From left: Frank Gehry, 8 Spruce Street and a cartoon Gehry admiring a crumpled paper on “The Simpsons”

Architect Frank Gehry appeared on CNN’s Fareed Zakaria GPS this past Sunday (video unavailable) and spoke about his design process. When Zakaria suggested that a crumpled piece of paper provided the motivation for the folds typical of Gehry buildings, and especially his design of Disney Hall in L.A., Gehry said it was a myth perpetuated by a cameo in “The Simpsons.” “That was just a fun — fun thing, but it has — it has haunted me,” Gehry said. “People do — who’ve seen ‘The Simpsons’ — believe it.” (For our Spanish speaking readers, a dubbed clip of the episode in question can be seen here.) [more]

Turns out living in a firehouse makes you no less susceptible to neighborhood fires. The next door apartment building to CNN anchor Anderson Cooper’s renovated Greenwich Village firehouse at 84 West 3rd Street caught fire early this morning, according to DNAinfo, but was controlled after roughly 30 minutes. The 104-year-old firehouse, which Cooper bought in 2006 for $4.3 million, was not damaged. [DNAinfo]

Robert Shiller isn’t sure that the economic recovery is anything more than a “spontaneous recovery of confidence,” he said in a CNN interview with Fareed Zakaria yesterday. The Yale professor and economist behind the Case-Shiller Index said the government’s stimulus may not have been large enough on its own to fuel the increase in housing prices that we’re seeing. He said he doesn’t know exactly what the source of this recovery is, but that it could be renewed confidence in the government’s ability to react at all, rather than the government’s actual actions. He added that the disparity between rich and poor Americans is not sustainable without creating a “winner-take-all” economic system that will inevitably result in resentment and hostility. [more]