Mark Hemphill dreamed up this wild and whimsical water park to reward an adventurous sense of play, promising to convert riders’ exploration of new ways of moving into enchantment and a calming flow. Propelled by their own muscle power, harness-wearing riders follow a track of bent I-beams that undulates, like a 3-D zipline, along twists […]

In Pittsburgh’s frothing tech and manufacturing hub, Uber’s 7,500-square-metre facility feels suitably industrial for a space devoted to digital mapping, vehicle safety and autonomous transportation. Assembly Design Studio honoured the city’s history by accenting the futuristic prototyping plant with generous splashes of distressed Corten steel – a material used for everything from custom detailing to […]

Desai Chia Architecture's penchant for masterly minimalism is put on display in the Photographer's Loft, a gorgeous home-gallery hybrid in NYC.

Food tastes better when it’s served with a side of dignity. That was the thinking behind the Old Brewery Mission’s decision to unify the ground floors of three different buildings that had served as the homeless shelter’s food service areas. Architem Wolff Shapiro Kuskowski introduced storefront windows, elegant awnings and bold signage to update the […]

Over the years, third-year architecture students at Virginia Tech’s design/buildLAB have left indelible marks on their community, designing and erecting structures to support local activities. Most recently, they brought their game to the Little League baseball teams of Clifton Forge, Virginia. The students worked as a team, using off-the-shelf materials to construct 12 playing-field structures […]

The Midwest Commodity Exchange Center, a marketplace for metal futures, is a seven-building complex in Xi’an – part of the Chinese government’s trade infrastructure initiative. At its centre, an impressive five-storey main lobby features cascading and curved interior walls of specially extruded aluminum. These vertical slats encase towering LED displays that show scrolling commodity symbols […]

Neri&Hu's design of the HUB Performance and Exhibition Center in Shanghai has given the performances that happen inside a lot to live up to.

Superficially a Manhattan residential building, 35XV would be a classic podium-and-tower condo but for the fact that the podium doubles as an addition to the local high school. In return for this community investment, developer Alchemy Properties received partial air rights above the original school, which sits on an adjacent lot. The condo tower is […]

Equal parts disco ball, beach-spanning parasol, solar-energy collector and nightlight, this massive floating orb proposes a futuristic landmark for the rocky point where Rio de Janeiro’s legendary Copacabana and Ipanema beaches meet. Like a low-orbiting planet made of two Mylar balloons – one small and helium-filled, nested inside a larger one filled with hot air […]

Taipei’s Fieldevo Design Studio invoked the relationship between tree and bird for the interior of this university startup lab – a roost for student entrepreneurs hatching their ideas. Four wood-framed boxes with pitched surfaces are set into the dropped ceiling, defining the open-concept space’s working areas from above, while maple key-inspired light fixtures spiral toward […]