"When companies plan wildly ambitious, over-the-top headquarters, it is sometimes a sign of imperial hubris. A.T. & T. was broken up not too long after it moved into Johnson and Burgee’s famously grandiose “Chippendale skyscraper” on Madison Avenue. General Foods did not last too long after taking occupancy of the glass-and-metal palace Kevin Roche designed for it in Westchester County, and Union Carbide fell apart after it moved into another Roche building in Danbury, Connecticut. The New York Times Company’s stock price plummeted after it moved into its Renzo Piano building on Eighth Avenue, and they now lease the home they built for themselves."

“The process of technological developments is like building a cathedral,” he said in an interview in 1990. “Over the course of several hundred years, new people come along and each lays down a block on top of the old foundations, each saying, ‘I built a cathedral.’

“Next month another block is placed atop the previous one. Then comes along an historian who asks, ‘Well, who built the cathedral?’ Peter added some stones here, and Paul added a few more. If you are not careful you can con yourself into believing that you did the most important part. But the reality is that each contribution has to follow onto previous work. Everything is tied to everything else.”

The uncanny similarity among the three designs — the painstakingly protracted approaches to the galleries — underscores the challenges the architects faced when trying to preserve the essence of these museums while making room for the cafes, bookstores, event spaces and education departments that have become regular features of the contemporary museum experience.

But there is something else behind the uniformity of these plans as well. What were once eccentric creations have become polite and well behaved. Gorgeously crafted, they are about reinforcing the existing cultural consensus — not rebelling against it.

A rare photo, released by the White House, shows Barack Obama fielding calls from a tent in Brazil, to keep up with events in Libya. The tent is a mobile secure area known as a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, designed to allow officials to have top secret discussions on the move.

They are one of the safest places in the world to have a conversation.

Designed to withstand eavesdropping, phone tapping and computer hacking, Sensitive Compartmented Information Facilities - also known as SCIFs - are protected areas where classified conversations can be held.

he shrugged, it sort of fits in

The project, Egashira explains on his website, "required the construction of an over-sized camera vehicle (Slow Box) and an archive space (After Image). Slow Box can fit a person inside its wooden structure. It travels across villages with a help of an agricultural tractor."