Vapor Graphic Perf, by California-based company Arktura, is a wall- and ceiling-panelling system as well as a mural. The tiles are made of perforated aluminum, and the holes, which vary in size and frequency, are akin to pixels. From a distance, they form a picture – a mountain vista, say, or a forest in the […]

The M’Bopicuá saltery – or, rather, what’s left of it – is a vine-covered relic from the 19th century, when the business of packing and curing meat was the main economic driver in Uruguay. The forest has slowly reclaimed the decaying plant, which was shuttered in 1878. Nicolás Franco Schicke, an architecture and design student […]

Carnegie Fabrics' Xorel Vue collection wins in Design: Interior Products for bringing a tailored, artisanal touch to office environments.

An abandoned neo-brutalist skeleton gets a new life in São Paulo, its sixties-era exposed-concrete frame having been judged too foreboding. Instead, the architects reclad the 17-storey, 9,444-square-metre one-time residential tower in business casual and converted it into an office building. The new interior’s sparse material palette of wood and glass, its clean lines and its […]

Brooklyn, New York’s Gowanus district is, like so many neighbourhoods in the borough, facing rapid changes. The area’s namesake, the Gowanus Canal, a polluted waterway from the 19th century, has been earmarked for a publicly funded cleanup initiative that will inevitably lead to gentrification and rising land-use costs. To give residents a voice during these […]

We are, all of us, suffering for fashion. Our ecosystems are suffering, too. The clothing we wear today will be the trash we take out tomorrow. Every time we do a load of laundry, toxic nanofibres poison our water system. Plus, the textile and garment industry contributes hugely to carbon emissions and, ultimately, to climate […]

In the Design: Architectural Products category, this innovative collection by Paik Sun Kim for Aboutwater by Boffi and Fantini took home the top prize.

In a complete break from the traditional, book-centric typology, a team led by Amsterdam’s Civic Architects converted a 1932 locomotive hangar in the city of Tilburg into a 21st-century library: a mixed-use and multi-functional venue that’s inclusive and curatorial rather than hush-hush and archival. Although there may still be quiet nooks for reading in the […]

Ventanilla, one of the poorest neighbourhoods in Lima, is known for leaky, uninsulated houses made of plastic, plywood and scraps of lumber. Architect Enrique Llatas set out to show that it’s possible for people there to live better. For less than $10,000, he built Leandra Ortega’s Human Settlement Social Housing, a 42-square-metre abode for a […]

The Coscienza Intuitiva, a conceptual piece and the thesis project of Italian student Federico Fauli, belongs to no particular era in design history – or, rather, it belongs to multiple eras at once. Fauli’s speculative tower, envisioned for the Piazza Caracciolo, in a once-thriving Palermo marketplace, would be constructed using the debris of the past. […]