The architect trio has become an art-world favorite thanks to its sensitive, insightful designs for museums and galleries, as well as its gorgeous models, objects of desire in their own right.

Buying art online has suddenly become ubiquitous. The new platforms are throwing parties in Miami, partnering with museums to organize their gala auctions, or providing media partnerships, but this relatively new sector is still trying to understand if they should disrupt a market or willingly dangle itself to be co-opted by the major old-school auction houses.

Artnet has been the quiet leader, as well as an anomaly, of the pack. It’s ancient—twenty-five years old—and is a publicly held company with offices in New York, Berlin, London, and Beijing. In the late Eighties, feeling threatened by artnet’s pursuit to make information transparent to the market, a number of auction houses unsuccessfully tried to sue the young company. It struggled for years as auctioneers and major galleries were uncooperative, but its perseverance to make access to data easy and to democratize the transaction of purchasing art has come full circle. Today, the same auction houses and galleries are all artnet clients.

The young Japanese architect’s enchanting designs challenge our expectations in a new group show at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.

Less glamorous with less money and less crowds, the Venice Architecture Biennale is the ugly stepsister to the Art Biennale’s Cinderella held in alternating years. There were anxious expectations for Rem Koolhaas, author of the seminal Delirious New York and founder of the far reaching and influential office OMA, who was tapped to take the helm and set things right. Critics have applauded his encyclopedic “Fundamentals” exhibition that resides in the Central Pavilion in the Giardini, as well as his autocratic decision to steer all the national pavilions to focus on the rise of modernism over the last hundred years. A commanding commissioner, Koolhaas has organized one of the most cohesive biennales in recent memory. Standouts included the Korean Pavilion, whose attempt to bridge North and South Korea through architecture garnered the Golden Lion, and the clever and funny Russian Pavilion as an international trade fair promoting the modernization efforts of its motherland.