Architectural case studies and material exemplars to spark your creativity and inspire your next project.
What do worms and mirrors have in common? If you’re familiar with Ideas City, the biennial festival that intersperses the area around the New Museum on the Bowery with a series of installations, games, talks, and performances, you might not find this to be an odd question. During its past two iterations, Storefront for Art…
“It is certainly unpleasant and tedious to be confronted day-in, day-out with products which are con fusing, which literally get on our nerves, and with which we cannot relate,” industrial design deity Dieter Rams of Braun once said. In order to steer us away from the creation of such products, he formulated the “10 Principles of…
“A chair is a very difficult object. A skyscraper is almost easier. That is why Chippendale is famou s.” Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe’s quip perfectly epitomizes the challenges of product design, which share a range of contrasts and commonalities with those faced by architects shaping the built environment. Daniel Libeskind presented his latest foray into…
A group of engineers are out to change how designers construct their 3D digital models.
With spring just around the corner, it’s time to start thinking about getting out of the city and into the woods for some fresh air. The brooks will be babbling, the birds chirping, and the sun shining. Forget what you know, camping doesn’t have to be roughing it unless you want it to be. Take…
The symbolic significance of the completion of One World Trade Center (f.k.a. the Freedom Tower), ca nnot be overstated. After nearly a decade and a half of controversy surround the sprawling construction site (an easy metaphor for a scar), the shiny new David Childs-designed tower will stand as a monument of rebirth and a landmark of…
In the matter of two decades, America has gone from having (arguably) “no” design scene to boasting a bona fide design movement. Role models have provided one source of that transformation, and Henrybuilt stands chief among them. Best known for its kitchens, the company approaches the function, materiality, and execution of all its products with…
In the 1920s El Lissitzky developed and proposed the idea of horizontal skyscapers — Wolkenbügels, o r “cloud-irons” — eight structures intended for the Boulevard Ring in Moscow. His logic was that as long as humans could not fly, moving horizontally was natural, and moving vertically was not. In an area where there is not significant…
Brutalism gets a bad rap for its over-bearing scale and sweater-snagging rawness. Polish studio Zupa grafika wants to challenge this perception by making several brutal icons of London into small, cut-out paper models. By introducing an element of arts and crafts (the pastime, not the movement), the foldable models cast brutalism as something miniaturized and makeable.…