Your typical penitentiary is a grim, fortified edifice far removed from community and culture. Not so the Minimum-Security Prison of Nanterre, a suburb of Paris. Located in a mixed-use neighbourhood, the 4,350-square-metre building is surprisingly congenial. It’s clad in perforated weathering steel, and the interior palette consists of lacquered aluminum and fine mineral plaster — […]

Textile development is both an art and a science. Case in point: Carnegie’s Xorel Knit. While the company’s woven Xorel material has long been a popular choice for wallcoverings and panels, it lacked the pliability to serve as effective upholstery. Thus began an elaborate quest to develop an offshoot version that could be wrapped around […]

What if Old MacDonald hired a cutting-edge architecture firm to design his farm? That’s the question posed by Montreal studio La SHED. Its concept for a family-owned organic cheese producer in Quebec’s Montérégie region delivers a contemporary cow stable that shifts away from the industrialized metal boxes common in the industry and harkens back to […]

As the judges conclude, the winner in Interiors: Commercial and Institutional is "a stunningly crafted space.”

A quartet of seven-metre-tall huts, BAAQ’s Casa Naila sits atop a concrete plinth on a 250-square-metre beach property in Oaxaca. Each box is distinctively wrapped, partially by concrete walls and partially by slatted palm wood enclosures supported by wooden framing. This vernacular building technique, which allows cross ventilation and natural light to filter through, is […]

Well beyond the recent resimercial trend and our current WFH reality, the desire for domestic comforts in office environments is a phenomenon poised to grow stronger in the years to come. To that end, workplace furniture specialist Coalesse and Spanish textile expert Nanimarquina have teamed up to create a soulful rug collection tough enough for […]

Despite being recognized with legal status and basic utilities 12 years ago, the informal Comuna 4 settlement at the edge of Bogotá still lacked effective park space. When its citizens grew tired of lobbying city officials, they resolved to spearhead the initiative themselves. Aided by a team of university students, Aaron Brakke and his design […]

A light vortex that you can step into, Formwerkz Architects' creation for a Shenzhen festival takes the prize in Design: Lighting Installations.

The first phase of this Warsaw museum extension, which is to be built in two stages, involves the construction of a three-storey polyhedral building with an arthropod-like roof and a prickly exposed-concrete facade. Standing on the foundations of an 1836 prison building that was used by the Gestapo during the Nazi occupation of Poland, the […]

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 […]