Altman as CEO, citing a lack of consistent candor with its board as the reason for his departure. Mira Murati, the company’s chief technology officer, is assuming the role of interim CEO while the search for a successor is underway. Altman, a co-founder of ChatGPT and DALL-E parent company OpenAI, did not elaborate on his future plans. The sudden change comes after Altman’s recent involvement in key company announcements and events, including a partnership with Microsoft. The OpenAI board is discussing with Altman about possibly returning, though he’s “ambivalent” about the prospect.

Following Suchitra Mattai’s debut solo exhibition and accompanying panel at Roberts Projects over the summer, the Los Angeles gallery announced its representation of the Indo-Caribbean artist this past week. Mattai’s sculptures, textile works, and paintings focus on what she termed “brown reclamation” and the supplantation of British colonial imagery in the region’s diasporic art. The gallery also recently announced its representation of London-based Portuguese painter Mia Middleton. Her intimate, dreamlike paintings will be shown with works from other Roberts Projects artists, including Mattai, at Art Basel Miami Beach.

This month, Pratt Institute hosted its annual Legends Gala, a scholarship fundraiser and benefit that pays tribute to megawatt talents in art, design, and architecture. This year, three distinguished alumni—Kenneth Cobonpue, Edward Mazria, and Kay WalkingStick—were honored at the historic Weylin in Brooklyn. More than 200 guests attended the gala, which opened with a performance by the Brooklyn United Music and Arts Marching Band and Dance Team and was followed by remarks from university president Frances Bronet.

When was it? Nov. 9

Where was it? Weylin, Brooklyn

Who was there? Patti Carpenter, Derrick Adams, Jamaal Peterman, Stephen Slaughter, Aya Maceda, Gary Hattem, and more.

Take a look behind the walled gardens of Highgrove House, the bucolic country residence of King Charles III of England, with Burberry’s newest collection of silk scarves. While the preppy staple has long been a signature accessory of the British fashion house, this collection is built around four pastel sketches of the property’s flora by British Drawing School graduate Sammi Lynch. Her idyllic landscapes are sure to spark an appreciation for the great outdoors, even among the most indoorsy types. $190

Perennials and Sutherland are icons and acknowledged leaders in the global design industry. Founder David Sutherland and chief creative director Ann Sutherland share an ingenious talent for curating the finest interior and exterior collections of furniture, fabrics, rugs, and accessories.

Surface Says: It’s easy to see why, for more than 20 years, design pros and in-the-know clients have looked to Perennials and Sutherland for high-end textiles designed to stand up to the demands of everyday life.

Archaeologists find the first red paint made from the roots of Rubiaceae plants.

TMZ’s shaky practice of “checkbook journalism” continues to keep it relevant.

Are pricey pet psychics making their way from the fringe to socially acceptable?

A fashion exhibition at the de Young Museum gets a boost from Snapchat.