A Rant About Tiny Houses & More Design Links We Love

What the tiny house movement got wrong, and more design links we loved this week.

• No matter your feelings on the rise of expensive housing developments in expensive cities, this long read on the conversion of churches to fancy condos makes you realize how much else is being lost in the process, besides just the past. (Curbed)

• In the artist Jenny Holzer's nighttime installations, a poem is projected in people-sized characters onto a building by a mechanical beam, "all its paradoxes, ironies, contradictions, understatements, and devastating truths," as one writer describes them, on display and illuminated. (The New Yorker)

• It's Friday: Permission to browse this list of the 15 "most beautiful" bonsai trees without worrying about how hyperbolic the headline is. (Then, visit the bonsai room at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden this weekend to get a dose of the real thing.) (Bored Panda)

• The next time you get swept up in the tiny house or Cabin Porn™ movement, entirely convinced that you should shun material excess and inhabit a shoebox instead, read this open letter/rant about homes that are "roughly the size of the Keebler Elf Tree" (and just try not to laugh). (Terrible Minds)

• It's sunny in New York, so we're celebrating by lingering by the windows and getting closely acquainted with these pictures of an airy California family home that gets as many points for cool elegance as it does for feeling attainable. (Apartment Therapy)

• A Dusseldorf-based museum curator devised a homespun way to clean their Pollack ("Number 32"), which involves an air gun, wheat paste, and a very, very steady hand—plus 300 spare hours. (New York Times)

What design stories did you read (and love) on the internet this week? Share the best of them in the comments.