Maison Wilson in Montreal’s Notre-Dame-de-Grâce neighbourhood is signature la SHED architecture, a design-build firm known for deftly updating legacy housing stock by adding contemporary gestures while preserving homes’ heritage elements for maximum authenticity. In this latest coup, a two-storey addition at the rear of a home exemplifies the firm’s backyard-to-front-curb approach and contains a new […]

Few can match the concept-driven formality of Montreal’s Jean Verville for sheer rigour. In this 160-square-metre Montreal apartment, a trio of palettes – the sparkling white of the quartz-composite kitchen countertops, ceramic bathroom fixtures and marble tiles; the opulent brushed brass of the monolithic floor-to-ceiling cabinets and wall panels; the muted grey of the painted […]

The NMAAHC brings together many disparate ideas: architecture and sculpture, destruction and creation, celebration and mourning. At its heart, Contemplative Court distills all these themes into a single moment – one that follows the ascent from three subterranean galleries that chronicle centuries of American slavery. To enter the court is to walk inside a sculpture; […]

With the Induction Wall Light, Castor Design has developed an elegant way to revive - and actually improve - expired fluorescent lights. The design is the 2018 AZ Awards Winner in the Lighting Fixtures category.

Vanoosh Villa’s va-va-voom derives from an undulating post-and-beam exoskeleton that makes a one-to-two-storey-high frame of broken planes and mimics the topography of the surrounding mountains in northern Iran’s Mazandaran Province. Once the garden’s climbing vines mature and fill in the voids, the foliage of this work in progress will enshroud the villa’s first and second […]

This Shanghai lane house – long of site, short of daylight – began as little more than a stack of enclosed boxes. RIGI Design completely remapped the interior plan, tearing out a dark, narrow staircase relegated to one corner and replacing it with a central open stair that wanders across all three levels and acts […]

Refurbishing a dilapidated Edwardian department store for retail, hospitality and collaborative workspaces, Squire and Partners faced the question of which layers to scrape away, which to cover up and which to preserve. (Among those layers: mahogany parquet floors and a tiled staircase with wrought-iron banisters.) Their utilitarian interventions, including new cabling and bespoke lighting, now […]

Patrick Norquet's Pure Paper Color takes paper, available in flat sheets or gently embossed in a number of patterns, and transforms it into a building material. The Ober product is the 2018 AZ Awards Winner for Architectural/Interior Products.

When contemplating this historic Seville residence with a facade from the 11th century, the Madrid architects charged with renovating it resigned themselves to the fact that they weren’t the first and likely wouldn’t be the last to update this building. Given their bit parts in the home’s evolution, they resolved to tidy up its existing […]

To reconnect a windowless basement to the outdoors, Licht Kunst Licht installed a 21-metre-long mural of the Rhine River (with vertical strata that reproduce the parallax effect of a 3D landscape) behind a false window. Also behind the glazing: RGBW LEDs in the floor to simulate natural light reflected off the water at dawn and […]