Unwrapping the winter issue of the new quarterly magazine nest is like unbuttoning your lover’s shirt—-literally. Each magazine is wrapped in one of 14 batik prints designed by quirky couturier Todd Oldham and secured with an exotic ovoid steel button (hand cast, we read) embossed with tiny dots in a kind of fashionista Braille. Below, there’s a sparkling color photo of a limber young woman baring all with an exhibitionist’s zest. Did I mention this was an interior design magazine? nest’s creator, Joseph Holtzman (Feb. 2), has concocted a decadent lifestyle portfolio blissfully free of departments and purchasing information. Essays on subjects from L.A.’s seedy-hip Koreatown to 18th-century British landed gentry read like Romantic fiction—but searching for an architect or designer name, save a handful of luminaries, is fruitless. Holtzman will speak at the Corcoran as part of the “Three Young Hot Designers” series, which includes architect Peter Vaughn (Feb. 1) and inventor and engineer Chuck Hoberman (Feb. 9), heir apparent to quirky engineer-cum-mad scientist Buckminster Fuller. Hoberman’s “Unfolding Structures”—protean metal creations that extend and contract like the eye’s iris—are like complex mathematical models given physical expression. His EExpanding Hypar” (short for hyperbolic parabaloid, it’s a metal model of a surface created when curved wire is dipped in soap solution) smoothly expands from 15 feet to over 50 feet in diameter while retaining stability and strength. Hoberman’s kinetic architecture suggests design solutions to the shelter problems of the next century and beyond. At 7:30 p.m. at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, 17th & New York Ave. NW. $36 for the series or $15 for each lecture. (202) 639-1770. (Jessica Dawson)