In New York, Envelopes enters its second weekend at the Pratt Manhattan Gallery, examining the future of building surfaces as protective skins for a structure's interior and its occupants. Comparing buildings in a city to humans in hostile environments, the exhibit the showcases new and sustainable potentials of building envelopes as the structure's skin. On display through May 5, 2010, the exhibition features full-scale representations and scaled models created by eight international architecture firms.

Also in New York, Landscapes of Quarantine opened earlier this week at the Storefront for Art and Architecture. Curated by former Dwell senior editor and BLDGBLOG author Geoff Manaugh and Edible Geography author Nicola Twilley, the exhibition is based on the eight-week design studio Manaugh and Twilley led this past fall. The studio focused on the spatial implications of quarantines--not only those that separate humans and animals from the rest of their populations but also their effects on the boundaries set up between things like clean and dirty, safe and dangerous, foreign and native, and so on. The exhibit, which opened March 10, showcases the resulting works from the studio. Landscapes of Quarantine is on view through April 17, 2010.

In Chicago, Actions: What You Can Do With the City closes at the Graham Foundation Madlener House on March 13. Originally on display at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal, the show features 99 ways in which to interact with the city, from appropriating urban sites into soccer fields to growing an urban garden, as well as "activists' tools" such as fruit-collecting dresses and seed-bomb rocket launchers. If you can't make it to the museum, visit the excellent online compendium to the show at cca-actions.org.

Also in Chicago, the International Home and Housewares Show 2010 takes over McCormick Place March 14-16. The event showcases new products from more than 2,000 designers and manufacturers from around the world.

In Milwaukee, Green Furniture Design closes at the Milwaukee Art Museum on March 14. The exhibit, which opened November 12, 2009, featured innovative objects designed to maximize their life span as well as the life span of their components. On view are objects like a couch made of felted used-sweatshirt material seating and chairs constructed from from small wood scraps.

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