Jean Verville's Fahouse is a restrained take on an A-frame, with fun flourishes that offset its minimalism.

Like a diamond among stones, this faceted gem showcases the People’s Architecture Office’s “Plugins” – a proprietary building system of prefabricated modular panels that includes insulation, plumbing and electrical, as well as interior and exterior finishes and glazing. By allowing Mrs. Fan to return to the site of her childhood home, Plugin House fights the […]

Designers and architects typically use concrete to evoke a rugged gravitas, as opposed to lightness or elegance. But with the Whorl table, Neal Aronowitz Design of Portland, Oregon, has combined all of the above qualities in a gestural wave, freezing soft curves in a rock-hard material. To make the table, the fabricators roll a wet […]

The compact facade of this four-bedroom house in an upscale neighbourhood of Toronto, Canada, belies an expansive 2,800-square-metre interior of barely-contained effulgence. Configured in an L-shape hinged around a sculptural spiral staircase, its three floors back onto a terraced garden, offering generous views through expansive glass curtain walls. Local architects Audax teamed up with Pencil […]

The Gemma Observatory meets the stringent requirements of a celestial viewing facility, but with a high-design form that looks anything but scientific.

Los Angeles architect Edward Ogosta’s redevelopment of a cavernous warehouse into a client welcome centre, employee training facility and office space earned a LEED-NC Platinum designation, thanks largely to 277 solar panels and an extra-tightly insulated envelope. As the city’s first business to earn this highest level of green-building certification, the owner modelled corporate citizenship […]

MDF Italia introduced the Sign chair – a sweeping loop of polyamide – in 2006, to wide acclaim. For the chair’s 10th anniversary, the manufacturer asked the designer to revisit his original form, but update it with luxury-inspired materials. Piergiorgio Cazzaniga turned to the art of filigree, a jewellery-making technique in which strands of metal […]

Iowa’s newest centre for the visual arts is itself a work of art, albeit an abstract one, with the blocky segmentation of a Nicolas de Staël painting – a playful composition of volumes interspersed with swoops and curves that belies the building’s incredible functionality. Steven Holl Architects included seven “centres of light” via vertical canyons […]

Nothing short of brilliant, People's Canopy is an ultra flexible, ultra portable piece of infrastructure that transforms any public space into one for gathering.

With their dramatic limestone cliffs, the Huangshan mountains of eastern China are the kind of landscape people write poems about. Huangshan Mountain Village, a suite of residential buildings by MAD Architects, blends in perfectly with these surroundings. The structures’ profiles resemble mounds of sediment, like stalagmites or hoodoos; on each level, the rounded, irregularly shaped […]